Posts Tagged ‘Britain’
A lazy “academic”, or a stupid one?
I stumbled across this article on Reuters about an “academic” in England who is arguing that universities should simply accommodate the most common spelling mistakes among its students. This statement coming from someone who teaches at a university seemed so ludicrous, I was beside myself. I didn’t know where to begin to lay into this cretin and his idiocy.
But then I thought, maybe I’m not being fair to the guy. He may have been misreported. So I read another article, this time by the BBC, and it said pretty much the same thing.
Just to be sure, I found the original piece Ken Smith wrote in the Times Higher Education, where incidentally, he identifies himself as a “senior lecturer in criminology, Bucks New University”. (Bucks is short for Buckinghamshire.) Reading the entire piece, I found that the news article had not misrepresented Ken Smith.
What a shame.
You can read the reader comments at the end of the Times Higher Education piece for all the ways Smith makes an ass of himself with the factual inaccuracies and logical inconsistencies of his arguments. That someone who claims to be a senior lecturer in criminology is silly enough to present such shoddy writing for publication is disappointing enough.
(If nothing else, you would think professional pride would prevent him from holding himself up to such unnecessary and very public ridicule.)
You can also make some very unkind observations about the institution he teaches at. You can hardly be overwhelmed by the academic credentials of an institution which has a link on its homepage to a website which claims to promote interest in tertiary education among 11 to 16 year old school children, by using bad spelling. In its own name no less.
“Be Coz U Can“
Way to drum up interest in education by lowering standards!
If you think I’m just being elitist, I would like to point out that this “university” offers a “degree” in “the management of selling beds”. I’m not even kidding. You can’t make this stuff up. See for yourself.
So things are not looking that impressive for Ken Smith. He seems to be a silly man working at an institution that appears mediocre at best. Even knowing this, it is distressing to hear such tripe coming from a supposed educator.
But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.
Why must you “suffer”? How about the fact that you are drawing a salary to educate these young people? If you are suffering from having to teach these kids spelling, perhaps you should speak with your university’s administration about entrance standards and accepting students who cannot even spell. Instead, Ken Smith would have other educators and institutions lower their standards to the level he has set for himself and his institution.
Ken Smith himself acknowledges that these “variant spellings” are actually mistakes. They aren’t “variant spellings”. That implies knowledge on the part of the student of the correct spelling of words, and an intentional use of a different variation of spelling for those words. There is no such intent here.
Students who misspell words do so because they are poorly educated and don’t know any better. No doubt they were ill served by other educators as equally dedicated to low standards as Ken Smith.
The op-ed in the Times Higher Education is not just the muddled thinking of a silly man. It is the work of a clearly mediocre and lazy educator, and the solution to poor student standards is not to lower standards, but to rid the education system of “academics” like Ken Smith.
