http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31079515
General:
Politicians do things. People disagree over whether it
was a good or a bad thing. Either way, politicians are running a country. That
can’t be an easy job. So mistakes are an inevitability.
Still, it really irritates me when the main parties start
blaming each other for ‘mistakes’. If you did that in any other profession, you
would be told to get a grip and grow up. Politicians who run the whole entire
country should have at least a little bit of maturity.
This Article:
Children need to learn their times tables and know proper
grammar, spelling and punctuation by the time they leave primary school.
Any school to fail two years on a row in getting *every*
child to pass will be forced to become academies. There will always be children
that fail. I can’t think of any case in any school having no failing students.
Forcing a school to become an academy is very worrying, also. Most
uncomfortable. Though the articles does talk about successful school leaders
going into a failing school to help that school, which can only be a good
thing.
I fail to see how knowing the timetables off by heart is
an important skill. Surely learning how to work them out is both more useful
and more productive? They take no more than a few seconds to figure out. There
are far more important things for a child to remember, anyway. Perhaps this is
a bias from my perspective, but what concessions will be made for the children who
simply can’t do these things? For the article to be so absolutist is very
worrying. One can only hope that someone will think of this and provide room in
the legislation for this.
Although anyone who knows me knows that I effectively
live to correct punctuation, grammar and spelling, they are, after all,
artificial rules that have been applied to writing. As such, there is no
universal agreement of what is correct and what is wrong. Quite often, these
are based on personal preference rather than logic. Quotation marks (‘x’) and
speech marks (“x”) are used interchangeably, as are semi-colons (to show both
sides are of equal importance). As no one agrees, someone’s right is another’s
wrong. This can only cause problems.
There is also a great problem with ‘correct grammar’. Take
conjunctions. People are taught not to start sentences with ‘and’ and
‘because’. Logically, this is not sound. Any other conjunction can be used to
start a sentence and this is accepted (for, but, or, yet, so, although, as,
before, if, since, unless, whether etc.) can be used to start a sentence and
this is accepted. No reason is ever applied to ‘and’ and ‘because’ being unable
to serve this function other than “It just is.” So no.
People also got so worried about saying ‘me’ when it
should be ‘I’ that people now say ‘I’ where ‘me’ should be. This singular
personal pronoun is ‘I’ when you are the subject (i.e. the person performing
the verb) and ‘me’ when you are the object (i.e. the person being verbed [yes
this is a made up word, but neologisms are the cause of accents becoming dialects
becoming languages. To not allow a new word is denying the very process of
language change; by this logic, everyone should be speaking the primordial
language of humans which is a ridiculous idea because no one knows what that
is]). So, ‘Bob invited the wife and I to dinner’ is incorrect: you wouldn’t say
‘Bob invited I to dinner’ because you are the object of the sentence. Adding
another object to the sentence doesn’t make you the subject of said sentence.
All in all, the entirety of this is very worrying.
Fingers crossed things will work out.
Be prepared for confusion and chaos, people.
