English class

[Chaukai]

I think you guys are really just touching on the surface argument of this. I think it's pretty well defined that people have different interests, some liking "liberal arts" while others liking a more scientific based approach. I think there's some interesting questions that can come from sirknightingfail's original post, most of which, I think, are addressed at the education system.

I won't say I have experience in every education, and I do think it's nice that we have people like lordpat, who can give a very different perspective. These different perspectives are helpful in seeing how similar school education may seem, at least to an extent. I think some major questions that arise are questions like:

To what extent should we teach the "basics" of certain subjects? Why are subjects considered more valuable than others, and should they hold that value?

I've seen a lot of argument about this, but it's always interesting to hear more perspectives. I think it's fairly certain that everyone should have atleast some knowledge of the arts and the sciences, but to what extent should we decide that, "Oh, now you only have to learn what you want to learn." We have that in our College system of schools, but what I'm always curious about is if there's a need for the amount of knowledge which we're demanded to know. Is it fair that an artist to learn about Calculus in order to get to a college to have a stable career? Is it fair for an engineer to have to have in-depth studies on books that s/he hates, in order to get to a prestigious college to have a good life? Or even then, is it fair that a college is almost completely mandatory to have any sort of life at all?

Food for thought, no actual answers but the questions are more for the pursuit of knowledge.

[WickedOreo]

English is going to be applied to everything you ever do, including mathematics. How would you know what to do if you just had equations without the teacher telling you how to do it? That involves English. Not as complex as a regular English course, but you have to know what the words mean to know what you're doing. The same with science, all science topics. By taking English (as much as we may or may not hate it), you won't sound like an idiot when you finally get out of school. If you sound like an idiot, no one is going to listen to you, ever.
On account of someone with Asperger's who knows English very well, I sound like an idiot when it comes to responding to someone. Here's an example:
Suppose I am in my Algebra II class and I am explaining the definition of sigma notation. Now, sigma notation is the sum of all the defined values in an expression using the Greek letter sigma. If I were verbally explaining it, it'd probably come up as, "Sigma notation, well, is a way of adding all the sums of a data set."
It's pretty similar, but I don't know how to dumb it down or to make sense of what's in my mind. It's not a lack of not knowing English in this example, but just a bad case of stage fright, speech impediment, ect. I get laughed at 90% of the time and I get angry with myself and my other classmates because they cannot understand a word of what I said. However, imagine if this you, and you didn't know the right words, yet you were perfectly fine (which is illogical). You can see why English is important. In real life cases, it's good to use your language to the best because companies nowadays will dupe you out of your money with a sleight of words or overly sophisticated vocabulary.

As for persuasion, how do you think technology came along today? Mere words to the government to ask for a patent along with a prototype made them distribute these products today. What about advertisements? They use words to make you want to buy certain things.

[NanTheDark]

Language (I'm not gonna say english, because that's not my native language, and I'm not going to say spanish either because here they just call it Language) has been one of the key elements that allowed our civilization to even form in the first place. Languages allow us to communicate with each other and share ideas. Without it, our current world wouldn't exist. We wouldn't be able to organize ourselves, wouldn't be able to develop advanced techs, or if one does something like that the others will have problems understanding what you did, same with art, you would never know what someone else wants...


Behold my microscopic contribution!

[*Emelia K. Fletcher]

This post by *Emelia K. Fletcher was thumbed up by: 2

-BY (June 25th, 2013, 10:12 am) • nin10mode (June 23rd, 2013, 11:04 pm)