'the apostrophe' Education  

Thomas Jefferson McDougal (69.15.241.66) -

Has anybody else heard anything about the Missouri State Board of Education's (possible) decision to do away with the apostrophe? A friend of mine who is currently working on a project that involves updating the state's education content standards has told me that the Missouri State Board of Education will no longer require students to learn proper apostrophe usage. He says that the state made the decision after consulting a panel of linguists who claim that the use of the apostrophe is slowly being phased out of everyday speech, which will lead to it being eventually phased out of formal and academic speech.

please say that this isn't so!

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Reply #1 Bubba from deep in your mind -

Well, I think it is a good idea. The alphabet and punctuation marks are really too complicated. Why do you need 26+ characters to express your self in a binary world?

We can replace them all with two different grunts. A 0 grunt and a 1 grunt. Digital computers (0 and 1's) are better than Analog computers... so why shouldn't we evolve into the binary world too?

We should honor the Missouri State Board of Education for taking the first step!

Reply #2 Kelly (65.118.27.2) -

I think that this goes hand in hand with the decision about 8-10 years ago (it has been awhile) to teach children to SIGHT read instead of teaching them phonics.

The gist of that was to teach them to memorize words by sight. This actually HAPPENED in our school district! The result was almost an entire class of children who did not learn to sound out a word while reading.

You wouldn't think this was a big deal, but years later, listening to my daughter struggle to sound out a word, and not being actually able to read very well at all until third grade, you definitely get the idea that they were out of their stupid minds to try something like that.

The loss of proper punctuation is absurd. Are they just too darn lazy to grade the papers any more?

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