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Dunno Much ‘Bout History
A couple of days ago, I overheard two of my colleagues talking about football. One of the mentioned the red and yellow uniform of the San Francisco Forty-Niners. I spoke up:
“The uniform is red and gold, not yellow.”
“Yellow, gold, what’s the difference?”
“It’s gold, because they’re the Forty-Niners.”
“What do you mean.”
“You do know what a ‘Forty-Niner’ is, right?”
“A football player.”
“Yes, but what is the team named after?”
“I don’t know.”
“The ‘Forty-Niners?’ 1849? The California Gold Rush?”
{Blank stare}
Years ago, I was working in a section with two doctors about my age, another, much younger, nurse and a still-younger tech. The docs and I were talking and the name Eva Braun came up. Neither the nurse or the tech had any idea who she was. At first I thought they were kidding, and said “Hitler’s girlfriend.” Nope. Never heard of her.
Now we know why idiotic ideas like “(Insert Republican president here) is worse than Hitler,” “The US today is a dystopia,” or “Donald Trump is a greater president than Abraham Lincoln” gain traction. Our glorious educational system has apparently stopped teaching history.
Published in Humor
I wonder if she would recognize all of her own stuff.
A long time ago I got the clever idea to write down the title of every book as I read it.
I didn’t do it of course, but it was a clever idea nonetheless.
You don’t have to, you just have to read the right ones.
I reject cursive writing in all it’s forms. It should be banned from schools and people who tell us society is degrading because kids don’t learn it should be keel-hauled.
Not really…but I do get triggered.
Years ago you used to take driver’s ed as a class in high school. There wasn’t a driving school, you just enrolled in the the class as an elective. One of the things they made you do as a final project was write a trip plan. So you had to decide on a destination, and write out where you were going, how many days it would take, how much fuel, number of miles, etc. I was a little behind in my but I got it done and turned it it. On the last day I got it back with a 0, for “failure to follow instructions.” The instruction I didn’t follow? I was to have “written” it, not “printed” it. I hated cursive, never used it, instead I “printed” anything I wrote (and still do). So I failed driver’s ed, and didn’t get my license until I was 18. All because of cursive.
Elitist prigs…
You should’ve resubmitted it in typewriter cursive.
Our youngest was having trouble with cursive, and I didn’t think it was all that important. He never learned it. There have been a couple of times when it would be handy if he could write cursive, but I don’t think it’s much of a handicap.
I would like to see cursive banned from Russian movies, though. I can read regular Cyrillic, even if I don’t know what the words mean, and I’m not very fast at it. But if the movie credits are in cursive, I’m almost helpless. I can’t make out much before the next screen comes up. If somebody in the movie left behind a handwritten note in cursive that’s shown on the screen, even though it’s in large letters and the words are few, chances are I’m not going to make out enough to understand what it has to do with the story.
Emphasis on “kind of.” I find those things unreliable. Most of the time I’m trying to find the pronunciation of a proper name, such as the increasingly popular Gaelic names that I can’t begin to pronounce. I consult the All-knowing Net and get three or four different pronunciations. So I’m left little advanced from where I started.
By ghostwriter, do you mean she wrote under a variety of pen names? Or she was doing the writing for “name” romance writers?
Presumably not romances like “Moby Dick” or “Don Quixote.” (I really struggle with placement of the “.”.)
I remember a Presidential Candidate who referred to Paul’s Second letter to the Corintians as “Two Corintians” instead of “Second Corintians.”
I don’t recall what happened to him.
I’m going to assume that she was literally dead and writing through supernatural means because it would be cooler that way.
She was writing for “house name” writers, mostly – most of the romance publishers had pseudonyms that a bunch of different writers covered. She did say she had written some of the “name” romance author works, too.
How many people are familiar with the name Leo Szilard? I’ll wait for you to google it. :)
I’ve had similar experiences. Rational ignorance is probably at play to some extent. Our education system teaches history in the worst possible way. It teaches an assortment of random, disjointed, and fragmented facts. There’s no continuity. Understanding the relationship between a sequence of events is way more valuable than any one fact. How much value is a kid going to get if you hand them a short summary of characters and events? Let them read the story.
I wasn’t sure if I agreed with you until hitting that last sentence.
Conclusion: Agree
They don’t get facts or story. They get narrative.
The history of the US is enslaving black people and murdering Indians; and Republicans want to put y’all back in chains.
Oh, and anger. You should be angry. Just because.
Dialects.
Leo? Capital fellow. Used to hang out on the campus of a college I attended, especially beneath the football field.
Them weird murder-bots with the plunger arms? What about ’em?
Aw, man, I love Sweet Home Alabama!
They’re on their way. They heard you were helping two-hearted aliens.
Are those two hearts in series or in parallel?
Yeah, I have never seen the teaching of random, disjointed, fragmented facts of history. I’ve heard oceans of criticism of that kind of teaching, and I’ve encountered people who claim to have experienced it, but I’ve never encountered it myself or come across a verified example of it outside the pages of fiction. There are connections everywhere. The problem is that the left connects the facts into distorted narratives to fit a narrow agenda, or sometimes in elementary and secondary education, presents narratives without the underlying facts. Those are boring. But as long as they present facts, I can supply connections of my own to make up for those they miss. I first learned to do it in elementary school in the 50s, and have been doing it ever since. I do it every time I read the essays and reviews in American Historical Review (for which I just renewed my membership yesterday).
(I had an upper elementary teacher in our 2-room school in rural Nebraska explain to the rest of the class that I wasn’t so smart (the other kids had been complaining about the competition and we had just taken IQ tests of some sort) but that I knew how to apply what I had learned. I thought she was spot-on, and still think so.)
Yes.
That was a different guy, and he was smuggling two-spirited aliens.
Yes, that is exactly true of the word “Injuns.” But progressives would tell you that it is wrong to refer to the Native Americans as anything but that. Even though major Indian leaders like Russell Means and Dennis Banks saw no harm was either implied or resulted from the expression “Indians.”