April 12, 2008.  Some of the major players in the tech sector drive me crazy.  It's not just Microsoft, which just about everyone loves to hate.  Others increasingly cross the line of good sense.

I have never, for example, liked Yahoo.  It is awash in advertising, including pop-up ads, which are no doubt good for Yahoo's bottom line but make its sites cluttered and user-unfriendly.  I also suspect Yahoo of downloading tons of spyware and adware behind the scenes.  After I have been to a Yahoo site – which I hardly ever do anymore – and then run a spyware scan, my software detects all kinds of intruders (many more than it does if I haven't been accessing Yahoo).  It's all about revenue, which is why Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo.  We can bet that, if that merger should go through, the worst practices of both will be preserved.

I have long been a fan of Google, and I still am – except that Google sometimes sinks into the muck as well.  I have, for example, a Gmail account, but I'm beginning to think about dumping it.  It does not filter spam at all.  I get literally hundreds of spam messages a day in Gmail.  One can set up filters, but all that does is divert the spam to the trash folder.  Thus, Gmail doesn't stop spam but sends it to either the spam folder or the trash folder, where it will accumulate for 30 days unless it's manually removed.  I've created thousands of filters in Gmail.  The result is that, in a given day, I still get about 50 messages in the spam folder and several hundred in the trash folder.  There's no way to block them forever; they just keep coming.  No, they don't clutter the inbox, but they still get through.  By contrast, Hotmail (which has its faults too) enables users to report spam in such a way that most of it is bounced before it arrives.  It doesn't even appear in the junk mail folder.  One would think that Google, with its sophisticated programmers, could emulate what Microsoft does with Hotmail, reducing spam to a trickle.  My Gmail account is nothing more than I huge recycling bin.  I never open the stuff, always mark it to be filtered, and yet it keeps coming.

Then there's Apple, the so-called model citizen of the corporate world in technology.  I don't own a Mac, but I have downloaded Apple's QuickTime for Windows.  So what has been happening the last few months?  Sometimes, when I turn on my computer, the desktop displays a message telling me that I should download an update for QuickTime.  It turns out that this is not a program update but a trick to get me to download Apple's new browser – which, according to tech reports, has some serious bugs.  It isn't enough to say, "No, thanks"; the message still pops up periodically.  Apparently, it hijacks Windows' automatic update program (which I've activated to keep XP up to date) and keeps harassing me to install another browser.  Explorer may have its weaknesses, but another browser is redundant, and I also believe that the more redundant stuff one loads, the less efficient the computer will be.

Maybe I don't understand the marketplace, but I think that tech companies – with hardly any exceptions – could use a few lessons in corporate citizenship.

April 13, 2008.  I need a break from grading student essays.  Although I have fewer than half as many papers now than I did at the beginning of the semester because of attrition (read, "laziness and hopelessness"), I am wading through both rewrites of argument papers and in-class essays that are supposed to be a dry run for the departmental.

By now, I am used to fragments, run-on sentences, misuse of common words, omission of apostrophes in possessives and contractions, insertion of apostrophes in plurals, exotic semicolons, totally random use of commas, misspellings, weird pronouns, and so on.  What gets to me is the content or, more accurately, the lack of it – the unsupported drivel and mindless repetition.  I am torn between shaking my head in disbelief and banging it against a wall.  As I read what apparently passes for logic in my students' heads, I wonder whether I am dealing with young adults from planet Earth or rejects from some parallel universe.

One of the argument papers attempts to support the thesis that the war in Iraq was a bad blunder.  The paper asserts that the war has cost a lot of money (emphasized) and lives (mentioned in passing).  While these assertions are true, this is all that the three-page essay says.  The writer does not analyze or even mention the miscues and misjudgments that caused the blunder.  He merely states what he hears in current public opinion.  Even then, he appears unaware of facts when he writes about the financial cost.  The war is the sole reason that the economy is currently in the pits (never mind subprime mortgages and the credit crunch), and it has caused an increase in taxes (never mind that taxes, especially on the rich, have been cut since the war began).

Of course, it's very hard to construct a logical argument when one has not examined or analyzed the facts.  Obviously, the writer adopted the prevailing popular conclusion and decided that the way to support a conclusion is to repeat it as many ways as possible.  The essay ends with the statement that we should withdraw all troops at once.  Never having noted that we are in this mess because of our simplistic assumption that the war would be quick, easy, and cheap, it never occurs to him that it's an equally simplistic assumption to believe that an immediate withdrawal would be quick, easy, and cheap.

Another essay concerns whether religion should be taught in the schools.  The author states emphatically that religion has no place in the schools and uses 200 words to present the usual argument about separation of church and state.  The next 200 words state that children should be allowed to share their various religious views in the classroom.  This is not introducing religion into the schools?  Then, without any attempt to explain the foregoing apparent contradiction, the student asserts that evolution should not be taught either and devotes a third of the essay to telling why.  (The topic was teaching religion in the schools, wasn't it?)  The reasons are that evolution is not a fact and that teaching it would upset some students because the theory of evolution contradicts their religious beliefs.  I begin to wonder if there's a short circuit in the logic center here.  Perhaps now you will understand why I don't know whether to shake my head in bewilderment or bang it against the wall.

This is what they have learned.  To write a persuasive argument, one states an idea and bludgeons the reader with it by repetition.  The other approach is to introduce loosely related but irrelevant points to make the piece long enough to qualify as an essay.  Even better is to use both techniques – stretching and padding.  Normal readers will, of course, quit long before the end, but English teachers are required to endure the punishment.

Advice to anyone who is thinking about becoming an English composition teacher:  Unless you are a masochist who enjoys reading thousands of words of drivel each week, teach something else – sewer management, garbage analysis, autopsy procedures.  They're much less unpleasant and are a lot like reading compositions.

April 14, 2008.  What I'm Hearing from Students . . .

Toward the end of a question-and-answer review session on fundamentals this evening, one student stated that I mark errors that he has never had marked before.  Others chimed in that this was certainly true.  Emotions seemed to be mixed, however.  While some appreciated discovering what had heretofore been overlooked, others were at least mildly hostile.  They thought I "nitpicked" too much.

Maybe I'm wrong to mark all errors I see.  Even some of my colleagues argue that, if we mark all the errors, students will be overwhelmed by the red ink.  It will only confuse them more.  However, what am I supposed to do – let something go unmarked so that the student doesn't know it is wrong?  It seems to me that one reason students are still making very basic errors after twelve years of schooling is that nobody has marked these blunders as being wrong.

At one point in this discussion, I suggested that high school teachers may not have been as "nitpicky" as I am because they don't have the "luxury" of spending an hour or so reviewing each paper.  They can't very well do that if they have a hundred or more papers to grade every time they mark the paper.  "I think they know what's right," I said.

This remark created an outburst of dissent.  Students were convinced that their teachers didn't know the material.  One student blurted out that he had never respected any of his English teachers because he suspected that they didn't know much about what they were teaching.  He "hated" getting papers back from me, he said, but "at least I respect that you're smarter than I am in your subject."  (Note:  This is not one of my star pupils but someone who is barely passing.)

I jokingly accused the student of attempting to brown-nose with the "respect" remark, but some others assured me that he was sincere.  They, too, didn't "like" me very much and thought I was "too tough," but they respected my knowledge of what I was attempting to teach.  If this is so, I'm pleased.  I am not in the classroom to win a popularity contest.

Other comments from students indicated that they are almost as disgusted with the schools' emphasis on building self-esteem as I am.  Perhaps because many of these night school students have been out in the "real world" and have had this false self-esteem painfully punctured, they resent being told that they're OK when they're not.  It is painful to become aware of how much they don't know, but the consequences of entering college or the competitive working world without sufficient preparation are worse.

Students themselves appear to be saying that teachers need to be more knowledgeable, tougher, and more demanding.  In retrospect, they see through the sham of the softer, easier way.

Of course, this discussion took place only among those students who have survived well into the semester.  More than half haven't gotten this far.  However, those who have probably feel, deep down inside, that they need to be challenged in school if they are to be prepared to meet the challenges ahead.  They rightfully feel that they should have been challenged long ago and have been cheated.  I wonder how much this sense of feeling cheated is responsible for their negative views of education in general.  When the goof-offs get diplomas alongside everyone else, why should they become anything but lazy and indifferent?