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Maybe you've seen the commercial, maybe on the Comedy Channel. Just when you least expect it, here's this ad for DVDs about drunk college girls partying on spring break who show their breasts (and who knows what else) to some fast-talking guy with a camera. Cool. I turn to my wife and say something like, "Yeah, I wonder what Daddy will say when he sees his daughter's breasts on DVD. I wonder what he'll think about this return on his considerable investment in her college education." In the paper this morning: "Most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food." Uh...common, yes...but complex, no. I remember in Waynesville we had to do this stuff in the 8th grade. "They could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school." My take on it is that high school teachers failed to do their job, and of course the universities assume kids already know how to do these things, so they don't address them. It's possible some high school teachers don't have the skills themselves. It wouldn't surprise me. A whole generation of middle-aged adults now say, "I was surprised how important it was to my wife and I." The grammatically correct way of saying this is: "I was surprised how important it was to my wife and me." It's fine to say "My wife and I will be there," because the pronoun "I" is used as a subject. But when it's used as an verb object or a preposition object, the pronoun is "me." It's a simple distinction. We were taught this in the 8th grade, or earlier. In the media, 95% of sports, news and entertainment announcers get this wrong. I fault their teachers. More to the point, teachers who put out concepts and information typically don't present the material in practical, real-life terms. They don't relate the knowledge to the students' lives or everyday problems. Doing so should be their mission in life, but it isn't. They think their job is to present the concepts and information of their course. Students should see learning as important to them personally. But most of them see it as irrelevant nonsense. We are saddened by their attitudes, but all too often they may be right.
Article Source: http://www.articledestination.com
Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.
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