GOF Chapter 3: The Invitation

[oryx_leucoryx]

This is the obligatory Dursley chapter, in which we are treated to the home life of this family and learn how inferior they are to wizard families.

Dudley takes up a whole side of the square kitchen table. Ahem, I doubt a square kitchen table (as opposed to a dining room table) was designed to seat 8 people, 2 on a side. His parents excuse away his teachers' accusations of bullying. As opposed to the Weasleys who never receive reports making such heinous accusations against the twins (we'll see the school does occasionally owl their parents, but I don't see any awareness that some of what the twins do is bullying behavior). (This starts the theme of parents dealing with wayward sons in this book.) Dudley is forced into a diet of fruit and vegetables rather than his favorites. From the descriptions we get of the food Harry eats at Hogwarts I get the feeling Harry's favorites are closer to Dudley's than to the health foods, nor does he limit his intake. But somehow Harry remains thin, regardless of whether he gets starved by Petunia or stuffed by Molly or the House-elves.

Changing the food choices of the entire family is a good thing! However adjusting Harry's serving size to Dudley's (perceived?) emotional needs isn't. I don't begrudge Harry for working around a diet he doesn't need, but then I also sympathize with Dudley who does. Changing eating habits of years is hard.
This is also the place to say Dudley must have grown up as an emotional wreck. Knowing that his parents were capable of such physical and emotional deprivation of someone in their care - what if he ever failed to please them? I think a big part of his misbehavior is both making sure his parents know he *isn't* Harry as well as wanting the reassurance that they still love him, no matter what anyone else thinks.

Of Harry's 4 sources of help only one sends food he appreciates. Odd that even Hagrid managed to send an edible birthday cake. But how edible is it (or any of the others) 3 weeks later?

Harry is surprised that the Weasleys wrote directly to the Dursleys. Vernon is embarrassed that they didn't know how many stamps to use. But really, how hard is it to find out? Didn't they go to the post office to buy the stamps? What does it say about the exchange rate between Galleons and pounds that a family so poor finds it reasonable to spend on so many stamps for one letter? Molly's letter sounds as if she is trying too hard to make the Quidditch World Cup sound special and to make Arthur sound important. And of course she doesn't have enough imagination to realize that sending a letter by owl isn't normal for the Dursleys.

Harry is offended on Molly's behalf when Vernon calls her 'dumpy'. Since Molly likes Harry nobody is allowed to notice she is overweight.

I must say that the scene where Harry threatens Vernon with Sirius looks a lot less humorous now that I have seen Harry enjoy torturing a man for punishment, and Sirius engaging in Muggle-baiting.

If I am correct in my understanding that Ron is claiming that he and Molly wrote their respective letters at about the same time, then I am impressed with the UK post. Molly's letter arrived on Saturday morning. Pig arrived the same morning. Considering the speed of owls elsewhere, it looks as though Ron's letter was sent earlier that morning. So a letter got delivered the morning it was sent?

I am less impressed with the Weasleys. They plan on taking Harry regardless of the Dursleys' consent. One could argue that eventually Molly and Arthur realized their sons were not exaggerating when they said Harry had been imprisoned and starved, but seeing how Arthur views the treatment of Muggles, both in this book and in COS, I doubt this made a difference.

Harry is happy specifically because Dudley is suffering and he isn't. The seeds of the bully of HBP and war criminal of DH.

Comments

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

But that simply isn't true. Slughorn notes himself on at least one occasion during the year that Harry is NOT "following the uncorrected textbook". And he *praises* Harry for this!

Because he thought Harry had learned the theoretical lessons in his lower grades, that he understood why the mint would help the potion and why stirring it counter-clockwise every seventh turn would work. He thought he was seeing natural talent enhanced by studious behavior and hard work.

If we were caught using notes, anybody's notes, in any sort of contest we would have been given an automatic 'F' for the test and for the day and possibly, be sent to the principle's office. If we used notes or whispered instructions from classmates during a spelling bee, we would have automatically been sent down from the contest and those weren't even graded. If we studied on our own and used material we had learned in order to come up with a good answer in a test or the correct spelling in a spelling bee, the teachers would have been pleased (except in those instances where we were supposed to follow a particular formula, say in math, but we've already been over that and I think we agree on that point.)

I'm wondering, is this a generational thing? Some chicken=little just out of high school asked me a few years ago if I'd be angry if one of my kids told me to hurry up and die. I said I certainly would! She honestly didn't get why that was - she even asked me why, since her dad really flew off the handle that morning when she told him to do just that. She also thought the teacher was rude to tell her not to sit on her desk during class to talk to a friend of hers in the back of the room and not to text during class.

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

Because he thought Harry had learned the theoretical lessons in his lower grades, that he understood why the mint would help the potion and why stirring it counter-clockwise every seventh turn would work. He thought he was seeing natural talent enhanced by studious behavior and hard work.

You're preaching to the choir, here...you actually quoted something that I in turn was quoting in my post.

I'm wondering, is this a generational thing?

It may be. I'm 57, if that helps. Back when I was in school, if you were caught using someone else's work/research for a project, it wouldn't have mattered that your "end product" was great, if it was discovered that you hadn't come up with the work yourself, you'd get a failing grade.

If I had been in Advanced Placement Chemistry, my teacher would have expected me to have a thorough understanding of chemical theory to even have been able to get into that class. There would have been an AP Chem textbook that contained various experiments for students to conduct. Students would have been expected to follow the instructions as printed in the book.

If a student in that class was particularly brilliant, and figured out how to come up with a better end result by making changes to the printed instructions, then that student would get an "A", perhaps "A+" on the assignment -- but that student had damned well better have also explained on their paper (a paper was always required in addition to whatever was created in the assignment) what changes they made, AND WHY.

If that brilliant student had made notations in his or her textbook, and then for whatever reason that textbook was given to another student years later, and that student utilized the previous student's corrections/notes to present a superior final end result, that student would receive a failing grade if the instructor discovered they'd used someone else's work. They would flunk because submitting something based on someone else's work is cheating, no matter what the final result is!

Someone in an Advanced Placement class -- and NEWT-level classes are the wizarding world equivalent -- needs to do more than just follow a written recipe, regardless of what the final result is. Rote repetition of what is in the book, or written on the board, is for students on lower levels. If it was merely based on following a recipe, with the final result the deciding factor, then why don't all students who follow the textbook get uniform results?

They don't, because even tho they utilize the same instructions, some are better at potions than others. Snape was brilliant at potions, hopefully his brilliance was recognized when he was a 6th and 7th year potions student...but Harry does not deserve the same accolades for merely copying Snape's work.

[ioanna-ioannina.livejournal.com]

"If a student in that class was particularly brilliant, and figured out how to come up with a better end result by making changes to the printed instructions, then that student would get an "A", perhaps "A+" on the assignment -- but that student had damned well better have also explained on their paper (a paper was always required in addition to whatever was created in the assignment) what changes they made, AND WHY."

Have Slughorn done this, there would be no discussion.
But I´m with you, I, too, think Harry was cheating.
That his teacher did not do his work properly, either, and did not catch him cheating, does not mean for me, that there was no cheating.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

I'm 55 so it might help. Back when dinosaurs roamed and I was in school (did you have a pet eohippus, too?) we couldn't even use our own notes. Calculators, which weren't half what they are today, weren't allowed for tests. Now, they teach how to graph on calculators and advise students to bring them to class and use them for homework and tests. Part of the math textbooks are instruction on how to graph and do other equations with a calculator. I'm back in school and sometimes, I feel like I'm coasting because the standards are much more lax than they were when I was a kid.

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

(did you have a pet eohippus, too?)

Pterodactyl. And I rode a stegosaurus to school. ;-)

Calculators, which weren't half what they are today, weren't allowed for tests.

Handheld calculators weren't even existence when I was in high school (I graduated in 1971); the highest form of technology was in my Business Math class, where we had those old (now, not then) 10-key desktop adding machines. But my teacher killed the power switch feeding those machines the first day of class, and for the first half of the year we were only allowed to calculate USING OUR HEAD!

Her rationing was that there would come a day when we were without power, or our machine malfunctioned, but we'd still need to be able to quickly calculate large sums. My classmates hated it, but I viewed it as a game, and by the time the teacher finally allowed us to start using the machines, I could add strings of 5 and 6 figure numbers in my head in a few seconds.

The teacher was correct -- no matter how fast your fingers are, your mind will always be quicker if properly trained. We'd get tests where there would be columns of figures, 20 or more figures, and each figure was at least in the thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, and not only did we have to add these figures up in our heads and obviously get the correct answer, we were timed.

I got an "A"...but sadly, handheld calculators came into existence shortly after that, I never had a job where I had to utilize the skill of speed-adding in my head, so it is a skill I have since lost.

As for tests in other classes, it depended on the class if notes were allowed; I had more classes that allowed notes in a test in college than I did in junior or senior high school. I did occasionally have an "open book" test in high school where you were allowed to use the class's text, but those actually turned out to be the HARDEST tests compared to regular tests.

I was in a public school, so we didn't buy our own textbooks, they were provided to us by the school and we weren't allowed to write in them; we had to turn said textbooks back in at the end of the school year. So there was never any chance of getting a textbook in junior or senior high school that contained another student's notes.

What did happen is that occasionally someone would latch onto someone else's notebook from a prior year -- usually an older sibling's, or a friend of an older sibling. If they just used those other person's notes to get a better understanding of the subject -- say an understanding of Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night's Dream, then there wouldn't be a problem.

But if those notes actually included the rough draft of a termpaper on the play, and the student just copied those notes and submitted it as his or her own termpaper, that student would receive a failing grade if the teacher found out (and they usually did, since people's writing styles are so unique, plus the teacher probably remembered seeing the exact same paper submitted in a previous year)...

Just as bad would be if the borrowed/found notes contained the answers to the test on A Midsummer's Night's Dream, and the student just didn't bother reading the play at all but got a good grade on the final test because of the test notes in the notebook.

It was definitely never a case of the end result/final product being all that mattered, that as long as a student presented a good result, it didn't matter how he or she got there. But nowadays, at least in the U.S., school systems "teach to the test", so that students will pass the now requisite federally-required "standardized" tests to see if students are reaching minimum requirements.

Schools' funding, and teachers' reviews, are now based on how many students in the school pass the federal tests. This has changed how many school systems have their teachers instruct the class -- it has become more important to have as many students pass the federal tests as possible, than to spend time making sure that students actually UNDERSTAND what they are being tested on.

So yeah, it seems the modern attitude is that it's only the final result that matters, but that is definitely not how schools were back when we learned by firelight in a cave... ;-)

[mage-989.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering, is this a generational thing?

It might also be a regional thing. I'm 25 from Canada, and had to hike through two miles of snow to get to school ;), and in all my university classes that required a term paper a whole page of the course outline was dedicated to plagiarism and the consequences of doing it. Essentially anything that you put in a paper that were not your own words had to be cited. Whether it was an idea, a fact, a theory someone else proposed (in talk or in print) that you wanted to investigate further they had to be given credit. And ignorance was not an excuse if you couldn't track a source down to cite it properly you either got help from the teacher to find it or you couldn't use it.

In other courses it was always the work that mattered. Writing down the right answer got you one point. Showing your work got you the rest. For my teachers it seemed it was important to know why and how you got an answer, that the student understood how things worked. They seemed to want us to go beyond just learning stuff for the test.

I'm actually surprised there is such a debate about Harry's actions because it comes across to me as the way it did in the very special episode about cheating in children's shows. The character gets some advantage that's let them do better in class or game and over the course of the episode it's taken away and then the character can't perform the task or do well on the test, because they haven't learned how to do it. The cheating has been a crutch to pass the class or game without trying.

This IMHO is exactly what Harry does. He gets the book with another student's notes in it and uses those notes to gain an advantage. But when he hides the book he has to use the old recipes and he doesn't know why the Prince made the changes he did so he can't use that knowledge and apply it to other potions. Harry hasn't learned anything, and his performance in class reflects that. He can't do the work on his own, because the work before wasn't his it was Snape's.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

We did have those tiny checkbook calculators. I'm not sure when they came out but a few students tried to sneak them in. Our teachers had the same reasoning for not allowing them - we may have a power outage, we may be on-site, whatever. The thing about those early calculators was that no two companies seemed to allow the computing to go the same way. IIRC (it's been a while,) you might have to push the + first to let the calculator know you were going to add in one type, which meant you had to push the - before you subtracted; on another one, you pushed the first number in, then hit the application button.

I went to US public schools, too. We weren't supposed to write in the books. We had to sign them out so they knew who had it last in case the book needed to be replaced, but there were still notes, scrawlings, etc., nothing that rendered the book completely unusable. Taking classes now, I'll sometimes buy the used textbooks. I know they're bought and then sold back, but it bothers me to find notes or highlighting in them. I've noticed where some answers are wrong, I've had things highlighted that weren't as important to my teacher as they had been to the other student's teacher, I've had key words in phrases obscured by someone's scribbled notes between the lines.

And yes, if you used an older sib's notes or notes from one of their friends and tried to pass them off as yours, the teacher would notice. It normally wouldn't be more than a few years/semesters since the sib or sib's friend had the same class with the same teacher.

I don't know what you've noticed about the younger teachers out there now but quite a few of them can't spell and can't do grammar. My eyes just about fell out of my head when my youngest came home with notes from her teacher with misspelled words, improper use of a homonym, punctuation bad enough for me to notice it (apostrophes especially!) - and this is what's teaching my kid??????? The decline in schools came way before the Teach to the Test. These particular teachers were graduated and teaching before Teach to the Test and No Child Left Behind.

I may be misremembering but, IIRC, it was that decline that led to the teach to the test. Now, it could have just been the school district my child was in at the time but, due to my major, I saw a lot of budding teachers who graduated to go on to teach in 2010 and now, I see people who are currently teaching in a different district (in fact, a different state and section of the country) who don't know the difference between sight, site and cite, there, their and they're, and so on. The rot's been there for a long, long time. When our parents (who survived the Carboniferous Epoch) talked about how things used to be and how they'd gone downhill, maybe they were right.

You had a pterodactyl? *sulks*

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

The decline in schools came way before the Teach to the Test.

No argument there, that's why homeschooling's mushroomed in the past two decades or so...

But it was just a general decline overall; I remember seeing a news report a few years ago showing a history textbook from the 70s, and the allegedly same textbook (same title, same editors, same publishing company) that was currently being used, and the size had diminished by about 100 pages. What had been a paragraph devoted to JFK's presidency and his assassination had been reduced to just one paragraph in the newer book.

And they showed the same thing had happened to the English/Grammar and Literature textbooks, basically kids were now getting a Reader's Digest version of great literature.

But the "teach to the test" mentality has been a fairly recent development, I think it took over starting in the 90s, and I suspect it has a lot to do with this "it's only the end result that matters" attitude that some people have.

When our parents (who survived the Carboniferous Epoch) talked about how things used to be and how they'd gone downhill, maybe they were right.

My grammar is atrocious. The only reason I can write a fairly literate sentence is because I read so much as a child, I just wrote sentences based on what I read. But we were never taught grammar in my school system. Not in elementary school, we were taught the alphabet and how to print in first grade, by third grade we were taught script writing, with requisite vocabulary words, and we were taught how to read.

We read a lot. By the upper elementary grades, that is ALL we did in the name of "English Class"...

In junior high they tried some experiment with us that I guess was supposed to be some sort of grammar instruction, but it seemed more like training to become a spy, it was all code, nouns were "1", verbs were "2", adjectives were "3", adverbs were "4", prepositions were "P", determinates were "D", that's all I can remember...

The teacher would either hand out sheets, or write on the board, something like "D 4 3 1 2 3 D 4 3 1", and we'd have to write a sentence based on the code. Or we'd get a sentence in English: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," and we'd have to translate it into the correct code.

Nobody, absolutely NOBODY in my school understood it. First off, by that point most students didn't even know a noun from a verb, to this day I couldn't tell you a preposition from a proposition!

Meanwhile at home, my mother would show my sister and me how when she was in school, they learned how to diagram sentences. We couldn't understand THAT, either, but my mother didn't question our teachers, I guess she figured it was a type of "New English", akin to the "New Math" that was all the rage back then.

Based on my poor grades in the spy code class in junior high, I got tracked onto Level 3 in my high school, which had 4 levels, #1 being the highest and #4 being lowest. I had 4 years of "English" in high school, which consisted of reading one book or play after another, and being tested on our comprehension of what we'd read. Not ever was I taught about proper sentence structure or proper punctuation.

Not that my friends who had Level 1 and Level 2 English fared any better -- they just got what were deemed "harder" books and plays to read than us dummies on the lower levels.

BTW, I ended up getting A's and B's in all my subjects, and my guidance counselor DID try to convince me to take Level 1 and 2 courses, but I was lazy like Harry Potter and figured I'd be happier taking home a report card full of A's and B's I didn't have to work hard for, than a report card of B' and C's...and like I said, the higher level English classes wouldn't have helped me when it came to grammar, anyway.

But it's something that to this day I'm self-conscious about, so I beg everyone's forgiveness beforehand anytime you see a glaring grammatical/punctuation error in my writing (I absolutely have NO clue to the proper placement of commas, for instance).

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Well, commas are tricky little buggers anyway. I'm a bit of a grammar nazi and I still get confused by them occasionally, lol. I think they're probably the most subjective punctuation, outside of semi-colons maybe.

My pet peeve is apostrophe abuse. It's rampant. *checks self*

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

It doesn't help that there are at least two schools of comma use. In one, you put commas just about everywhere. In the other you don't put commas unless someone holds a gun or wand to your head. I've taken to the Shakespearean approach - add commas where I'd expect an actor to take a breath.

Apostrophes! OMG! *reels* *falls* They don't teach proper comma insertion in schools. My college grammar teacher told us that they stopped doing that somewhere in the mid-1960s, along with a few other "improvements." There's a rule on how to do it and people don't know it! I went to private schools off and on when my parents could afford it so I did learn the rule in the 1960s but, to test out this theory, I asked my husband how he determines where to place an apostrophe when he writes. He said he doesn't - back in school he just memorized the words that took them. I asked the youngest, who is now 19; she said you put the apostrophe between the ultimate and penultimate letters (not her words, btw.)

!

For semi-colons - you stick them between items on a list following a colon. For anything else, I use it when a period seems too final but a comma seems out of place. I'm like majorjune here - most of this sort of thing I learned from seeing it in books.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

I like the Shakespearean approach myself, though I'd never named it. I think you've officially christened it. ;) Also, have you read "Eats, Shoots and Leaves?" I LOL every time I see the title alone.

Lack of teaching would probably explain why I now see official documents, advertising campaigns, and even pieces of journalism written by people who haven't a clue what to do with apostrophes. It makes me cringe. It's not like it's all that *complicated* after all! (Makes me glad that I went to private school after grade 2.)

!!

The way I learned to use semi-colons (IIRC) is in lists or when the following clause could stand on its own as a proper sentence (but for some reason you want one sentence instead of two). If it can't stand on its own, use a comma. (I admit I'm rather too fond of semicolons in academic writing; it makes my papers unreadable, lol.) I agree that reading a lot helps a lot - I'm a bibliophile myself, so that's probably taught me quite a bit too.

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

I've taken to the Shakespearean approach - add commas where I'd expect an actor to take a breath.

That's my understanding of comma use (remember, I never was actually TAUGHT grammar in 12 years of public schooling), that they are used where there would be a pause if the sentence was spoken out loud.

I asked my husband how he determines where to place an apostrophe when he writes. He said he doesn't - back in school he just memorized the words that took them.

That's basically what I remember, we were given weekly vocabularies to memorize. Altho I do have a faint memory of being told about its use in contractions (turning is not into isn't, for instance) and to indicate possession (Harry's wand for instance). Or to indicate where a letter has been dropped from a word, as in Toys 'r' Us...

Other than that, I haven't a clue.

she said you put the apostrophe between the ultimate and penultimate letters

Huh?

For semi-colons - you stick them between items on a list following a colon.

I did not know that. :-)

For anything else, I use it when a period seems too final but a comma seems out of place.

Yeah, that's basically how I do it, too.

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

My pet peeve is apostrophe abuse. It's rampant. *checks self*

I don't think I'm too bad when it comes to apostrophes, altho I must admit to occasional confusion on the proper use of "its" or "it's"...

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Think of it this way - if you can say "it is" instead of "it's", then you put the apostrophe where the 'i' of 'is' used to be. If it belongs to it, like the car's gas tank or the chair's cushions, it's "its" gas tank or cushions, just like "his" or "her."

(BTW, I use either " or ' to close off words, mainly because I'm lazy as all get-out and, sometimes, my shift key is hard to depress.)

I love the headwall icon, btw. I feel that way a lot.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

There are tests on the internet that purport to be actual tests from 1800s eighth grade tests. Not too easy. I'm not sure they're bona fide; wish I knew for sure if they were or not. My dad dropped out of school in the 8th grade (1917) and he was an absolute font of knowledge. He read a lot, which, I think, enhanced what he'd learned. If you watch those Jay Leno man-on-the-street interviews, you can see how things have changed.

On grammar, see my answer to condwiramurs. They stopped teaching almost everything related to English and now, the attitude is, if you understand me, why bother with the right usage of a word? I'm a "descriptive rather than prescriptive grammar" type myself. Colloquial usage is fine with me and more natural to the language. A lot of what they teach (like split infinitives) was taken from Latin (the so-called "perfect language") and has no bearing on what the English language is actually like (you can't split a Latin infinitive because it's all one word; the English word is two words and can be split.) They also added elements of philosophy: a double negative = a positive, when, in language, a double negative can serve to emphasize something ("I ain't done nothing wrong!") Philosophy is a very exact form of writing that doesn't apply in normal conversation so why use conventions that stem from it in grammar?

Still, language is meant to communicate so, if it takes me too long to figure out what you're trying to say, then you (not you personally, I haven't had a problem in reading your posts) need to learn how better to communicate or resign yourself to being misunderstood. It's galling when university students don't know how to place an apostrophe, for instance, or uses "too" instead of "to" which, in a few cases, actually can affect the meaning of the sentence. I wish I could remember the couple of instances where it made a huge difference in posts I read elsewhere! I do recall a time when my roommate had me worried - I asked what time it was and she said, "10-2." (just read it phonetically since it was spoken.) I thought she meant "10:02" and I was late. She meant "10 till (the hour, 9.)" I wasn't late.

We didn't get the 1-2-3 method of grammar. We did get to diagram sentences with the little arrow pointing to the direct object, underline the noun and the verb, put a slash between the subject and the predicate (now, there's a fanfic some English major ought to write!) When I took grammar in college, we tossed that out the window in favor of Sentence Trees, diagrams that look like word mobiles on hangers. I liked it. It's more practical than the old diagramming and it's more descriptive of the actual language.

Oy, read and comprehend and infer and find subtext. Heh. Isn't that what we do here? ;)

[ioanna-ioannina.livejournal.com]

Now I can understand why here English grammar is taught "on the basis of Czech"...
I hate it. English grammar is the only grammar I never understood (as opposed to the other 6 or so other languages). I still feel pretty insecure when speaking English because of it. If I can´t understand how the language works... :´-((
It makes me very sad. :´-((

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

A lot of what they teach (like split infinitives) was taken from Latin (the so-called "perfect language") and has no bearing on what the English language is actually like (you can't split a Latin infinitive because it's all one word; the English word is two words and can be split.)

I have absolutely NO idea what you are talking about! (sigh)

I have no idea what an infinitive is, let alone what a split one looks like.

The only thing I know about prepositions is that the word "to" is one, and that you're not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, but I think I do it all the time! :-P

We didn't get the 1-2-3 method of grammar. We did get to diagram sentences with the little arrow pointing to the direct object, underline the noun and the verb, put a slash between the subject and the predicate (now, there's a fanfic some English major ought to write!)

Yeah, that's what my mother had been taught, and what she tried to show to my sister and me, to great failure. Like I said, instead of questioning if we were actually being taught any sort of grammar, she just thought that it must be a "New Grammar" just like the "New Math" we were being taught. And since my sister and I could write fairly literate sentences, my mother didn't realize that there was a problem.

I only found out how bad my school system was in my 9th grade French class. Our teacher, a very volatile French Canadian, had to spend most of the year teaching us what we should have been taught in 8th grade (whole other story, that)...

So there we were at the beginning of June, temps in the upper 80s in a postmodern building, all steel and glass and no air-conditioning, baking in the sweatbox of a classroom, and didn't even have curtains/shades to keep the sun out, and our sweaty teacher was trying to teach us some aspect of French grammar.

Part of the blank look on our faces was due to the heat, but most of it was because we had no idea what he was talking about. He kept talking about prepositions and definitives and determinates and predeterminates and presdestination (for all I knew at that point)...

We could see his frustration building. Nothing, and no one, should get Mr. Fournier mad; you wouldn't like it when he's mad.

He finally starts teaching us in English, stating, "Well you know, in English grammar..."

We had no idea what he said after the word "grammar"...we still looked like jack-lighted deer.

Mr. Fournier noticed our faces, and asked (actually more of a statement), "Tell me you have no idea what I'm talking about!"

So we told him that indeed, we had no idea what he was talking about. He literally screamed, "What do they teach you in English class?"

So we explained about all the books and plays we had to read and be tested on. Mr. Fournier broke his piece of chalk in half, as was his wont when angry, and then he collapsed onto his desk chair and proceeded to break a couple of pencils in half, as was his wont when he was really angry.

Then he noticed how scared we all looked. He sighed, and in a much softer, sad voice said, "I'm not mad at you kids. I really feel very sorry for you, and that this town has such a lousy school system..."

He then went on to explain what he thought had happened...seemed there had been a big scandal about 10 years previously, where students graduating from high school in my town who'd gotten A's in English, went on to college -- some to Ivy League colleges -- where they found that THEY COULDN'T READ. Or couldn't read much past a 6th grade level. All these previous straight-A students flunked out of college because they couldn't keep up with the reading assignments.

But they'd been able to write beautifully, in fact that is why many of them were able to get into Ivy League schools because they were able to write so well.

So apparently my town went to the other extreme, decided to emphasize reading over writing, so my generation ended up with students who were able to read at grade level or above, but for the most part couldn't write an intelligible sentence if their life depended on it.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Now I'm imagining an encounter between Mr Fournier and Professor Snape.

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

You had a pterodactyl? *sulks*

Didn't actually own it, it nested in a big tree on this farm that was across the street from my elementary school. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. My sister and I spooked it out of its nest one day when I was about 7 or 8 and we were exploring in the dormant fields...

Didn't tell anyone about it for the longest time, then I read the Introduction to John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies and he mentioned that in 1961 a TWA jet flying just outside Poughkeepsie, NY was buzzed and divebombed by a giant pterodactyl, and the jet had to take evasive action.

Poughkeepsie was just over the border from where I lived in Connecticut at the time, a hop-skip-and-jump as the giant soaring dinosaur flies, and I was 8 y.o. in 1961... ;-)

Can't say I've hallucinated any prehistoric anachronisms since then, tho... LOL

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Now, that's a cool story! :D

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

Now, that's a cool story! :D

My sister and I were walking thru this overgrown field when we heard this screech; we turned to look at the sound, and this very large "thing" was flying out from a group of old-growth oaks about 300 yards from us.

It was gray, leathery, and had a crest on its head. Based on the size of the trees, I'd guesstimate that it was about 15-20 feet long from beak to the tip of its outstretched toes, because it was as big as at least two of the treetops...the wingspan was perhaps 25-30 feet. It may have been larger, but I don't think it was smaller than those estimates.

It was flying away from us, and my older sister just pointed at it and stared at me, speechless. To my eight y.o. mind it looked like the movie monster Rodan, from the Godzilla movies.

As extremely odd as this whole thing was, what is even more strange is what I then said to my sister:

"Don't worry, it's a mother Rodan trying to protect her nest. If we just keep going in this direction," -- which was away from those group of trees -- "she'll know we aren't a threat and won't bother us."

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Why I "knew" it was a female, and that there was a nest of baby Rodan's, Lord knows. But we did continue to walk away from that area, and we weren't bothered.

Of course my parents didn't believe us when we told them what had happened, and within weeks my sister refused to talk about it, and in later years claimed that she didn't even remember the incident.

There was an Audubon sanctuary barely a mile away, maybe they were attracting rather exotic varieties of flying critters! LOL

Anyway, it wasn't until we started studying dinosaurs in school two or so years later that I realized that what I saw wasn't an escaped movie extra, but a pterodactyl that's been extint for 65 million years...

Or is it? ;-)

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

I am younger than both of you, and we didn't have calculators. We had slide rules, and were taught how to use them and when (transforming sines and cosines and tangents to fractions, etc.)We WERE allowed to use slide rules for certain tests, but were never, that I can remember, allowed to use calculators.

[oryx_leucoryx]

I was in a transitional generation - kids just a year or two above me learned how to use log tables, mine was not taught that skill officially, though anyone interested could get the explanatory booklet from the teacher. We calculated by pen-and-paper (or mentally) until 9th grade (including square roots, though my teachers only taught taking square roots by iteration or guess-and-check, not the formal algorithm - which I learned from my mother but my friends didn't know). From 10th grade we were allowed scientific calculators, since looking up a sine in a table or on a calculator is the same thing, in no case is one actually calculating the value.

However once calculators were allowed the questions on exams were deliberately composed in such a way that calculators gave no (or little) advantage - can't use them for proofs, algebraic manipulation etc.

[ioanna-ioannina.livejournal.com]

I´m younger, too, and it was no calculators until the end of the secondary school... but I´m from another country, so it does not count, I guess.
Today, the children do use calculators (and usually don´t know how to count without them, at least the more advanced stuff), too, here. The less lazy ones still try to learn it, but lack the practice.

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say it's a generational thing per se- most students I did my undergrad with two years ago were firmly against cheating- in fact, there was mass outrage among the student body when it was discovered that the President of the university had plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis and the university did nothing about it.