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I done good too. |
Posted on 05/08/2005 12:54:23 PM PDT by gitmo
All right, boys and girls, it's been twelve years since that September morning in 1993 when your mom gave you one last hug, brushed away your tears, and told you to listen to your first grade teacher. Well, you've made it. You're graduating high school. In the next couple of months, you'll be walking down that long aisle, watching your step as you climb to the stage, taking that diploma from your principal's hand — and then, afterwards, posing for photos with weepy relatives.
You're ready for college . . .
Not so fast, Poindexter. Here's a pop quiz (answers below):
1) Define the terms "independent clause" and "dependent clause."
2) Find the subject in the following sentence: "Many of my friends drive to school."
3) What are the three principal parts of the verb "to bite"?
4) "Jane has been dating John for two years." Is that sentence written in a present tense or a past tense?
5) "Jane has been dating John for two years." Change that sentence to the corresponding past tense.
6) What three parts of speech can an adverb modify?
7) What is the main use of a semi-colon?
8) "Jane invited John and me." "Jane invited John and I." Which is correct?
9) "He should of told me that I wasn't invited." What's the error in that sentence?
10) "Every person is entitled to their own opinion." What's the error in that sentence?
Okay, pencils down.
Each question is worth ten points. If you scored below 70, you failed. More to the point, your teachers failed. They've failed you, miserably, for twelve years. Those hundreds of hours spent in classrooms with posters of William Shakespeare and Alice Walker on the walls, those hundreds of hours spent as your teachers prattled on about the joys of creative writing — those hours are worthless, utterly worthless, and you can't have them back. Those A's you received for free-verse poems, those stories you wrote to explore your feelings, those papers returned to you without a single grammatical correction — they're worthless too. You didn't learn what you should have learned, what you needed to learn.
See you in remedial English this September.
Answers: 1) A clause is a group of words, acting together, with its own subject and verb. Independent clauses can stand alone; dependent clauses cannot. 2) Many. 3) Bite. Bit. Bitten. 4) Present tense. 5) Jane had been dating John for two years. 6) Verb, adjective, adverb. 7) To separate closely related independent clauses. 8) John and me. 9) "Should have" or "should've." 10) "Person" is singular, so use his own opinion or her own opinion. — Mark Goldblatt teaches remedial English at Institute of Technology, a branch of the State University of New York.
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I done good too. |
Aint't that tough, really.
GRIN : )
The article was very well put. I still can't believe there are some kids who are graduating high school and cannot read! That's a travesty!
We're in more trouble than I thought...
''has been dating'' is hardly the present tense, which would be the awkward construction ''John dates Jane on Fridays''. ''has been dating'' is the present perfect progressive, describing an action or actions performed in the past and which has or have continued until the present, and possibly into the future.
Time to take out the Strunk & White, 'Professor'.
The author obviously flunked basic arithmetic.
We're in more trouble than I thought...
I was a Teaching Assistant at the University of Georgia, teaching Intro Biology. One of the labs we conducted involved long division. I never told the students ahead of time to bring a calculator, because it really wasn't that difficult a problem. In 3-4 years of teaching, I never encountered a student who had ever heard of doing long division without a calculator. 142.5/34 was an impossible problem.
Even discounting the virtually universal illegibility, there is a widespread inability to place a subject, verb, and other sentence components in a proper syntax that would permit a reader to understand what is being said. It is all an exercise in disappointment.
Thus being so, there is always a segment of the class that demonstrates those academic traits and communications skills that make teaching a worthwhile undertaking. I agree with the conventional wisdom among professors that the top of the class at any school, (eg: the small central Florida liberal arts college at which I teach one class each semester), would be at the top of the class at any major college or university. It is at the bottom of the class where the difference is so clearly cognizable.
So, to what should we attribute the cause of this demise of education?The public school systems have reduced academic standards to a very low common denominator that purposefully is manipulated to accomplish two goals: (1) to allow students who likely otherwise would fail state standardized tests to achieve a score that moves them on to the next grade even though they're not really prepared; and, (2) to avoid the allegations of discrimination and disproportionate attention arising from a segment of the local community, a discrete, easily identifiable part of the populace served by the school that believe the schools are adult day care centers. These are parents who do not participate in parent oriented programs to improve things and who thrive on their perceived state of oppression.
Local governing and taxing authorities haven't been much help either. If the rest of the country is like Florida, and I believe it is, they have eliminated basic academic courses like advanced math, basic sience, English literature, and other courses that are meant to produce well rounded, collge ready and educated youth. The rationale' always offered is related to public dollars available.
The past tense is "Jane dated John for two years."
That depends on whether you have performed a partial colectomy or have constructed a neo-bladder after urinary bladder resection.
"So, the semi-colon that we used for your neo-bladder is now for Number One and the remainder of your colon is still for Number Two."
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Love the tagline (you little cutie-on-duty)!!! |
5) Change that sentence to the corresponding past tense.
I wouldn't say the author is wrong here, though I grant that using the words "a past tense/a present tense" is vague and misleading. As concerns question #4, it is in fact a present tense, but not the present tense, otherwise known as the preterite. Although "has been dating" has a past tense form (n.b. not the past tense), and as such is called the present perfect progressive (the word "perfect" implying past time), it still functions mainly in the present time. Its meaning is that of a verbal act or condition beginning at some indefinite point in the past but continuing up to the present. So, even though it includes the idea of past time, the verb's main force of meaning is still that of an act or condition occurring in the present time. This idea of the present time is reinforced by the corresponding construction of the same idea in certain foreign languages (Spanish and German are what I know, but I'm sure many others do the same) using simply the present tense. That construction is essentially "I am dating for two years", but it means "I have been dating for two years".
Similarly, the answer to question #5 is "I had been dating for two years", as the author said. The question does not ask for the past tense or preterite form, but for the corresponding form of the present perfect progressive were it in the past time. The corresponding form is thus the past perfect progressive, i.e. "had been dating"
I missed the word, "corresponding."
You are correct.
However, for a 'professor' to confuse the preterite with the present perfect progressive is simply unacceptable. This is the same type of sloppy thinking that manifests itself all through government schools, albeit not quite on the level of the nauseating notions of 'creative spelling' and 'creative math (sic)'.
BTW, and no offence, but ''I am dating Jane'' is not the simple present tense, but rather the present progressive. ''I date Jane'' would be an example of the simple present. As my old Latin teacher always insisted: ''the presence of a participle is proof of the progressive''.
:^)
Actually, 'had been dating' is an example of the past perfect progressive (aka pluperfect progressive). Any verb construction that describes an action that is or has been ongoing for a period of time is a progressive tense.
That was my answer, too.
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