Does anyone write anymore?
My drivel is utter garbage, with enough punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors to make my High School English teacher warm up her cattle prod. (I wish she had warmed up her cattle prod back then, but such is a lurid fantasy best kept under wraps these decades later.) It seems to me that what passes for “well written” these days is beyond abysmal.
Take for example, my eldest stepson. He’s a nice young man, rather intelligent and finishing his BS in genetic biology. I had the honor (read as “maggot choking misfortune”) of being begged to proofread the final submission for his thesis. Personally, I don’t know a damned thing about yFAST complexes and Mec1 relations to the ATR mechanism, but I do know that when your sentence changes tense three times – with none of these tenses matching – you have a serious problem. Irony holds that it’s probably genetic.
Sending the boy to a geeky engineering college likely didn’t help matters. They stress the sciences and ignore the more banal issues of life, such as personal hygiene and eating. Sending him to public school in Utah most certainly did not help. The public school system here is very low grade. I may be biased in that my schooling in the 70′s and early 80′s was in Minnesota, a state which has always prided itself in funding education. This also helps to explain the draconian tax rates in this winter wonderland, but that is another issue.
Whereas I should continue with a story about walking the thirty miles to school each day in twenty feet of snow, with my dad strapping bacon to my ass to make the wolves chase me faster when I was running late; I will instead resort to a snide comment on how little work I’ve seen issued in school to foster functional writing skills. My youngest stepson, about to graduate from High School, has only written a handful of papers for senior Advanced Placement (AP) English. Perhaps my memory has been skewed with the advent of age and the languishing effects of nearly three decades of computer monitor radiation, but I seem to recall having to write a lot more than that.
I also don’t see the need for assignments which seem a little childish, or otherwise saccharine – especially when they’re aimed at me, rather than my child. My youngest came home with a sheet from English class a few weeks ago, which asked for parental participation in their reading assignment of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. In the letter, the teacher asked that the parents write a short note with sweet words of wisdom, gentle advice to give their child in preparation for life’s wonderful journey ahead; as Hamlet’s father had given to him. This reasoning, it was stated, was an attempt to “pull the child into the sentiment of the work”. That is a paraphrase. I don’t recall the actual wording, but it is fair to say that my insulin levels needed to be checked afterward.
My message was quick and easy to write and not wanting to kill a tree for it, I gave it to him verbally.
“Trust no one.”
What examples I have seen of his written assignments have been horrid. It is obvious that I did not watch his education carefully enough and did not step in to correct the situation in time. The frightening part is that his papers earn good grades. If I had a time machine, I might have been able to help at the correct point. As it is, I’m encouraging him to concentrate on his writing skills when he heads off to a liberal arts college – even if it seems to be a futile gesture. Some of it will sink in.
Either that, or he’ll end up writing crap like this his whole life.
