Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The Teacher (And English Graduate) Who Admits - I'm Illiterate And Therefore Well-Qualified to Write About Education Policy For The Daily Mail

This piece of happy horseshit is the most fraudulent thing the Daily Mail has published in hours.

And none of the commenters even question the premise of the article.

(An example: This twit expects us to believe that she and the other teachers at her primary school had to rely on the "head" to correct spelling errors in the end of term reports that were sent to parents. In and after 2005. Were these reports prepared on computers without spell-check?  Did the head re-type entire reports? Did the head happily proofread hundreds of reports for spelling errors, without consequence to the teachers who wasted her or his time?  Ms. Smith makes Michelle Rhee sound credible.)

As one subliterate wingnut at John Hawkins' website puts it: "This is a scorching indictment of Liberalism that not only applies across the pond but also her in America." (sic, baby!)

3 comments:

LT said...

"sic, baby."

You funny.

P.S. All I want on my headstone:

[sic]

Pere Ubu said...

Tried to leave this on the Mail site; I can't be arsed to register over there so you're the lucky one:

Odd.

According to the reading level evaluator at read-able.com, the first part of this article (which I presume is written by the teacher in question) is at a 9th level comprehension with a high readability score. Not what you'd expect from someone "illiterate". A certain piscine-in-Denmark quality, if I must say.


Montag said...

The only way we'd know if she was functionally illiterate were if The Daily Mail offered up her original submission for comparison, a before-and-after-editing side-by-side.

But, we don't get that, so, we have to presume that while she's no Charlotte Bronte, she's not illiterate, either.

I have no doubt that general education in the UK has suffered at the hands of the incompetents who've been running government and educational policy there for these past several decades, and the general austerity policies implemented in the last few years certainly don't help. That said, I doubt seriously that the teaching profession there has been overrun by mental defectives, as Smith seems to suggest.

There's no small amount of bandwagon-hopping going on in this.