Edumacation

Got a bit of a shock last night. The end of the school year is nigh, so the 10 year old came home yesterday from the hell hole up the road with a box of stuff that had been collecting throughout the year. As the stuff came out of the box, I noticed a test paper where the score was 20 out of 41.

Egads, I thought, I'd better have a look at that one to see why he did so badly.

It was an English test. I worked my way through it and discovered that I would have been lucky to get 10 out of 41.

There were questions on synonyms, antonyms and hymonyms. The first two I vaguely understand, but the last one was beyond me. I thought he had been unfairly marked on an antonym where the question was "healthy" and the answer he gave was "overweight". Gods, that was a classic tug of war between the perils of kids being obese and prone to dying young (thus clearly unhealthy) and the idea of being politically correct and not stigmatising the "big boned" kids. Bloody rough of the teacher to come down on the side of the politically correct. I must send a copy of the test to Tony Abbot to let him know that the message about fat kids is sinking in.

Then there were questions on conjugating verbs (I couldn't answer any of them) and doing things to nouns and pronouns and adjectives that were just beyond me. Like I said, if I had scored 10 out of 41, I would have been chuffed.

So it got me thinking - if they are teaching this stuff to 10 year olds these days, why can none of the 20-something contractors that I have working for me write anything worth a damn? Has verb conjugating and all that only recently re-appeared in the curriculum, so that an entire generation missed out, or does knowing what an antonym is really make no difference to how well one can read, write, comprehend, reason and argue?

Perhaps a bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. It could be that some people run around going, "I must be good at English because I know an adverb from a verb", but that's like knowing a few words of Italian but being unable to comprehend whole sentences.

We found out about that last night. J decided to make tiramasu for dessert, and was reading the recipe (in Italian) from the back of the savioardi packet. I was able to translate "sugar" for her, and that was about it.

After it was made, we were discussing how to make it and I discovered that she had not separated the eggs and whipped the whites - the whole eggs had simply been mixed into the marscapone and sugar. We were a bit sceptical for a while as to how it was going to turn out, given that the whole 'separate the eggs' bit is fairly fundamental to the recipe.

So given our comprehension of Italian, we were able to understand the words "biscuit", "cocoa", "coffee", "sugar", "marscapone" and "eggs", but made a bit of a hash of putting all that together.
Be that as it may, it still turned out pretty good. Maybe a touch heavy on the whisky for my liking, but the egg issue was not a problem in the end. For sure, it was different, but it went down well.