scrubbedexpat091

If school actually taught me useful real life skills, I'd probably have fared better in life, I wish they had taught me a useful skill, a trade or something that could have led to better paying jobs.

kimilseung

Not those kind of skills either, the kind of skills that would allow you to then go on to acquire the type of skills you mention.
Look at, say, the standards for a history class, standards are the things that will be used to create a rubric that will be used to assess the success or not, of the learning, none of those standards will include a date, a place, a name, an event.
The Holocaust will be used as a tool to address the standards, the Holocaust is a secondary level of didactic instruction, it is the propaganda or political instruction (not many of us will object to this, but propaganda it is - propaganda isn't always a pejorative)

I will give a couple of example standards that might use the Holocaust as a conduit:
RH6 Grade 9-10
"Compare the point of view of two or more authors for how they treat the same or similar topics, including which details they include and emphasize in their respective accounts"
RH9 Grade 9-10
"Compare and contrast treatments of the same topic in several primary and secondary sources."

kimilseung

Its basically, know that Hitler said one thing, and a bunch of normal people said he was nuts.And the skill is to be critical of things you read or hear
Eidt: happy to delete if you want

Nutek

School taught me nothing other than a lifelong dislike of anything involving “team sports” and cultivating social awkwardness.

Fortunately, I find sport is utterly boring anyhow and, being British, I am able to cover potentially embarrassing gaps in conversation by polishing my monocle*.

* of course this should really be attended to by my man but such social norms seem to be lacking these days.

Steerpike

I don't want to quibble with the overall impact and intent of the article, but what exactly was the question, I wonder, in regards to '6 million'? I am quite aware of many of the details of the holocaust, but I don't carry numbers around in my head very well, and I'd be hard pressed to say '6 million'. If you gave me a multiple choice and it had a range of choices from 1 to 50m, I may have chosen 40m or something; 6m actually sounds low to me, but it's just not something I remember (and I don't think it's important to be 'accurate' in this regard).

The closest I can find to the actual question asked in the survey is this: "Nationally, 63% of respondents did not know 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and more than one in three (36%) thought 2 million or fewer had been killed.". So were you 'wrong' if you answered 7m, 10m, 20m - and thus, counted in the 63%? I'm hoping that's not the case and they are just guilty of poor descriptions here.

Steerpike

You may not agree, but I think it would be helpful if you used fewer ... what shall I say ... obscure words? You obviously have a great grasp of the English language but not all of us do. I had to look up 'didactic' for example - it's not a word I've ever encountered in my 60+ years. Pejorative - I know that one but may be unknown to some. The sentence "the Holocaust is a secondary level of didactic instruction" - even after looking up 'didactic', I have a hard time grasping the full intent of the sentence.

I say this because as you can see, Jsmith deleted his comment with a reason 'too stupid to understand' or words to that effect. It can be counter-productive to use such words in a forum where many of us are not as well-versed in this type of language. There were a few other words I encountered in the past few days where I had to look them up. I'm personally happy to do the lookup, but I do think you run a risk of losing your audience if you aren't careful.

kimilseung

Thats good feedback Steerpike. Got to remember to code switch.(have I just done it again with code switch?)

Steerpike

I guess you have, but I do rely a lot on context when I've never heard a phrase before and what I think you are saying is, tune your message to your audience? I have spent all my career in IT, and one of the skills I've really learned is how to 'talk to others about tech'. I ran customer service ('help desk') operations for years and one thing I learned was, don't intimidate your audience, or you'll lose them.

What you said above sounded like what I might hear if I stumbled into a teacher's lounge at University .

I've actually been thinking about this a lot recently in the context of the discussions about 'woke' behavior, and white supremacy. Having an extensive vocabulary is perhaps one manifestation of 'white privilege'. That's not to say everyone white (and privileged) has a great vocabulary, or that all minorities DON'T have great vocabularies, but I think there's definitely a case to be made that vocabulary is something of a privilege. You see it on here (BE) sometimes when 'grammar nazis' start correcting the language usage of others (only when it's an adversarial exchange), in a manner that is designed to imply "if you don't know how to structure a sentence (or spell a word, or whatever), you are obviously not worthy to be in this discussion" (this does NOT apply to you).

It's a shame because, as others have pointed out, we have a rich and wonderful language and it's a shame to reduce it to a set of lowest common denominators, but I've personally concluded that there are far too many 'specialized' words in use that could be replaced by either simpler words, or, constructs of simpler words.

Fun topic, overall ...

Edit To Add - since I can still edit this, I'd say that 'vocabulary' above is probably not the best word; perhaps 'eloquence'? Nah, that doesn't quite sound right either. 'Being well spoken'? But I hope you get my drift, rather than focus on the exact word.

steveq

Steerpike

I remember those crop rotation classes! Was this in the early 70s? It does help now when people warn about the need to let soil 'recover', and encourage crop diversity ...

Back in 'our day', and perhaps in the UK more than here, there were only ever 3 TV channels (4 with the addition of 'Channel 4'). So you pretty much had to consume a fair amount of 'news' and 'current affairs'. I'll never forget 'Panorama', 'World In Action', 'News at 10' and others (and who can forget, Angela Rippon...) . Compare that to now ... you can spend your life consuming sit-coms on Netflix, 24/7 if you so desire ...

scrubbedexpat099

BBC2 came later, introduced 605?

Crop rotation I did not think was limited to the middle ages but was common until the agribusiness got going.

I have nioproblem with the use if a word I have forgotten and have to look up if it is the right word for the situation.

Steerpike

later than ...? Obviously, BBC2 came later than BBC1 but it was the third major channel to arrive on the scene ... before the rather aptly named 'Channel 4'.

BBC2 was launched in 1964. ITV was launched in 1955. Channel 4, 1982. Holy crap - I left the UK in 83 so I pretty much missed it!

kimilseung

Oh there was a whole thread on this at one time, when some college started talking about respecting non standard English as legitimate, a bunch of people reacted negatively too it.
Actually this summer when I was studying at University ( a 23 credit summer program) on one rubric it stated "accent" as part of what would be assessed for the final presentation, I sent a "strongly worded" email to the administration that this has historically been used to discriminate against the poor and (in this country) people of color.. They removed it from the rubric and affirmed their policy of no discrimination. I felt a little nervous pointing it out, but of late I have felt a bit more urgency in speaking up, and i was pleased that it was received well.

Steerpike

Full disclosure - I had to look up Rubric
First I got: "a heading on a document.

• a direction in a liturgical book as to how a church service should be conducted.
• a statement of purpose or function."

But then I found:
"In education terminology, rubric means "a scoring guide used to evaluate the quality of students' constructed responses". Put simply, it is a set of criteria for grading assignments"

I really enjoy seeing words I don't understand, and the feature in Chrome where you can highlight a word, right click it, and choose 'look up...' is really quite amazing. So please don't take this as a criticism. But I wonder how many are honest about what words they don't know!

Nutek

Yep.. 73 - 4ish?

World in Action was (is) superb and should be a compulsory watch for everyone.