"I guess so," said the blond ex-tin man in the duster...

[verilyverity]

What is up with the burly detectivism in Tin Man?  Never have I encountered a fandom so dead set on replacing characters' names and pronouns with ridiculous sounding proxies.  And passive voice!  With a verb that takes an object!  How can that even sound right to an author?

ETA: Ye gods and little fishes!  *stares at ballooning comments*

Comments

[kseda]

I was actually flipping out about that to myself the other day. People have names, it's okay to use them, really! And yes, the costuming was fantastic, but let's not describe every aspect whenever someone turns up.

Unless it's the tightness of Cain's pants. That can never be overstated.

[amedia]

Well, in elementary school, we didn't have English, we had Language Arts, and I remember that we had this program called SLA, where we went to the learning station (open classroom) and read little stories pre-sorted by our reading levels, and answered questions. If you got enough right in one category, you got to move up to the next, so at least it wasn't boring; if you were able to read at a higher level, you got to read stories at that level. We also did a little grammar in 5th or 6th grade, stuff about subjects and objects, although I remember the teacher was wrong at least once and I had to correct her, which was startling because *she* would have gone to school back in the day when people learned stuff, whereas nowadays teachers my age were in school in the rainbow-kitten days and have something approaching an excuse. [Note: this was a public school in a well-to-do district on the East Coast. I went to a private elementary school for grades 1-4 but honestly, 1967 was a LONG time ago and I don't remember it very well

[luchia13]

Considering I didn't move to Colorado until...fifth? Sixth grade? I'm not sure. But I doubt I can really answer that. We learned to write, and spell, but everything was based on memorization. And "accordion papers" which was one thesis statement and paragraph, three paragraphs, and then one closing paragraph. We discussed literature, but...quite honestly, the worst thing was science. I moved from Maryland to Colorado and was almost two years ahead of everyone, but state policy says that you stay with your own age group.

In other words, they almost treated English like preschool. I distinctly remember that in sixth grade we made papier-mache models and had to write a story about how we painted it! Whee! I wanted to die and almost literally moved into the school library, considering the librarians were the only ones willing to actually teach me anything useful.

[verilyverity]

Bwah! I spent third grade in the library, reading the encyclopedias. I was considered a "case" in my school, and the teachers just never bothered making me come to class.

[luchia13]

I will never, neeeever tell my parents OR anyone else this, but I literally broke my own leg in middle school to get more library time. PE was the longest class in the entire school, and it was completely worth it. I got more of an education during that bit of time than I did until I got to the high school library. And then I was kind of scary to everyone because I was so interested in politics and the science and history behind nuclear weaponry. I was a freshman and asked seniors to tutor me.

Although I DID get out of the library to try out for a play! I did actual time-period costuming and everyone hated it.

[verilyverity]

Geez. That's hard-core. I just hit a couple of kids and they were more than happy to let me skip class. But then, I was eight and unsophisticated.

[luchia13]

I was kind of desperate. They would quite literally have us skip classes for more PE time. It was the only way out, I kid you not.

[verilyverity]

*whistles* Why? What, exactly, is so important about PE that teachers are willing to stiff students their education for it?

[luchia13]

BCUZ IT'S MIDDLE SCHOOL LOL WHO CARES ABOUT THAT?

...or to actually be serious, public middle schools were treated more as opportunities to begin a student on their way to an athletic scholarship at a university, and THEN they'd let students get an education. They tried very hard to get me into track. This is one of the reasons I broke my leg.

[verilyverity]

Does not compute.

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

[luchia13]

Yyyyyeah.

To break your brain a bit more, there's this state-wide test called the CSAP. Any East Coast student could have done the seventh-grade version in third, possibly second. It had logic problems like "WHICH BUMP WOULD THE CART STOP AT?" with a diagram of one small bump followed by a HUGE BUMP followed by a smaller one.

[verilyverity]

Oh, for...

*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*

[luchia13]

On speaking! We learned absolutely NOTHING, leaving me with the strangest accent EVER for the first few months. Usually when I switched into a new school I could pick it up from the first few weeks thanks to the classes, but not in Colorado.

Anyway, there is no such thing as proper speech. Imagine a cowboy and give them a briefcase and an ego that makes them try to clean it up. That's basically what passes for language, along with a lot of completely random noises that rather disturbingly count as complete statements. I'm fairly certain Colorado's official schooling policy is that your future is entirely in your own hands and they'll give you the basics so a student can head off and do their best, and then let the colleges take care of the rest. It is a very, very bad policy.

[moony_blues]

[S]everal people claimed to have been educated in the U.S. and further claimed to have NEVER BEEN TAUGHT GRAMMAR. Some actually said that "grammar isn't taught in schools here anymore.

Ok, I'm glad I don't have that excuse, as I was home schooled and received very thorough training in English grammar. Too bad I've forgotten most of the technical stuff in the last 12 years...

[andrealyn]

I can cite that while I was taught grammar in grade school (I'm Canadian, though, but I spent two years in CO during formative years and they did not TOUCH it, there), I've been inundated with it at university. In two years, I took three courses that stressed grammatical use and the scary part was that no one knew what they were doing in either the English course or the Business Communication one. I learned via my beta-readers who taught me what was wrong and what wasn't, but it's a scary place out there when an institution of higher learning has students who genuinely don't understand grammar.

[luchia13]

HIGH FIVE EX-COLORADO BUDDY! \o/