"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

[blade_girl]

Heh. I am beginning to think that it really doesn't matter what English teachers say in class - almost nobody seems to retain anything they're taught in English. A month or so ago, someone caused a huge wank in torch_wood by suggesting that people who can't spell or don't know grammar especially well shouldn't post without taking some extra steps, such as beta readers. This was met with an absolute tsunami of rage (a whole lot of it from people who claimed to have dyslexia and who apparently believe that excused them from ever being expected to write comprehensibly

[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/

[blackletter]

a whole lot of it from people who claimed to have dyslexia and who apparently believe that excused them from ever being expected to write comprehensibly

Heh, I have mild dyslexia, and it never stopped me from paying attention to the spell-check squiggles. (Just don't ask me to distinguish "how" and "who".)

several 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."I'll go on record as another person who wasn't taught a lick of grammar in public schools. It wasn't until I started taking Latin (sophomore year of college) that I learned what a direct object was. Before then I was an osmosis writer