5 thoughts on “Daily English Discussion–Tuesday, July 7, 2009”

1. Thanks, Nguyên. Good job, little brother. Of course, the best way to keep a person’s dream going is to teach the younger folks the skills to keep it going.

   Great day 🙂

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2. Translate:
   Đã đến lúc tôi nhường bước cho một ngườI ít kinh nghiệm và tài năng hơn tôi

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3. It is time I step aside for a less experienced and less able man
   In this world, there are many gifted people but someday, they will stop going and step aside for younger people. The old people, they can be gifted, can have lots of experience but they don’t have lots of times to complete their dreams. About the younger people, they can have less experience, can be less able but they have lots of time to complete theirselves. That’s the reason why the old people should teach the younger people about all they know, they should help the younger people to be progressive and complete their dream. I heard someone said:”believing in young class is like believing the way we teached them and the future.

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4. Hi Trâm and everyone,

   Good point, Trâm. I am not sure what it means. I put the weird quote out, trying to get some reaction. Thanks for giving me a reaction. This strange quote is all over the Internet, but apparently no one cares to ask what it means. Actually, the quote everyone has contains “It it time I stepped aside…”, not “step” as I have corrected. Maybe originally it was meant to be a joke of some kind. But I have found nothing.

   Incidentally, while searching for Scott Elledge, I ran into this 1962 TIME article about the difficulties in teaching English (with Elledge in the article). I thought this would be a good one to share with the English teachers on ĐCN.

   So here it is:

   http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,938889,00.html
   Friday, Aug. 31, 1962

   English Ain’t No Snap

   “Every morning I awake with an empty feeling, as if there had been a death in the family,” says white-haired Floyd Rinker, veteran of 32 years of English teaching at Newton (Mass.) High School. What depresses Rinker is the generally sad state of the 90,000 English teachers in U.S. secondary schools—public, private and parochial.

   Rinker well knows that English teaching can be impossibly hard. The “normal” high school teaching load is 125 to 150 pupils a day. If a teacher assigns 125 pupils one 500-word essay a week, allowing 15 minutes apiece to correct them, he faces more than 30 hours of extra work. (One result is that some teachers assign no essays, and high schools are graduating students who never wrote a single composition in four years.) Nonetheless, Rinker thinks that the deeper problem is simply incompetence; few teachers, for example, read enough, and many cannot write with style and clarity.

   “Germ Carriers.” Teacher Rinker is now executive director of a coast-to-coast rescue squad called the Commission on English, which the College Entrance Examination Board launched in 1959 with $1,000,000. A top priority: re-educating teachers. Says Harvard Professor Harold Martin, chairman of the commission:

   “They’re doing a damned poor job in education schools—75% of the time is wasted time, filled time.”

   This summer Rinker & Co. set up “institutes” at 20 universities from Cornell to California, gave 900 teachers a stiff dose of everything from satire to syntax. Supposedly the nation’s best English teachers, they are expected to go home as “germ carriers” after a graduate-level summer tour of literature, linguistics and composition. Rinker is pleased—but not nearly as pleased as he hoped to be.

   Reformer Rinker’s problem was clear last week at Harvard, which wound up an institute for 45 New England teachers. Their ages ranged from 25 to 62, and 85% of them had master’s degrees. As the course ended, a few were plain flunking; many others had barely grasped it. Only about a dozen emerged with honor.

   “Born Again.” In teaching the literature course, Harvard’s Professor Martin dug deep into the “ethos” of King Lear. His charges scribbled copious, precise notes (only one or two actually dozed). At length Martin paused to ask: “What happens to Edgar at the end of the play?”

   A long silence followed; apparently no one remembered Edgar. Finally Martin said, a little ruefully, “He’s king.”

   Professor Scott Elledge ruthlessly ripped apart the teachers’ compositions—the first creative writing for some of them since adolescence. “Full of hazy thought,” he snapped. “This kind of rhetoric we don’t need—it’s unliterary.” The teachers, who tend to see correcting essays as sim ple proofreading rather than criticism of meaning, giggled nervously, or sat in stunned embarrassment.

   Happily, they remained undaunted. “It’s like being born again,” said one woman teacher. Inspired by their encounter with Greek rhetoric, 21 teachers even launched a new syllabus for teaching expository writing in high schools. Still to be seen is how much of an epidemic such germ carriers can start back home.

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5. “đã đến lúc tôi nhường bước cho người kém kinh nghiêm và khả năng hơn tôi.” — I find it odd that a professor from an accredited college would make such a statement upon retirement. It just doesn’t seem like good form to point out that someone is less abled than yourself, no matter how true that may be. I once read in an etiquette book that it’s not polite to introduce your subordinate as your subordinate — this seems to be along the same line.

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