Tim, after reading your post I then proceeded to read Jenny Allums post. I hope you do the same, but be prepared for being very depressed for the rest of the day.

Jenny Allum is Head of the SCEGGS Darlinghurst and Chair of the Academic Committee of The Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia (NSW).

Our children don't stand a chance!

I work in a secondary institution, and I can only, sadly, agree with this article.

Part of my work involves building and mainting an online Learning Management System (LMS). I am frequently presented with learning activities that are barely readable, riddled with appalling grammar and incomprehensible jargon, and (I would have thought) hardly useful in a classroom, let alone an online environment.

The worst offenders often seem to be the English staff, some of whom are incapable of such simple feats of punctuation as knowing the difference between a comma and a semi-colon.

Ultimately, frustrated with asking for rewrites, the curriculum manager and myself have simply taken it upon ourselves to rewrite these activities ourselves. For our troubles, we stand accused of "micro-management alluding to perceptions of professional staff incompetence".

What really saddens me, though, is when I (only too often) see students who, after completing ten years of schooling, are still barely literate.

In my academic studies, it was once suggested to me by my lecturer, that I got bogged down in subordinate clauses. I therefore shortened my sentences but still used such a form when necessary. However, today's teachers who purport to teach the English language, are unaware of what a subordinate clause yet alone a clause it !!

Two out of my three children have excelled in English and every other subject at tertiary and high school level simply because my wife taught them to read and also to have a love of reading. Much of the dumbing down of our language comes from hours in front of the idiot box. I know members of my wider family whose language skills are far worse than mine (which are pretty bad) and yet still have managed somehow to get/buy/bribe university degrees. Many schools are pathetic environments for learning anything other than how to survive out of control groups of kids.

This is so depressing. Never mind testing new graduates, test ALL current teachers. If this article is representative of the general standard, it should be easy enough to devise a teacher test based on providing a sample of appalling drivel and ask for it to be analysed and corrected.

Instead of literacy testing for graduate teachers I think there should be compulsory literacy testing of all aspiring university students, and a high 'pass' mark as a pre-requisite for being offered a place in any course. The standard should be even higher for trainee teachers. Why waste money on a tertiary education for those who haven't even acquired the basics of secondary education? Its just dragging down the nation, as this article illustrates.

Tim's comments might reflect the opinions of many who were educated in the "good old days" when English was taught by explanation of the principles, forms, and structures of our language.

I believe that Australia's media help to make those who are not linguophiles express themsleves in illiterate ways.
That's probably because a great many of those working in it lack competence in the correct use of English.
This, in turn, filters down to the listeners and readers and becomes the norm.

One of the emerging habits which fill me with derision when I hear speakers expressing them, is the practice of stressing prepositions ("what are they, Mum?") when talking; examples such as "...turning now TO the weather", "FOR the moment, we'll listen to.....", etc.
There is another growing practice of speakers using the redundant "DO" in phrases such as "we Do have a good range in stock".

Tim, perhaps these English teachers are victims of 'monkey see - monkey hear - monkey do".

The solution is simple and Queensland teachers are working at it now.

Pay teachers more. Pay a hell of a lot more.

Every time a beat-up happens, every time the brainless media spouts yet another 'aint it awful' story the response is 'we'll put THAT in the curriculum'. With overcrowded curriculum and overseen by political realities where everyone's an expert because they went to school, the teaching profession is the punching bag for every wannabee perfectionist.

Give it up, boys and girls. If you want to belt teachers have a shot at parents first. The raw material is seriously less than perfect. The little darlings are desperately rarely pocket Einsteins. Maligning teachers only serves to underscore your simplistic notion that parents have nothing to do with their children's learning.

If teaching was as easy as pedantic grammar and precise English, everyone would be doing it.

Whilst I can see that non school issues may affect literacy the same cannot conceivably be said in respect of Mathematics. The brute fact is that, as Masters has stated, Mathematically our students have regressed by about 2 years learning in the last decade or so. That is exactly what I see every day whilst tutoring - i.e. I have to use old Year 8 and 9 books whilst I am tutoring Year 11/12 students. Every adjectival day it happens. It will happen in an hour or so when my first student turns up.

Re literacy, I have a very smart grandson in Year 10. He has an excellent general knowledge and reads voluminously. However he cannot do 'joined up' writing at all and even his printed letters are hard/impossible to read. Speling iz perthetic. He is, in that sense, functionally illiterate.
Last week, in a letter to our local rag here I referred to the abysmal condition of our childrens education, called it 'State sponsored child abuse' and pleaded, yet again, for Parliament to launch a full blown Inquiry into school education.

I’m sorry Baxter Sin, but I cannot see how paying teachers more will improve the quality of their teaching. The only thing it may do is attract a few more qualified practitioners.
I agree that many parents are shirking their responsibilities and expecting teachers to do far more than teach. Likewise, the Education departments are overloading the curriculum with more and more PC rubbish.
Though, when members of the teaching profession come up with the examples noted by Tim they deserve a touch up.
Over all, I don’t believe the issue is about maligning teachers, but rather the education(lack of)system that has evolved over the last 30 odd years.

I think this article largely recapitulates the basic theme of "Death Sentence", written by Don Watson. A central theme is the transfer of intrinsically unwieldy and irreparable management jargon to mainstream misuse.

Perhaps these errant teachers of english could be issued with a copy of Strunk's classic.

(I too would benefit)

Rustopher.

Many of the irritating errors in English grammar and spelling creep in slowly, like DNA mutating.
For example, Clownfish's:
"Ultimately, frustrated with asking for rewrites, the curriculum manager and myself have simply taken it upon ourselves to rewrite these activities ourselves."

The use of the personal pronoun "myself" as the Subject (or nominative as it used to be called) in this sentence is incorrect. Take out the shared Subject "the curriculum manager and" in that sentence and the remaining Subject should stand. It does not, as we would never say "myself has simply taken it..etc".

It should read "...the curriculum manager and I have simply...".

This mistake is now quite common and will become "common usage". Call it evolution, but it stems from an incomplete understanding of English sentence structure.

Hooray for the rexationarys of the world - I know when things are wrong but my grammar is so rusty I can't explain why - so I'm probably part of the creeping problem too! Just last week the PM was wittering on about 'myself' and Malcolm Fraser used to do it to, so its been going on far too long.

I think we need to have a new word: aliteracy. People who know they can't grasp the written language are illiterate, but those who pretend they do, like the English teacher's in the article, are aliterate. The neither know nor care. Like people who are amoral.

There is no point berating parents for not doing their part. Some don't care, some don't have the ability. It is these parents who make it so important that teachers do know their stuff and are able to provide an excellent example to children who have none at home.

Crikey eyejaw,

if a student needs Maths tutoring then he/she is probably not coping with the Maths they are doing in class.

That means that the parent who is forking out their hard earned expects you find some point from where you can build up the child’s understanding whether it be a Year 10 concept or Year 8 concept.

We call this process teaching and yes it is hard work.

I work in a high school and am frequently horrified by my colleagues' abuse of the English language. Every day, I am bombarded with emails riddled with poor spelling, shocking grammar and terrible punctuation. I can accept the occasional slip-up, but what I see can hardly be described as 'occasional'.

As teachers, we often talk about 'automaticity'. When we know the rules of language to the point of automaticity, we don't have to think before we apply them. We can use apostrophes without any problems, we can structure sentences easily and we can express our ideas lucidly. The occasional typo is to be expected; regular errors are unacceptable.

Now, if we do not know our language rules to the point of automaticity, how can we expect our students to? Every time we spell something incorrectly on the blackboard, we are failing our students. I'm all for the testing of teachers, partly because I know that I would pass. It would also mean that I wouldn't have to spend my life correcting the mistakes my students have learnt from my colleagues.

God damn it all, now they've got me doing it!

You're right: The horror of these creeping irritations is that, at this point in time, they are so insidious.

Yes, one was deliberate.

Could they be preparing the students for management?
Lets face it, the ability to spout incomprehensible rubbish with no substance is a prerequisite for senior positions these days.
Sadly "soft skills" such as toadying, body language awareness and "me too Boss!" are *way* more important than real skills in the modern career landscape.

Sadly, a lot of these language problems do originate from Universities.

From '02 to '06 I waged a continual war against Edu-speak in my own courses. I had one lecturer in particular who would go through my assignments and convert my plain English to Edu-speak incomprehensibility with the irritating preface "You mean...".

One article we were given as required reading in a Drama class was so incomprehensible that a group of us approached our Lecturer and begged her to translate it. She, cornered, finally admitted that she herself did not understand much of it, but that as the writer was the author of several books on Drama we would benefit from familiarity with these works. Benefit?

It reminds me very much of the way Australians used to regard Art. The more incomprehensible it was, the more it was felt to be good for us. This resulted in a fiasco concerning a painting called "Blue Poles" for which the Government itself paid a ridiculous sum in a bid to buy a little cultcha. The painting itself however, was the artistic equivalent of the Emperor’s New Suit.

Now, in my own classes, at the beginning of each semester I post a list of phrases and words which I refuse to accept in student essays and detract marks for obfuscation.

This is the same argument that politicians use, Baxter Sin, and about as convincing.

>>The solution is simple and Queensland teachers are working at it now. Pay teachers more. Pay a hell of a lot more.<<

The underlying theme is that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Therefore, jack up the pay, and you'll get...

Unfortunately, much as politicians have, teachers have exhausted their credibility credits with the public at large. As a group - and I have to say that I have also met some really fantastic individual teachers - as a group, teachers are seen as failing our children.

Many of them blame the system - "I'd like to encourage the bright kids, but they won't let me", or "I'd like to enforce a little discipline in the classroom, but my hands are tied" - and I suspect that there is indeed more than a little dead-hand-of-PC involved.

But unless the system itself is changed, and teachers are allowed to excel (or fail), there is little real point in granting them across-the-board pay rises

As it is with politicians. Unless and until we are allowed to measure politicians on their performance - starting, obviously, with the pre-election commitments they make, then feel free to ignore - they shouldn't be paid one cent more.

Unfortunately, only one of these two groups is in the position to unilaterally decide they deserve more.

Unfortunately, Uncle Tim is correct.
I like art and believe that a teacher of art needs technical ability. Demonstrably, I don't have that ability and would never attempt to teach art. However, a teacher of English is apparently not required to be able to write English which complies with established standards of grammar, spelling and punctuation. What hope do the students have?
Some teachers of English appear to know only one meaning of colon, namely 'the intestine between the caecum and the rectum'. Many of these teachers react like a colloquial version of their semi-colon when asked to account for their performance. Like a seer, they claim special knowledge and ability that is beyong the understanding of the critic: ironically such teachers are unable to make most people understand what they are trying to say. Paradoxically they usually assert that they are seeking to make the language simpler but can only express themselves in arcane and comples language that few understand.
The object of language should be to communicate effectively. The established standards enable flexibility where it facilitates effective communication. But lazy, careless, convoluted and jargonistic expression should not be confused with literary writing styles.
Many teachers of English claim that their technical deficiencies are actually a literary writing style or within the bounds of accepted flexibility of expression. By doing so, they confuse those seeking to be educated and degrade to language that they are employed to teach.
Verbal communication is always less grammatically rigid than the written form. However, it is difficult for most people to learn effective communication beyond the most basic level without learning the ability to express themselves in writing.
In my view, a person must be able to demonstrate highly developed skills in literacy before being made a teacher of English.
P.S. Disclaimer. I rote this quickly without a re-reading. I am not an English teacher. Please, forgive gramar, spelleng and puntuation errors!

Candide's reference to "aliteracy" makes a very good point. Too many of those who should be leading the way either don't know or don't care about the basics of English. Unfortunately, we have had years of institutional dithering in education policy. As policy shifted to favour "expression" over structure, we have had teachers accepting woeful spelling on the basis of "as long as they know what they mean..."!
I have a great deal of sympathy for teachers (I am married to one) but I don't believe they should have allowed modern obsessions, such as the pursuit of frustating, ever-changing and increasingly abstruse organisational CSFs, to divert them from their real duty.
Because of the reduced emphasis on sentence structure (or grammar, as it was known),and lack of guidance to ensure soundly based automaticity (thanks Odonoko), many young people go into the workforce without basic skills and are unlikely to ever improve their English. That is a terrible shame.
Many really bright people are unaware that there are any rules. I employed a very bright young systems programmer who was brilliant at obeying the arcane code rules of computer languages, but he mispelt his own 6-letter name, and had problems constructing coherent sentences.
Finally, one of the ways we understand our own language rules is to study other languages. I learnt English, Latin and French so I always thought there were rules and structure. I hope that is being repeated now, perhaps with Asian languages.

Sounds like 'Baxter Sin' is an English teechur.

Tim wrote this teechur quote:

"Work programs would not be accepted at Moderation meetings if they did not reflect these changes, and a student would be disadvantaged if she were not familiar with these processes."

In Queensland, 'moderation panels' are made up of the subject teechurs, so to misuse a quote 'they would say that wouldn't they?'

Let's be brutally honest about Education Queensland. It is a 'failed state', and never mind blaming the young teachers going into the system for all the ills.

I pulled out of a course work Masters in Education, having completed a research Masters in Asian Studies, simply because the Education Faculty had designed something that amounted to little more than keeping a teenagers diary as a major part of one of the units. It was absolute rubbish, and would not have got a start in the Arts Faculty.

This was supposed to be 'cutting edge' Internet based learning. If that example is the experience across the board in Education Faculties across the wide-brown-land, there is no point blaming the teachers they churn out in factory-like rows.

But also, the Ed Qld senior management is drawn from a monocultural gene pool, of classroom teechur-turned-principal, with little or no training on the way through.

Imagine a paddock of sunflowers, all facing East as the sun rises, and West as the sun sets, such is the management style of Ed Qld, a Stalinist cess pit of un-imagination.

And not covered in the Masters attempt to divert blame from people like Bligh, who presided over all this rubbish for years without ever attempting to reform anything, is the sad fact that the Qld Studies Authority allows and therefore encourages ID and Creationsim, not only in science classes, but in any class at all.

Is it any wonder Ed Qld is so hopeless?

Sadly, Blue Cross, teaching is not only woeful in Qld, I had the experience of a year (form 6) of education in the mid 70's in Melbourne. Though I came from a non-English speaking background and my spoken English was just OK, my Australian English was non-existent, my written English was advanced in comparison to the natives.

In the non-English speaking world, grammar and foreign language learning is an integral part of education.

Not teaching English properly does not only eventually affect English teachers, it affects teachers in all subjects. I have 3 children and like Tim, I've often marveled at the convoluted, nonsensical preambles and instructions to assignments.

For some peculiar reason, using lots of jargon is perceived to illustrate authoritive knowledge of a subject and intelligence. It's quite amusing to see how techno-babble can cut pesky questioners off when they veer into areas one is not so sure about. Try it at work and marvel at the power of B.S.

PS: I passed my HSC, I cottoned on quickly on the power of techno-babble. Even in chemistry and biology.

In year 12 my English teach took maternity leave part way through the year. Without a teacher for several weeks and only sessional staff filling in (like the school art teacher who was unfamiliar with our set text), my mother suggested to the school that this was inadequate.

The English coordinator replied that 'English is a subject where you can teach yourself. You just need to read the texts and think critically. However, if your daughter is struggling, we do run literacy classes for students with language difficulties'.

My mother's response: 'My daughter is not illiterate. If she were I would have hoped that you would have already been aware of this. As to your suggestion that the role of the English teacher is redundant, then please tell me why exactly you are employed?' (Go Mum!)

The teacher then stumbled out some incoherent response. It appeared that the school depended on parents (and students) having the unquestioned belief that teachers know best despite all evidence to the contrary.

Now I work in the youth sector and illiteracy is a key barrier to young people being able to create positive pathways into better futures. I'm also a PhD candidate and I tutor some undergraduate students whose writing skills are often so limited that the bulk of my time is spent going over major grammatical/sytax issues in their work. Added to this, it seems that the ability to spell is apparently unnecessary.

I am left bewildered when I sit back and realise that this is the product of ten years of compulsory 'education'.

Quite so, Kathryn D... I too tutor undergrads as a PhD candidate and the marking is mainly concerned with fixing the failures of schooling, amongst the younger students but not the mature age ones I hasten to add.

I prescribe a good dose of Strunk and White.... the course set-book on grammar and punctuation, from the Journalism course.

Good-on your mother for calling them to account, I also do this at our school.

Australia's schools really need parents to 'engage', as the jargon goes, with what happens. Most parents seem not to care or notice though.

My Y10 son, who gets As for most subjects and 'report card' columns, is 'engaged' in explaining to his teechurs that he clearly has no need to undertake 2.5 hours of homework each night as demanded because a) so little goes on in class he gets it all done there, b)the various teechurs ideas of homework, including the deputy who 'bansheed' the entire Y10 cohort for sinning-with-their-homework only know how to set more and more of 'the same' exercises, and, frankly, if you can understand the exercise there is little point in continuing to 'prove' that.

I've complained to the local Director about all this but, as always in EQ, there will be no case to answer and life will continue totally unaltered as if nothing had ever been raised.

Such is the 'thinking' on homework, as a result of politicians whingeing and various other silliness that hovers around skools from such as The Australian and Kevin Donnelly, that the exercise has been reduced to measuring the time, not the content or purpose, of homework... and even class efforts.

These low grade views and reactions permeate Australia's 'education' systems... to our national detriment.

And, sadly, it is clear that neither Rudd nor Gillard are really interested in changing any of that with their still-born 'education revolution', being yet another political fixit sham.

Why is it that education in Australia is so lack-lustre? There are so many concepts that were so illogical to me, when a student. For starters: progressing to the next grade without having at least passed all subjects.

I was used to the idea that certain subjects were mandatory to pass: like the native language and maths. I was made to repeat form 2/year 9 overseas. because I failed two subjects, neither of which were mandatory subjects. Here I was put in form 6 because of my age skipping a grade!

There seems to be an obsession with age and not with achievement. With total disregard that the maturation of our brains is not linked to our chronological age. There is this peculiar idea that expecting a certain standard of achievement from our children is harmful. Why on Earth is that?

Kathryn, good on your mum. Isn't it sad though that a succesful educational outcome is so dependent on the level of engagement of your parents.

Anansi... it is hard to know 'the complete' answer for that question but I suspect it has a lot to do with our nation being a primary producer, food-rocks, and little else.

This requires little or no intellectual activity, indeed, thinking beyond these parameters threatens the ever increasing expansion of mining.

'Book learning' only has to extend to understanding the John Deere tractor manual... nothing else really matters.

Also, years of tariffs and protection, years of being a dumping ground for products, as we still are, mean there is little need for thinking 'what next', because 'next' always comes from outside, with no development needed.

And, as Horne tried to point out in 'The Lucky Country', before every goose in the nation took his title for the complete opposite of what he was saying, our leaders have never had to struggle to make a point.

Also, Australia is a highly compliant, aquiescent, nation, built on bulldust, unquestioned myth, and laziness, at least in the intellectual sphere.

Just read the newspapers, watch TV, listen to your neighbours, your fellow parents at P&C meetings.... observe how quickly parents 'bought prestige' without inspecting the promised outcomes of 'private' schools rather than starting to demand something better/different from the state schools.... in such observations can be seen the reasons for our shoddy education system.

Even at the 'academic' level, where one might expect a little intellectual rigour, to say nothing of vigour, there is little on offer. A handful of academics speak up every now and then but the vast majority hide in their bunkers doing nothing, saying nothing, being traitors to their role and supporting, willingly, the same as the boof-headed sports woman-bonker that our community praises every night on TV, until OUTRAGE.... one is exposed for 'crossing the Rubicon'.... and then the very TV programs that endorse, support, perpetuate, reify all this rubbish... turns their backs on it.

A token 'feminist' is wheeled out... creating 'training programs' for boofs... life continues as normal.

Australia.... we sow our own seeds of despair and unimagination.

The answer, 'they' do say, lies in the soil.

Blue Cross, that's so depressing.

From years of working in the medical field, I know that Australians have nothing to be ashamed of, for such a small population, for all the innovative thinking and inventions that we have contributed.

The sad thing is that Australians are largely ignorant of this. We may carry on about a cricketer of days gone by, or the skills of a footballer, but know nothing about what contributions fellow Australians have made to the world at large or Australian society as a whole.

What I find hard to understand is why there is this preoccupation in this young nation with 'working class' and 'professional/intellectual class'. It is wholly manufactured and artificial.

Here we are once again, lamenting the mediocre state of our education system, yet publically we sneer, scoff and belittle academia and intellectual discourse. Yet the irony is, that more and more parents are being sucked into paying through the nose for an education for their children that shoudl be the right of any child in this wealthy nation for just that, academic success.

Unless and untill the brightest of our children start choosing to go into teaching, into education our education system will remain peopled by a few bright increasingly discouraged passionate souls amid a sea of mediocre wannabees who couldn't cut it anywhere else.

At the moment, the comment is: teaching? Why would you want to do that? You could do......

"The sad thing is that Australians are largely ignorant of this. We may carry on about a cricketer of days gone by, or the skills of a footballer, but know nothing about what contributions fellow Australians have made to the world at large or Australian society as a whole."
Anansi, you have in a nutshell!

Anansi said "Unless and untill the brightest of our children start choosing to go into teaching, into education our education system will remain peopled by a few bright increasingly discouraged passionate souls amid a sea of mediocre wannabees who couldn't cut it anywhere else."

One of my children, who got an OP1, tells me he'd consider doing teaching, and being a maths science teacher, if it were not for the people who are already working in the system, and the structure and mentality of Ed Qld management.

Of course, the OP score is not an intelligence test and most students who work diligently can achieve a reasonable one, also, the cut off for uni' entrance is a market indicator only. That is, few people want to be teachers so the entrance score is low and there must be a lot of places, whereas to do medicine or dentistry the score is OP1 because the demand is high and the places few.

Unfortunately, this market based approach undermines any notion of 'the national interest', as with all market based solutions.

The QTU campaign to receive higher pay on the basis 'pay peanuts and you get monkeys' is a load of... nonsense too, because EQ is overrun with monkeys already. Far better to start lifting the job from being a low-end 'tradie' task to a high end 'professional' one by addressing the structure of the career.

I'd be opting for a 35-38 hour week, overtime, 4 weeks annual leave, and time-in-lieu arrangements to rebuild the 'long school holidays' teachers get now, so all those extra curricula tasks teachers do, getting the school play going, taking students to museums, running the debating club, all count as 'time worked' and are no longer regarded as being 'part of the vocation'.

I'd add in, sabatticals, payment for higher degrees, professional development expenses paid direct to individuals, taxed of course, and remove that from the grubby hand of principal control, and at least here in Qld, put an end to the massive casualisation of teaching where harldy anyone gets a full time gig.

I should add that despite my mother's ability to voice her concerns, it made little impact. I was eventually removed from the class permanently and went without English tuition for the rest of year 12. Not too sure what the school was hoping to achieve from that course of action; but I'm not too sure about what this school was trying to achieve in the broader picture either. Education was evidently not its primary concern.

Fortunately for me I had learnt to read well early, and was raised in an environment where one was forced to think critically. Consequently, the fact that I failed most of high school (yet continued to progress each year - again, uncertain of why ...) seems to have little impact on my later career options. If anything, I have had more academic success (later on) than any of my peers who were forced to sit through the various 'teachings' the school had on offer. Oh the irony!

Anansi, you raise a good point re: chronological age and school level. I find it quite bizarre. School is the only time in one's life where progression is determined almost exclusively by age. This in the face of enormous evidence that shows it to not be suitable model given differing developmental needs.

As for the teaching, when I wanted to be a secondary teacher (may go back to it later) I received the same response: 'But you could do so many other things?'. Not a nice reflection of community perceptions of school teaching.

'But you could do so many other things?'. Interesting..... I think I would say that to someone contemplating a teaching career, not because I think badly of the profession, rather, that I know what they put up with in (and out of) the class room.