Now I Get It... and Other Education News

One month after my first phone call to the Education department, and two months after my initial email, I finally received a response. According to the Education website, I should have received an email with a registration access date in late April. I did receive that email. According to the person who phoned me from the Education department, only second-year students receive their registration access dates in April. In that case, one must wonder why that information is posted on the first-year registration information site, and why it remains there today after I alerted them to the posted misinformation. Hmmmm...

In other news, there is a lot of discussion in my community about young people entering university and college, and the workplace, without the ability to read and write properly. This discussion mainly takes place in the Letters to the Editor section of the local newspaper. For the most part, it involves old people whining that "things aren't like they used to be" and that young whippersnappers nowadays can't read words with more than three letters thanks to SMS-culture.

In today's paper, one such intellectual wrote in to share his story about education back in the good old days. He wrote:

"They can not write a good sentence consistently."

I would like to point out that "consistently" is an adverb of frequency, like "almost", "sometimes" and "never". Therefore, it should be placed before the verb it is referring to, in this case "write". So, the correct sentence should read:

"They can not consistently write a good
sentence."

In my personal opinion, someone shouldn't write a Letter to the Editor arguing that young people today can't read and write unless the author himself is able to write a proper sentence with properly-placed adverbs of frequency. Clearly education in 1950 wasn't that much better than it is today!