I have noticed a lot of people complaining as of late about the abundance of miss spelled words on social media and the lack of punctuation. I am guilty of this myself not the complaining but the fact I often misspell words and rarely use punctuation. I have learned to use spell check and rely on it often in my writing. I do not think this problem is a new one I think it is just noticed more now with communication being mostly in type and not spoken word.
I have my own opinions on why this is becoming more and more common and as I always do I am going to spew out my thoughts on this epidemic as I have seen it called . The first part of this problem I feel has been caused by quotas and the need for schools to show a certain body count each year at graduation to keep founding money coming in. The government funding is very important to each school no matter how big or how small and if one dollar of funding money is lost it could mean cutting back on school programs for the next year. So many students are shuffled along and promoted from one grade to the next even if they are not prepared or have learned the basics to do so. I am a product of this quota system as I never grasped mathematics but with a D in a class I would be promoted to the next grade. In many instances I should have been given an F and held back until I was able to grasp or learn but to fill the body count or quotas I was passed. I feel this does a disservice to the student and does not prepare them for the world they will enter once they graduate.
I also think the money given to run schools is often misused and squandered on programs that are not as important. The need for these small towns to build a new school every ten years or so baffles me. There once was a time the school and the church and town hall were all in one building. Those days are a thing of the past and I understand there is growth in towns and villages and the need for more class rooms and space is needed but what is the problem with expanding the building or updating what is already there? Do we really need to spend money on a new school and not just a school but they have to be an expensive Frank Lloyd Wright style building? My small town has grown since I was a child and many of the schools I attended have been torn down and new ones built. Some of the schools were closed and sat empty for many years while they built new ones. My small town built a new High School before I graduated in 1980 and I attended that school after one year in the Old High School. The Old High School was deemed to small for the growth of the town but instead of expanding on the existing school building they built a new one. A few years ago I see that they have built yet another new school to house the students and within a few years after it was built it was deemed to expensive to run and the students were moved back to the old High School. Money wasted as far as I can see.
My point in all that babble is that why is the money not spent to teach the children properly and assure they are ready to go out into the world with the proper knowledge? Having an impressive stylish building seems more important than teaching the children from what I see.
Overloaded classrooms is the next problem I see. A teacher has 30 or 40 kids in a class and no matter how outstanding a teacher they are they do not have enough time in one day to give special assistance to each child, so many of the students fall through the cracks and are allowed to do the minimum and past to the next grade.
The new technology has not helped the problem with the new phones and texting being the main way to communicate. Texting has caused people to use abbreviations like cuz for because 4eva for for ever. It is a form of short hand but I feel by using this to communicate will and has caused spelling problems. I can only speak for myself but I know my spelling has improved by actually spelling the words out I may be completely off in my thoughts on this but as I say I can only speak for my self. I have dyslexia and that fact did not come out until I was in the military many years later that could be the reason that I never grasped mathematics and struggled so much in school to mentally hold on to information.
The cure for this? I do not have one I have ideas as I am sure others reading this do I do feel it is only going to get worse in the future if something is not done. I feel we need to put more effort and resources into teaching our young properly and make them the priority in the education system something I am not seeing.
No comments:
Post a Comment