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New Zealand has sunk to a new low in modern education. A number of high school students have started a petition to not be failed on a national history exam as they did not understand the meaning of the word 'trivial'. For those not in the know, trivial means "of little value or importance" which aptly describes this petition given that it is being made by grade 13 high school students who by all rights should know the meaning of this word. More than 2400 people have signed the petition 'expressing their frustration with the exam question'. Student Logan Stadnyk claimed that he was "lucky" to have known what the word meant, as half his class didn't. "New Zealand History Teachers' Association chairman Graeme Ball has sided with the students calling the exam a 'little bit of a snafu'" but not providing an adequate answer as to why students in grade 13 would not understand a common English word.
Have the three Rs lost all meaning in schools? Are we failing our students? Or is this just another case of today's teens being snowflakes?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 18 2018, @12:55PM (4 children)
Nonsense. How can a normal person teach themselves to teach themselves at a remotely acceptable level of efficiency when they're bombarded by information 24/7? When we were kids there were 2-3 linear algebra books, 2-3 differential books, and a couple of newspapers everyone read and you were expected to understand without opening a vocabulary. Nowadays kids are running into foreign loan words from Spanish in American English, Gaulish in Irish/Scottish English, Hindi in India's English, Latin/Welsh/Cockney in British English... All without being able to differentiate what's slang and what's necessary for academic purposes.
If the education system expects children to know a certain word, they should put it in writing. You think "trivia/trivial" should be in the core vocabulary? I agree. Lets make it official. In all the non-English countries there's a core vocabulary list students are required to know. It's done to prevent such situations as private schools with partial public funding from deliberately using obscure words that are only taught in their associated lower-education private schools from fixing the examinations to only welcome their own students. So, have the school board write down the list and make it mandatory for teaching materiel and examinations not to exceed it. You can even go the Japanese way and force the newspapers to stick to it and add a footnote whenever they use a word that isn't no the list.
The English vocabulary is huge with enough regional and age differences to boggle commonsense.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 18 2018, @02:36PM (2 children)
See the learning of their native language from birth to age five or so. It not only happens, it happens for every single human being on the planet.
As for that particular word, there is no way in hell they didn't hear it enough times while reaching their current age to infer at least a reasonable approximation of its meaning.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by http on Sunday November 18 2018, @11:21PM (1 child)
Before the brief 90s phenomenon of the board game "Trivial Pursuit", I had never heard the word used outside of undergraduate math classes. Your experience is not universal, and neither is mine, but your absolute insistence suggests an unwillingness on your part to imagine someone else's experience.
Sadly, the disease is common enough that there's a name for it.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 18 2018, @11:40PM
Hi, welcome to the world with the Internet, http. My experience is hardly isolated given the global forums everyone interacts in nowadays.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @12:18PM
"Inshallah" literally means "of god wills".
It is what you say when rape someone