Text speak?

Question

My parents and I were recently discussing a newspaper article written about a parent who was enraged with her son's history teacher for giving the boy a failing grade on a term paper because the entire thing was written in "text speak" (LOL, idk, omg, ur, etc.). The mother claims that the teacher had no right to fail the paper because it was written for a history class, not an English class. The teacher argued that in school, regardless of the subject, students should use proper English, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Your thoughts?

Answer 1

I would have failed him as well. Does she honestly think that text speak is a valid form of communication outside of texting and IMing? Honestly, if she can't instill better habits than that into her son, she has no right to nag about his grades.

Answer 2

It is true. Across the curriculum in any school proper grammar and spelling should be practiced. In fact when other teacher do not enforce these it adds to the problem of poor education coming out of schools these days. There has to be some level of care and consideration in everything you do whether it be school or work or life. If someone is blowing though a paper and having massive grammatical errors it shows either a lack of education on the part of the previous teachings or a lack of caring on the part of the student. By failing for such as issue is a red flag that something needs to be done.

It comes back to a lot of issues that are discussed in Yahoo! Answers. One being my favorite is the idea of changing the English language to make everything phonetic. This frankly is a pathetic and lazy answer to a problem. We should not be lowering standards so that the greater majority of people can get off 'easy' if you will. We should be working harder on the youngest generation to raise them to the level they should be. English is a complex and difficult language. It is why a lot of zero or first generation citizens who live in this country do not speak it properly. If you try to listen to someone whose native language is something like Mandarin or Spanish, the structure of their sentences will be very far off. We should be working on these first and second generations to bring them to the way things are properly done. We should be educating the inner city and rural areas to eliminate the slangs and idiosyncrasies from their vocabulary because, frankly, that is all they have been subject to.

It is not an easy thing, and it all falls back on the education of the educators. For many years now the newest waves of educators have not been taught the right way -- much like what would be if the example stated passed the student. I have bore witness to a lot of these bad educators that just don't care what they are teaching. I know someone whose teacher tried to teach that the plural for of you is the 'fifth person' in English. This isn't true; it is bad education. I doubt severely that the teacher made it up. I would guess that they were taught that what she said was true so she can only assume that it must be true. It is really a "Whisper Down the Lane" type of scenario. Person A gets a fact wrong and tells person B, Person B tells Person C and by the time it gets to Person Z people assume that it is a fact. It all starts at the top. If you teach your students that killing is okay and you can just open fire on anyone who looks at you the wrong way, then your students are going to assume that they can go around killing anyone they want. It is an extreme example, but one that isn't exactly far fetched in this day and age.

Should a student fail solely on the spelling of his paper, probably not. Should the student be held accountable for the way he turned in said paper, absolutely. If I were in this situation as the teacher I would have probably failed the student under the pretext of "do this right and I will regrade." The student failure would only be upheld if he didn't take the opportunity to fix -- and possibly even learn from -- his mistakes.

Answer 3

Absolutely. On Answers I won't even bother reading questions that are written in "text."
A teacher's job is to teach. Just because we're covering the civil war doesn't mean I'm not throwing in some literature, music, manners, and math. That parent needs to understand that teachers and schools have a standard set for students that crosses the curriculum.

Answer 4

The boy was lazy and dumb, period. What right does the mother have to defend such a poorly written paper? Whether It was an English class or not, every paper should be written properly with punctuation and full words. It is also her fault for not checking over her son's paper in the first place.

Answer 5

I believe this is true. Her statement is stupid. Although it isn't an english class, it is a class and all paper's (regardless of content) are graded in the same fashion. If you write something like that on a standardized test, you're grade goes down. Even abbreviations can be considered inappropreate. I text, but I don't use "text speak" I only go to that when I am running out of space in my text and I need to shorten things.

Answer 6

I'm with the teacher. "Text-speak" that slops over into other forms of communication is not only lazy, it's making an entire generation functionally illiterate. Or, as I said to a nephew who e-mailed me in almost unintelligible "textese": Dude, you have a keyboard and a spell checker. Use them. Please.

Answer 7

that's been a contravesy for a while but some teachers will let it pass if there is like 1 or 2. i should know. i fogot ot take some out and i got a C on it and she let me redo it so i got an B+ it all depends on the teacher but i agree with u

Answer 8

The parent needs to take away the phone and grow up. Its a parents job to guide their child to be a responsible adult. If the parent is defending sloppy work, it is setting a bad example.

Answer 9

I agree with the teacher.

Answer 10

I agree this "text speak" BS is rediculous. I personally hate it.