Grammar , spelling and punctuation.?

I have a similar reaction. The problem is the schools, not the kids. The teachers grew up under the tutelage of hippies whose goal it was to destroy standards in the schools. "It isn't important that you know anything, just so long as you know where to look it up," was the hippie mantra. Pretty funny saying, though, when you consider what a lazy bunch the Sixties Generation was, and that they hardly ever looked anything up. That's how so much fraud worked its way into colleges, including the insistence that teaching grammar was detrimental to the students' opportunities to learn "language arts" (which has never had a solid definition). The goal was to "help them become readers" and "get them ready for high school." Please note how vague the goals are; so vague, in fact, that they wouldn't be considered goals by anyone who actually knew what goals are. But that way the teachers can't be criticized for letting the children down.

Similarly, spelling has been dumped from the curriculum. Under the "whole language" method, children are supposed to learn through osmosis and the teachers frankly don't have to teach. Reading, grammar, spelling, and clear writing are off limits. They have been told that teaching spelling and grammar will interfere with the students' learning "language arts skills".

Now our teachers are GenX and GenY, who were indoctrinated into greater and greater dislike of "education". They've been told to be suspicious of their own urges to pass on information, and instead to let "peer work groups" do the teaching, since it's axiomatic in the teaching profession that the best teacher of an eight year old is another eight year old. In groups like this, the one kid who knows the subject gets stuck doing the teaching, and frankly he almost always teaches the other kids in exactly the same way that the adult teacher would teach them; just that his face is closer to the floor when he does it. How do worthless teaching methods like this get perpetrated in the schools? How does common sense not intervene? You can thank teachers' college for that, where new students are told that only barbarians would teach with the old ways, and aspiring teachers who embrace the New Ways are a million times more enlightened. Since everyone wants to consider himself enlightened, seventy or eighty percent of student teachers will assent to this insanity.

As for your other point, about questioners expecting us to do their homework for them, it's too often the case. However, now and then someone posts a question, and I can see they really don't have a clue where to look it up. They don't have the skills to focus on keywords in order to do a web search. These kids I'll help out with some suggestions.

Now I have a question for you: Have you ever noticed how many people will see a grammar question and jump into the discussion, while they have NO CLUE what they're saying? Yet they assert their answer with all the confidence of true experts, as if they'd actually studied grammar, linguistics, Latin, parsing or diagramming sentences, and composition, which they have not. I've seen remarks such as, "'Me' always comes after 'of' and 'to' so you'd say 'with he and I' in this sentence".

So much for one student teaching another. How do you teach what you don't know? But I guess at this point, the GenY teachers don't know anything either, so they might as well not bother any more.

You answered my weed question and since i cant email you im writing on here..even if what you said was true.. and i guarantee that has happened no more than 3 times.. but oh wait, how many times do you think that has happened with people who are under the influence of alcohol.. btw weed does not have a large enough effect to impact someone to kill someone that greatly.. that person was probably fudged up from the get go... godd i hate stupid ignorant people like you.. and if you think weed makes you dumb, im a 3.7 student at Michigan University..put that into your statistics...

Alright well where do i start... First of all its the internet i could care less about punctuation and grammar on a yahoo aswer board just to prove my intelligence.. As for those 279 deaths, i can guarantee that the smoking the marijuana was not directly the cause of the deaths. Im sure that weed can cause slight complications medically but what doesnt? Almost everything can effect your health in a negative way.. food, medication, alcohol..etc. So that large number you threw on me, "279".. lets compare that to some other numbers..

Alcohol, which incase you didn't know..is a legal substance.. resulting in 75,000 deaths a year.

Smoking Cigarettes, which is also legal btw;) kills 400,000 people a year.

The use of over the counter medication tallies up to 106, 000 deaths a year.

If you are so against Marijuana than why aren't you against all those?

Well maybe you are but how about the fact that people die from cars, sports, drowning, and i could go on and on..also i could guarantee that the totals for everything i have stated is well above the death total for smoking Cannabis.

People have a choice in everything they do..people also know the risk of certain substances and everyday actions they partake in. If i were to label alcohol as X and weed as Y and told you all the effects and death percentages among the U.S. for both but not telling you which is which..what one do you think you would want to ban?

Just because it is legal doesn't mean you have to smoke..

You probably have a perception of the normal weed smoker someone who just lays around smoking not accomplishing anything.. I sure you already have an idea of the medical benefits of it.. but what you dont know is that weed is everywhere and most the people use it for different reasons like for example some people i know smoke to bring out their innermost creativeness and artistic abilities.. I am also sure you have never smoked and have a completely delusional idea of what its like.. that is why you are ignorant.

I'm not appalled however it is stupid I'd like to help them more stupid it makes more funnier. For an answerer it is a challenge rather than educating already educated or one who trolls.