The Glade 4.0

It's a perfectly cromulent usage.

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It's not just the placement at the beginning I find odd, though; it's the use of "anymore" as a stand-in for "nowadays" instead of "any longer". I just did a little Googling, and I think the quote below, from Merriam Webster, explains my puzzlement. It's apparently a regional difference.

It's a very uncommon usage that is distracting. If your purpose is to get a point across then you shouldn't distract the reader or obfuscate your sentences.

edit:

For example a newspaper article would never print this usage.

Says the guy from New England.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Newspaper articles are not a good metric for judging what should and should not be done as far as language and writing, considering the reading level of their target audience.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Wait, you're telling me that a guy living in New York City and who spent the majority of his post-secondary education in Boston is chafing at the positive usage of "anymore"? And the same applies to the guy living in Boston ...

It's a common usage that dates back to 18th Century Ireland.

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What significance do NYC and Boston have? As for how common the usage is, all I can say is that it's new to me and some casual Googling this afternoon suggests it's been a largely regional thing (i.e. parts of Ireland and midland US) until recently.

Large Irish populations, RangerDave ...

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Ah, good point. Maybe from different parts of Ireland? Or from immigration waves that came from different time periods?

(Oh, by the way, I didn't go to school in Boston actually. I just dated a Harvard girl for a while!)

Possible, but it's neither uncommon nor unknown as a usage for at least 2 centuries. But, heh, today is apparently Argue with the Linguist Day

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Nah, not really arguing. Just new to me, so I've been poking around online a bit. At first glance, it seems there's a bit of scholarly debate on the issue. The Dictionary of American Regional English refers to positive anymore as a minority/regional thing, whereas the Cambridge History of the English Language says such usage is "widespread and commonplace except for the old South and far East."

/shrugs I have zero idea which view is correct, of course. I just find it interesting since the usage is novel to me personally.

It's very rare on the Internet as well, not just around New England.

I'm sure that many people who use the word this way don't have a high reading level, and that it's often spoken.

Has anyone else noticed that the less introspective someone is, the smaller their "world" is and the more sure they are in making statements of their beliefs? Irony indeed.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Back to the topic at hand, Stathol has pretty well summarized the problem with secondary school teachers today. My mother has Bachelor's in microbiology and a lifetime certificate to teach biology for grades 7-12. I'm told my grandfather insisted on her getting the teaching certificate. I'm also aware that such certificates are no longer possible to obtain, so time has proven him wise (despite the fact that my mother never needed to use it). The reason put forth is that teachers must continually go back to school for recertification, but the real reason is a system of kickbacks whereby the universities collect a portion of the public school system's federal and state funding, and the school districts in turn are able to make it appear to the tax-payer as if they have competent teaching staff.

Now, in order to become a teacher, you need a degree in education. I can't speak for the English department, but there is no reason to send a mathematics or science teacher back to school for recertification. It isn't like algebra has drastically changed in the past ten years. To be sure, there are many new discoveries in the sciences every single year, but none of them concern a high school classroom. An 8th grade science teacher does not need to be informed about the latest breakthrough in whatever the chemists are doing in order to teach a group of thirteen year-old kids how to balance a chemical equation. Moreover, that is not what these recertification programs are delivering to public school teachers.

There are way too many people holding doctorate degrees in education compared to the number of schools across the country, and so such people have to make their money hosting training seminars for teachers. In order to protect their bottom line, they need to make sure everyone is on board with the recertification idea. This is why there are no more science majors with teaching certificates. Instead, you have an education major who barely scraped by with a C in biology teaching physics. You may wonder why a physics teacher's biology grade is relevant - that's because biology is the only science course this person took in college. Well, that and Introduction to Physical Science, which is what we teach high school freshmen.

The math department I work for has a policy where to teach a class, you must have passed the class that comes after it. This policy cockblocks a rather large number of AP-certified high school teachers from teaching trigonometry and calculus over the summer. That should be disturbing when you stop to think that it means people who are supposedly teaching the first two semesters of calculus have not had more than one semester of it themselves. The policy's effect becomes even more pronounced when high school math teachers try to teach evening and summer college algebra courses. The majority of high school math teachers have not taken a math course beyond 11th grade algebra.

Now, teachers will commonly trot out the argument that not everyone can teach, and this is very true. Having a graduate degree in a subject does not mystically confer upon its recipient the ability to teach effectively. I know this far better than any of the teachers trying to defend the validity of their educational science degrees. All of my classes are taught by people with graduate degrees, and some of them really suck at teaching. Now, from my own experience as an educator, I can't say that empirical evidence has shown education degree-holders to field a better percentage of good teachers. If ten to twenty years of recertification has made a dramatic improvement in the teaching ability of secondary school teachers, I shudder to think how bad they were in the 1980s.

The current certifications required for a teacher are not designed to build better teachers, however. What they're designed to do is keep out any individuals with real knowledge of the subject matter. The last thing that secondary school teachers want is for a Boeing engineer to teach physics, or a Google programmer to teach mathematics. That would cause the entire house of cards to come tumbling down.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

So very very true.

I really should point out that saying recertification for math teachers is useless because algebra hasn't changed is like saying "recertification" for police officers is useless because their gun works the same as it always did.

Pure. Comedy. Gold.

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That's completely silly

A) Police officers do go back for "recertification" and continuing training and things like that for areas of law, procedure, or tactics that have changed or evolved. For math teachers, pretty much everything is math; it is all in some way related regardless of what kind of math they are teaching. Police officers utilize a wide range of unrelated skills; some of them remain relatively constant in terms of what they involve, like marksmanship. Others change as time goes on, such as case law.

B) Shooting a gun is a perishable skill that will deteriorate over time without practice. While math may be the same way, the fact is that a math teacher will exercise math skills pretty much every day, while police officers rarely discharge their weapons in the course of duty. This means they muct practice and periodically be tested to ensure their skills remain.

The two are not comparable situations.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Why are you arguing with him? You two are in agreement that saying "recertifications are useless" is dumb.

Actually, Lenas, DE isn't necessarily saying that recertification for math teachers is useful.

I think he just completely missed the intent of Xequecal's comparison; namely to point out that recertification is useful for police officers, and thus must be fore math teachers, too.

I disagree that it's a valid comparison, but agree that recertification for police officers is useful for most of the reasons DE stated.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

No, I knew that was his point. I was pointing out that it is incorrect; just because recertification is good for police officers does not make it so for math teachers. I do not know if it would be good for math teachers.

Essentially his argument is a form of "if recertification is good for one profession it must be good for all", which does not follow.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Ah, okay. It seemed you were taking issue more with the notion that recertification was pointless for police officers (which wasn't what Xeq was trying to use the comparison to say) rather than the poor quality of the comparison between the two professions.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opin ... 93.graphic

And the process to fire a tenured teacher, wish I had that level of job protection.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Last Thursday the Mayor and School Board of Providence RI fired all 1,926 public school teachers in the city.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20