It's no wonder 80% of the population can't write. It really helps if the teachers knew what they were doing. Or in this case, the computer programmers.
One of the classes I'm covering is a reading class for 8th graders who failed their SOLs. Every week, they venture to the computer lab to do a section of a program called SkillsTutor, which is supposed to help them improve their grammar, spelling, and general writing skills. At the end of each section, they get a grade and an explanation of which questions they got wrong. Most kids don't even bother reading this, which defeats the point of the exercise. If they don't know why they got a question wrong it does them no good to complete the exercises again (which they have to if they get less than 70%).
Not only that, but as I was looking over kids' shoulders to make sure they were on task, I noticed that a lot of the questions were murky or even... dun dun dun... plain WRONG!
Here is an example in which the student is supposed to identify which line has an error:
A. Pope John Paul II, leader of the
B. Catholic church speaks eight languages,
C. including english, Italian, and of course Latin.
D. No error.
Do you know what the answer is? The obvious choice is C because "English" should be capitalized. (By the way, they don't need to know why the correct answer is correct, just that it is correct.)
However, there is another error. There should be a comma after "chuch" in line B because it is the end of a dependent clause and is grammatically incorrect as it is.
Programs like this make me mad. They simply feed the problem; they do not fix it.
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