To wonder how the HELL some people get into university?

[SayYuleNowSayWhipTheReindeer]

I'm currently doing a degree as a mature student alongside work, and am just amazed at the stupidity lack of knowledge some of my fellow students have. For instance, nearly all of them - on a fecking ENGLISH LANGUAGE degree course - mix up "your" and you're", "there" and "their", and use the spelling "definately".

I overheard a conversation today that involved several students talking about how they didn't know their times tables above 5 or 6.

AIBU to seriously wonder if it's even worth doing a degree if this is the standard they're allowing in at the moment?

LRD, I didn't take it that way.

I remember from previous threads that you are very knowledgeable about teh Church and all of what they were up to throughout teh Dark Ages and medieval period etc. Fascinating subject that would be great to discuss, but unfortunately probably not for this thread.

"it's everyone, man. Everyone's on strike." Then they had a rant that the trains had better be running because it would be a nightmare if they couldn't get to uni that day. I didn't have the heart to tell them their lecturers would probably be striking.

LRD - and 'when this text was written people generally viewed women as second class citizens, which is difficult for a modern READER (aaaaargh) to understand'?

Oh dear. At least they think that the idea of women as second class citizens is problematic though. I'm not always sure mine all do.

Problematic, but all sorted now, I find.

My favourite ever question from a person educated to degree level:

Did cowboys and Indians ever really exist, or are they just a tv thing?

Aww, Milly, I love that!

Mind you I only recently discovered that France was on the opposite side of England from what I'd assumed.

(Btw, claig, you're right and I do ramble on too much- sorry! )

Kids do though have some obscure general knowledge. Mostly learnt from the Simpsons.

Elaine - have you noticed how all writers are men, too? It's amazing - even ones called Sarah or Jane seem to have achieved masculinity.

True, that! How jolly clever of them.

I blame Labour's 'Let's get 50% of kids going to University' crap.

I was when I heard that one.

Now look where we are with massive tuition fees and 'graduates' who know fuck all.

'Btw, claig, you're right and I do ramble on too much- sorry'

No, not at all. I think it is a fascinating subject

This thread has made me cry a bit. The amount of posts in the thread, which seemed to suggest that the joys of Mathematics were a closed book to their authors!

This might be a cross-post, because I'm only half-way through the thread, but there is more to Maths than reciting times tables by rote. As it happens, I don't know any of mine, because memorising things by rote, especially out loud is incredibly difficult for me, but fast mental arithmetic wasn't. Thus, I could always work it out faster, than I could ever recall it.

I know people with degrees in Mathematics, who are far better at Maths than me, and unsurprisingly better educated in it, who suffer from the same "problem".

It's all fascinating. More to the point it is giving me an excuse to sit here typing and baking cookies instead of working ...

Mrskbpw "One of them got her calculator out the other day to divide £3,450 by 10."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

But I'm amazed, too. I remember when I was 11, first year of secondary school (this was a long time ago), one kid getting a severe telling off from the teacher for writing "should of". Doesn't that happen any more? Is it because the teachers write "should of" too?

I left secondary school in 1988 and we didn't learn grammar. It had been dropped from the curriculum by then. But my dd is - they know subject/verb/object/adjective/noun and have started to learn adverbs as well. Amazing. But no idea if this will continue further up the school.

Yet I appear to have an English degree LeQueen. How did it happen?

The tutor is not allowed to say they can't be arsed. They let me use a spellcheck instead.

It is perfectly simple to understand how words evolve without being sure of the spelling: you look it up.

I teach people whose spelling is truly awful. I went to university with someone who did her exams through an amenuensis. These things aren't unusual.

I think spelling is very important in order to get jobs etc.

notyummy said something very interesting

'I then in later life was involved in selecting graduates for a well-known retailer .....In addition a single spelling or grammatical error in either CV or letter and the application was binned without readng on.'

So it is possible to obtain an English degree without being able to spell?

LeQueen - my DD was taught the basics of grammar at primary school. Is there anyone here whose DC haven't done so?

Oh well, maybe the EBacc notion will push more kids (the ones likely to be candidates for university, at least) into learning an MFL and then they'll jolly well have to learn what nouns and verbs are! TBH, even in my day when we were taught English grammar, it was learning French that made me think about it.