Today in the car Klara and I were memorizing lines from Scripture for her Memory lesson. They have Memory every day, and as a result, she now probably knows more Scripture by heart than I do. Outside of religious considerations, I can say as a literary critic that there’s no better exercise for literacy and the capacity to appreciate great works of literature than this. It would be much easier for me to teach if my students knew their Bible. It’s tiresome to have to explain Cain and Abel every time I teach Unamuno, for example. One keeps wishing for some basic level of shared culture when one teaches.
Tomorrow, Klara’s class is performing an operetta for which they memorized some lines in Greek. This gave me an opening to talk about antiquity and Greek roots of some words.
This kind of school does make sense. It’s not AI’s fault that in many places school has been perverted through the use of education fads and application of inane ideology. You can make school useful. It’s not hard. Simply throw away all the fads and go back to the basics.
Clarissa's Blog 
School is for proles, and always has been.
The scions of the rich have always had tutors.
Schools for the rich are about cultivating connections with other rich families.
Schools for proles are, at their best, for offering literacy and numeracy to the children of the illiterate, for culturally integrating the children of immigrants, providing upward-mobility ladders for the minority of bright lower-class kids, and for reinforcing religious norms inside of religious subcultures.
More often, they have been used to acclimate children to the needs and norms of wage employers, to deter upward mobility and the acquisition of useful experience and skills, and to break familial, cultural, and community bonds– increasing dependence and decreasing agency among the lower classes.
-ethyl
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“If I would have done that”. More and more I notice the normalisation of this plebeian form of non-standard grammar in current US speech, even among the educated.
Another shibboleth of mine is “things I wish I knew” instead of “I had known”. Is this normal? Are teachers in grade school no longer correcting students’ mistakes in the US?
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” plebeian form of non-standard grammar in current US speech”
English is a pluricentric language, there’s not a single standard that everyone follows or aspires to. Conditional forms have been leveling in the US for a long time.
“If I would have done that” sounds fine as colloquial everyday American usage. I wouldn’t use it in a formal speech but different registers have different standards. Someone who uses formal forms all the time is someone no one really wants to talk to.
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I hate “different than.” If something differs from, then it should be different from.
We don’t do that with any similar words. Divergent from. Separate from.
We don’t say separate than. We don’t say this thing differs than that thing. We’d sound like schizos. But everybody says different than. WHY??
Different than is ugly.
But the usage goes back at least a century, so I don’t get a say. It’s a legitimate construct.
-ethyl
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I agree, and I work in schools. Too many schools act as free babysitting and a dumping ground for kids so the parents can work, most of the work is on Google Classroom or is just piles of worksheets asking questions from previous chapters to keep them busy, it’s not actual learning. All I need is to take attendance and make sure the kids don’t go on YouTube or social media, it’s not real teaching.
As a Sunday school teacher, I’ve met a lot of kids without any knowledge of the Bible or Biblical stories at all, they’d never heard of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Moses, or only had a vague idea about Jesus. These same kids didn’t know the name of the president, the name of their school, or even the name of their schools or town, these were average American kids and not children with special needs
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One of my children has a Bible name. Not a common given name, but it’s an extremely prominent (I thought!) story in the New Testament. Surely, everyone is familiar with this name, even if they don’t know anybody with the moniker.
Nope. Outside of church, the only person I’ve met who instantly recognized it, was my neighbors’ Mexican bisabuela, who was giving my Spanish its most strenuous workout in years. She got it, and was delighted. So we can be friends 😉 it helps that she is old-school Catholic.
Everybody else: they’ve never heard it, they have no idea how to spell it (even though it’s spelled exactly like it sounds), and when they hear it, they transmute sounds to make it into a different completely made-up gibberish name. It’s become an unintentional literacy test.
-ethyl
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I knew a 4th grade neighbor who didn’t know his birthdate. It was the same as my daughter’s, so I knew it, but he did not. I thought that was incredibly strange.
Amanda
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