The Chemistry of Texting English in High School

Well,all I can say is:

If u thnk dis is bad, then u shld c how sum of da high scool kidz write. Yez, its dis bad.

Anywayz, I g2g, but Ill brb ily ttyl

That’s weird. While my attitude (as a trained Linguist) is definitely anti-prescriptive — i.e. there’s no such thing as “correct” or “proper” language, it’s all just Language — the teacher’s suggestion is… weird.

Kind of artificial, at least as I perceive it in this anecdote.

Sort of along the lines of telling kids that it’s okay to eat brightly-colored flavored yogurt from tubes, and giving them lunchboxes full of it every single day, when the kids in question don’t even like yogurt in general.

>Think about our Constitution becoming a bunch of “lol’s” and “wtf george what’s wid the taxes”! Absolutely ridiculous. <

I love how this sort of language alarmism never goes away. In every generation, every single year, at least a dozen people will publicly remark, “oh the language is devolving, the young people just talk gibberish and can’t read or write, pretty soon not a single word will have any real meaning!”

Really, now.

I am not suprised. Thats sounds like public education at its best.

That is absolutely appalling. Instead of the school system raising the bar to higher standards, they are simply throwing the bar on the ground and saying, “is ok, we not care u dumb (lol).” Wonderful societies we live in today.

“I thought this might interest you since your involved in both English and technology. As you can imagine, this was a concern to me.”

But not concerned enough to proof read what he wrote (assuming the above was accurate) and then insert the missing apostrophe and ‘e’ in ‘your’? Pedantic I may be but I had to chuckle.

What happen to turning in assignment in properly hand written form?Can many students as well as adults even hand write any more?Well should i say that can be read by others?Forget trying to read a Doctor’s hand writing.But i notice they print prescriptions out and just sign it.So there wont be any mistakes on us getting the right medications and the correct dosages.Although i know the chat lingo,but lost in phone text lingo.But this should’t be taught in school.Unless they just trying to keep up with what the kids are saying or doing.

We had a young employee once that graduated High School early, at the top of her class no less. Her English skills were so poor that I couldn’t allow her to so much as compose an email on the companies behalf. And she admits to flunking math, despite her accelerated graduation status. Our public school systems are failing us.

I agree with Franklin (Justin). I’m also in that Chemistry class and thought that assignment was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen.

I find that absolutly halarious that a teacher would tell you to do that.My teachers all have either a black berry or an iPhone and Im pretty sure they use proper grammar.

what your still in college?

That’s absolutely dreadful. Especially her telling him to use bad grammar. I’d flat out refuse to do the cellphone speak part of the assignment and then dispute the grade with someone higher up until this kind of practice stopped.

This worries me as well, but my English teacher has made us write a report, then the next night had us rewrite it in the “texting” format. one thing i did notice was that i rewrote it a lot quicker, and didn’t have to run spell checker 7 or more times, but i do agree in thinking that it can start to make students get a little lazy.

I agree with Justin that frightens me a lot, kids already use that lingo way to much as it is and I hate when people abbreviate “you” and other words I mean you can’t type out 3 letters? I personally do use lol and heh when I type online but other then that I don’t use much else. It is a scary thought that schools would do something like this.

Yes you have both made the a common mistake in this email. One that irks me the most. You both used your when you should have used you’re. Others that totally “p” me off is not being able to know when to use to, too or two, there, their or they’re…etc, correctly in a sentence. As for the teacher asking students to write in text message lingo I think they are getting a list of “word” children use in texting so they can decode what is being said in the text messages for themselves and parents. They’re probably compiling a text message dictionary of some kind.

And I have a tendency of hitting Publish before proofreading my message. I meant to say “made a common mistake” and also “getting a list of “words” children use”.

[...] and their “smell test” senses are more finely-tuned than ours.  That’s what made this post so amusing to me:  a student calling out their teacher for adopting an inane suggestion [...]

I may be in my 60’s but I love technology. If you want students to pay attention you have to be at their level. It certainly can’t be done with the old humdrumm system we had to endure during my school days… borring!!! I admire those that come up with inventive ideas and take a stand in what they believe in. This is one cool teacher.

This is patently ridiculous.

1) Schools are supposed to prepare us for college and teach us useful life skills. I doubt any admissions deans will be impressed by an essay written in chatspeak.

2) And once our teachers certify us as fluent in LOLs and other acronyms/abbreviations like that, where are we supposed to use our new English skills? In our Ph.D dissertations? As a scientist, submitting a report on our findings to a scientific publication in lowercase?

3) It’s also just really pathetic when newspapers, for example, write articles about the rise of chatspeak and use sentences like ‘if ur going OMG about dis, u should c…’. This is kind of the same thing, but worse, because teachers are not supposed to take a cue in teaching from their own students.

There’s basically two dominant views on chatspeak, as Naomi Most mentioned: people that take the alarmist standpoint, thinking that teenage texting lingo is going to take over the world (it won’t; there’s tons of old people out there), and people that consider it the natural evolution of the English language and advocate just going with the flow.

Both views are kind of BS, and I’m just enormously relieved that my teachers are far too clever to get mired in either.

I’d like to see Sandy Garret tell me what use writing English papers the way I talk to my friends will be in real life.

The thing that really bothers me about this is that it’s like the teacher is telling the student to do something that is contrary to what they’ve been taught all of their lives.

I don’t really care about the way people type because I think it’s not right to judge someone by the way they write, but teaching students to do something one way and then later be told to do it a different way for no good reason seems wrong.

Aww man, tell CNN, tell Fox even! They’d love this!

Language is a shared cultural definition in a given space. It needs to be organic of course.

The system is actually designed to fail you know. That’s no secret. Good teachers are being given bad curriculums. Heck, the only reason I can spell is because I’ve set up firefox to do the hard work for me.

OTOH, my son (who’s almost 40) received an interesting homework assignment in High School:

Take a nursery rhyme and “translate” it from English into English, but using larger, longer, more technical words. She suggested the students get their parents involved, saying that it can be fun.

My son came home with his eyes wider than I’d seen him in a very long time. “Dad!”, he said, “you THINK like this!”

So we sat down to give it a try. “Three Blind Mice” became “A Trio of Visually-Impaired Rodentiae”. “This Little Piggy Went to Market” transmogrified into “This Diminutive Porcine Creature Journeyed to the Retailing Place for Comestibles”.

And so forth. My son’s teacher was attempting to encourage her students to use their brains. teh “eduk8r” in the stor-e dint care abt nething xcpt 2b freinds w/her kidz.

It’s sad. Certainly doesn’t make me LOL. Maybe WOL.

That’s “weep”.

I still have the results of the assignment. I’ll email it to “NE1″ who wants a copy.

This is really appalling, I am stunned that a teacher actually assigned this. This type of thing falls in the same category as computers replacing handwriting.