The unimportant news thread

[North Star]

Speaking of lunacy...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-30146160

Yes indeed. 
I wonder how long it will take for the politicians to realize that writing can't be replaced by typing.

[Florestan]

Yes indeed. 
I wonder how long it will take for the politicians to realize that writing can't be replaced by typing.

To promote illiteracy as the goal of education, now that is lunacy hard to beat. 

Do you expect teachers to react to this insanity and actively oppose its implementation? Or are they trained / accustomed to blindly accept anything coming from the governmental educational bureaucracy?

[Jo498]

But I think there are several countries that gave up cursive handwriting in favor of teaching printed letters and letting students figure out their own way of connecting them if if helps them writing faster. I do not think that Finland will abolish writing by hand altogether.

I am in favor of teaching cursive although calligraphy should be optional not compulsory. (Also long division and Latin). Because I am in many respects a culturally conservative square. Besides the fact that there are apparently studies showing that it is "good for your brain" I find it a fundamental skill everybody should be taught. Those who hate it, can abandon it later and only type.
I am writing this as someone who could read about a year before entering school but really struggled with cursive handwriting for several months when starting school. But those motor skills are important as well, so I glad I had to do it, and my handwriting was fine enough from second grade on or so. Although I never tried my hand at it, I also like some calligraphy.

[North Star]

The BBC piece is wrong in saying that Finland is ditching the ink - pupils always, always, use a pencil in schools, except in the matriculation exams' mother tongue & literature exams.

To promote illiteracy as the goal of education, now that is lunacy hard to beat. 

Do you expect teachers to react to this insanity and actively oppose its implementation? Or are they trained / accustomed to blindly accept anything coming from the governmental educational bureaucracy?

The school system has being slowly doing away with teaching cursive writing for almost two decades. The mother tongue & literature teachers will largely accept what they education board tells them, but there is of course some leniency for the teachers (the requirements for curricula are rather loose in general, and most specific requirements are for the 5th (IIRC) and 8th classes. If you can teach those to the kids, you can do pretty much anything you want with time you have to spare, whatever it is that you teach.), and they certainly can't be denied teaching cursive. I'm not absolutely sure whether it is possible to fit it in practice, but kids write a good deal in elementary school mother tongue / lit. class in any case, and a teacher can insist on them writing in cursive. I don't know which subjects will get the extra hours freed by the end of teaching IT as a separate subject in junior high. It ought to be mother tongue & literature and math if you ask me.

[North Star]

But I think there are several countries that gave up cursive handwriting in favor of teaching printed letters and letting students figure out their own way of connecting them if if helps them writing faster.

There's really no if about this. Properly learned cursive is always best.

I do not think that Finland will abolish writing by hand altogether.

True.

I am in favor of teaching cursive although calligraphy should be optional not compulsory. (Also long division and Latin). Because I am in many respects a culturally conservative square. Besides the fact that there are apparently studies showing that it is "good for your brain" I find it a fundamental skill everybody should be taught. Those who hate it, can abandon it later and only type.
I am writing this as someone who could read about a year before entering school but really struggled with cursive handwriting for several months when starting school. But those motor skills are important as well, so I glad I had to do it, and my handwriting was fine enough from second grade on or so. Although I never tried my hand at it, I also like some calligraphy.

That Finnish students are taught 'calligraphy' is really nonsense. The kids in first and second grade do/did spend some time in their mother tongue and literature classes practicing the individual letters and numbers in cursive and block writing, but to compare it to what calligraphy means in the Far East would show how ridiculous it is to use the word in this context.

[Jo498]

I did not necessarily mean calligraphy as a separate subject.
When I started school in 1978 I am not even aware of ever learning to write *printed* (unconnected) letters. Of course we learned to *read* those as well as the cursive but in my recollection first grade started with a few motor skill exercises like loopy chains or so and soon afterwards the teacher would write a letter very neatly in the first line of your notebook and as homework you would copy lines and lines of those letters. (Or maybe there were some pre-printed worksheets as well.) It was really rather archaic. "o" was the first letter we were supposed to learn I think.
(The funny thing was that in math class I fell into that window of maybe 10 years when "new math", namely naive set theory was deemed the best starting point for six year olds. So we had to learn both to write numbers legibly as well as understand that the red triangles were the intersection set of all triangles and all red figures etc. We had little colored plastic shapes to help with that...)

There was no separate calligraphy class but I think from 2nd to 4th or 6th grade one would receive a mark for handwriting in one's report.

In any case later in high school (and final examinations at the end of that) we had often longish examination essays where many people wrote a lot of text in 90 oder 120 or 180 minutes or so. Without a fluent cursive script one would probably get cramps very soon or otherwise not be able to write "enough" for a decent treatment of the essay question. And if the teacher was not able to read your handwriting this did not bode well for your grades either. Although teachers usually were not petty about that they could mark stuff they found unreadable as orthographic errors and take points off.

[North Star]

I did not necessarily mean calligraphy as a separate subject.

Neither did I.

When I started school in 1978 I am not even aware of ever learning to write *printed* (unconnected) letters. Of course we learned to *read* those as well as the cursive but in my recollection first grade started with a few motor skill exercises like loopy chains or so and soon afterwards the teacher would write a letter very neatly in the first line of your notebook and as homework you would copy lines and lines of those letters. (Or maybe there were some pre-printed worksheets as well.) It was really rather archaic. "o" was the first letter we were supposed to learn I think.

We had preprinted worksheets and even booklets in the late 90s. I'm not sure whether we progressed alphabetically or starting from the most common letters in Finnish.

(The funny thing was that in math class I fell into that window of maybe 10 years when "new math", namely naive set theory was deemed the best starting point for six year olds. So we had to learn both to write numbers legibly as well as understand that the red triangles were the intersection set of all triangles and all red figures etc. We had little colored plastic shapes to help with that...)

Oh jeez.  0:)  Long division took me a while to get, but I was always the best of my year in maths in primary school, even though I rarely got absolutely perfect test scores. That might also have something to do with the fact that I was always the first one to return the exam . . . 

There was no separate calligraphy class but I think from 2nd to 4th or 6th grade one would receive a mark for handwriting in one's report.

I think we received those marks in first and second, maybe third grade.

In any case later in high school (and final examinations at the end of that) we had often longish examination essays where many people wrote a lot of text in 90 oder 120 or 180 minutes or so. Without a fluent cursive script one would probably get cramps very soon or otherwise not be able to write "enough" for a decent treatment of the essay question. And if the teacher was not able to read your handwriting this did not bode well for your grades either. Although teachers usually were not petty about that they could mark stuff they found unreadable as orthographic errors and take points off.

Yes, I can imagine that having poor handwriting skills would have seriously hurt in our jr./sr. high essay exams. I suppose the fluency of your writing might also influence the speed of your thought. I don't think we had much long essays in jr. high, but in sr. high there certainly were a lot of those. Again, I was certainly one of the first to turn in the paper Once, when I had to do both the English and math exam on the same day, I did both in the same time that my friends needed for just the math exam. In other English exams, I always had time to kill after finishing the exam (with an essay) and checking and double-checking, before the first hour had gone, and one could leave the exam room. All exams were 4 hour exams, and I only remember one exam where pretty much everyone - even I - stayed to the end - the electromagnetism course of physics, also by far the most difficult course in all of sr. high.

[Florestan]

I have always believed - naively, perhaps - that a legible and if possible, even beautiful handwriting is one of the surest marks of a truly educated person*. I might have been influenced in that by my family milieu: both my parents and several second degree relatives are/were avid readers and have/had a very elegant handwriting, almost caligraphic in the case of people born and educated before WWII. My own handwriting has been heavily influenced by my mother´s, and although people always say it is beautiful, I am almost always dissatisfied with it not being as beautiful as I intend it to be.

(* By educated I mean not having an university degree. I discovered with indescribable delight that my mother-in-law, whose education did not extend beyond secondary school, handwrites (is this a word?) in a more legible and beautiful manner than many a university graduate. She told me that her teacher in elementary school took great pains to teach her and the other kids how to write legibly and correctly --- and this accords to my own experience.)

Call me a snob, or a petty bourgeois sentimentalist, or a hopeless reactionary, but I do believe that a society in which the importance of handwriting is downplayed and in the name of progress handwriting is dropped from the basic requirements of kids education --- that such a society is doomed, intellectually and morally speaking.

Drop handwriting, bring in porn --- and let the Devil take care of it all!... 

[North Star]

I have always believed - naively, perhaps - that a legible and if possible, even beautiful handwriting is one of the surest marks of a truly educated person*. I might have been influenced in that by my family milieu: both my parents and several second degree relatives are/were avid readers and have/had a very elegant handwriting, almost cal[l]igraphic in the case of people born and educated before WWII. My own handwriting has been heavily influenced by my mother´s, and although people always say it is beautiful, I am almost always dissatisfied with it not being as beautiful as I intend it to be.

(* By educated I mean not having an university degree. I discovered with indescribable delight that my mother-in-law, whose education did not extend beyond secondary school, handwrites (is this a word?) in a more legible and beautiful manner than many a university graduate. She told me that her teacher in elementary school took great pains to teach her and the other kids how to write legibly and correctly --- and this accords to my own experience.)

Call me a snob, or a petty bourgeois sentimentalist, or a hopeless reactionary, but I do believe that a society in which the importance of handwriting is downplayed and in the name of progress handwriting is dropped from the basic requirements of kids education --- that such a society is doomed, intellectually and morally speaking.

Drop handwriting, bring in porn --- and let the Devil take care of it all!... 

You must mean 'By educated I do not mean...' and not 'I mean not' - or do you really mean that one can't be educated and hold a university degree?
Otherwise, I am entirely in agreement. More reading and more writing are needed in schools. Stopping cursive writing because of computers is equal to switching all reading to watching TV series and movies instead.

[Florestan]

You must mean 'By educated I do not mean...' and not 'I mean not' - or do you really mean that one can't be educated and hold a university degree? P

Hah! Well spotted, thanks, I stand corrected. 

[Ken B]

Can Starbucks get any worse? Why yes, yes it can. http://fortune.com/2015/03/16/starbucks-baristas-race-talk/

In Michigan we have a splendid chain of coffee shops, Biggby. Nice to see them get a boost!

[Karl Henning]

Schultz dismissed the notion that race was too hot a topic business-wise for Starbucks to tackle.

Heck, if you can operate a cappuccino machine . . . .

[Ken B]

*cough cough toldya so*
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/009736.html

[Karl Henning]

Love this comment:

More snobbery. They don't seem to have tested other kinds of music but feel the need to sound superior by using classical music. It sounds as though it is just Music that is good not just this one white, Western European type of music that has acquired a bizarre cachet even though the majority if people don't listen to it regularly or at all. It's like Charlie Parker's or Chet Baker's need to record "with strings". Or Zappa and others recording with orchestras.

Note, (most) classical music is fine but it is is not intrinsically better than other forms of music and people, particularly scientists, need to stop pretending it is.

Thank goodness he knows The Truth! 

[Ken B]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11479761/We-must-listen-to-Trevor-Phillips-and-his-inconvenient-truths-about-race.html

[Ken B]

As a follow up to the Latin gem I present this. It's involved but pretty funny.
https://www.popehat.com/2015/03/16/nobody-including-tom-cotton-knows-what-tom-cotton-is-saying-about-corruption-of-the-blood/

[Karl Henning]

Don't know whether to laugh or cry.

[Karl Henning]

(I moved my lips while I read it.)

[Ken B]

Don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Indeed.

No mixed emotions here I'll bet.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/mentally-ill-woman-stoned-to-death-in-kabul-for-burning-quran/

[kishnevi]

As a follow up to the Latin gem I present this. It's involved but pretty funny.
https://www.popehat.com/2015/03/16/nobody-including-tom-cotton-knows-what-tom-cotton-is-saying-about-corruption-of-the-blood/

Even Popehat did not catch the misuse of the term corruption of blood
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Corruption+of+blood
It did not put them in prison, it barred them from inheriting anything they might claim through the convicted traitor.