For each weekly group lecture in my FYE class (a kind of freshmen seminar) we are required to write a "thoughtful and coherent" review of the day's lecture. I have little trouble in "voicing my opinion" of these lectures. Due in large part to paying for my own education, I hold all of my classes to rather high standards. FYE is no exception. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these FYE lectures have been an educational joke, and, at the end of the day, they leave me pondering the state of national education. I have enjoyed (i.e. learned something) from only three lectures out of the year long class. This horrifies me. Worse, it worries me that I seem to be the only person who genuinely cares.
This week's lecture stands as a perfect example of these Wednesday lectures. Since I loathed the lecture, finding it both poorly supported and disastrously organized, I wrote what I deemed to be an adequate review expressing my disappointment. These weekly reviews are turned in online, and, after turning in our reviews, we are able to look over our classmate's reviews as well as our own. So, it only makes sense that, in order to receive the respect of you classmates, you would turn in a polished piece of writing. After all, the directions do state, quite clearly, that your review must be coherent. Apparently, I am the only person who thinks this to be a necessity. After turning in my review, I decided to open up a few of my fellow classmates' reviews to read. As it turned out, I wasn't the only person disappointed by the lecture. There were several people who expressed their confusion regarding the lecturer's points and opinions.
While disagreement with the lecturer was progress for my class, out of the reviews, only one bothered to employ some kind of editing. I was horrified by the grammar, the spelling, and the lackluster responses of most of my fellow students. In nearly all of the reviews that I have read my classmates still (even after years of high school English) cannot properly differentiate between 'too' and 'to' and 'your' and 'you're'. I saw people apply emphasis to a word by capitalizing its first letter (something that I believe was discontinued in the 17th century). I saw, frequently, the incorrect use of semicolons, colons, and commas. While I am certainly not a saint when it comes to punctuation, I make sure that someone else reads over my work before I turn it in. Or at the very least, I have the computer perform a spell check. What has happened to responsible writing in college? Will my generation see the ultimate end of the English language?
Don't even get me started on text messaging....
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