Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#10
posted to rec.boats
|
|||
|
|||
Here's a Story You Will Never See On Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,150663,00.html
Interesting article, thanks for the link... definitely gets the point across about the health issues... but was this covered on their TV news? Or does this further prove my point that the best info is to be had by *reading*? "Shortwave Sportfishing" wrote Funny you should mention this Doug. The other day, I was commenting on an image on a photography group I have frequented for a long time and used some imagery from mythology, in particular Campbell's "Thousand Faces" to make my point. Nobody knew the reference or ever understood it for that matter. I have noticed more and more that the broad based reading you would think "artists" would be doing isn't being done and that if you make a literary reference, it's usually met with stone silence - unless the reader is around my age (60 +/-). Very few people read nonfiction for pleasure, and the fiction audience gets smaller & smaller every year in this country. I am shocked at the number of people I meet in the university environment who read as little as possible, and that only within a very narrow range of interest (within their field of course). I met a far higher percentage of avid readers in the military. I have often thought that one reason that we have the political problems we have is that not enough people are well read enough or spend their time reading that which is understandable to them, rather than stretching their imaginations and intellects to at least try and attain another level of enlightenment. Sure. And IMHO the internet makes it worse... this newsgroup is an example... instead of sampling a wide range of material and digging further for interesting details, people tend to form little clusters of self-reinforcing interest groups. Doug Kanter wrote: I wonder if what you're talking about has been caused, in part, by the internet, and the ease of plagiarising such things as written material for college assignments. Two years ago, a friend of mine taught a college course in research methods at SUNY Binghamton. The school apparently has a system in place for spotting plagiarized writing by the students, who must submit their work as computer documents. My friend found that 5 out of 20 of the seniors in the course had swiped some or all of their writing off the web. And, their bibliographies listed books which did not exist in the school's library. Sort of interesting, considering it was a course in research methods. To make matters worse, a few of the students' work was unintelligible - the kids could not write to save their lives. How they got past 15-20 professors in years 1 through 3 was a complete mystery. Anyway, some of these people never cracked a book. Partly because I was an older student (returning vet) and partly because I pushed pretty hard, in college I spent a lot of time in grad courses & hanging out with grad students. For a couple semesters I found myself as an aide and responsible for helping to grade undergrad papers... at least half of those "essay questions" were answered with incomplete sentences, gobbledygook sprinkled with keywords plucked from the textbook. It was appalling and I was told many times to not grade so harshly! After a while, I felt that the guys who wrote long-winded evasive paragraphs about very very little were at least deserving a C for being able to write coherently. When I say that the average reading level in the US is at the 5th grade, I'm including college... unfortunately. Regards Doug King |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist | General | |||
What a wonderful headline and news story | General | |||
So where is...................... | General | |||
Hey! The News Media Is Ignoring A MAJOR Story! | General | |||
Good News story.. | General |