Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

Mike Ellis wrote:
>>>"Next year we won't correct wrong answers in math either."
>>
>>Ah, but the method is more important than the answers! :P
>
> Without the correct answers, you still fail the test. Try it.
Oh hardly. When was the last time you did a maths test? I did year 12
(what the last year of secondary school is called here) last year, and I
did Methods. If you get the answer wrong and you've shown your working
and it's all correct, you lose one mark for the question (regardless of
the value of the question). It's possible to pass without any correct
answers.

For the record, we learnt what nouns, verbs and such were in grade five,
and again in year seven. But these things are irrelevent to speaking
English. If it makes learning another language easier to know these
things, they are taught in the German/French/Spanish/Igbo classes. And
this is how it is IME.

(Other people have answered everything else better than I could, so I
won't bother.)

H. S. Teoh wrote:
> To ste^H^H^Hquote Tom Lehrer: "... but in the new approach, as you know,
> the important thing is to understand what you're doing _rather_ than to
> get the right answer. ...  [emphasis mine]
>
> "And so you have thirteen tens,
> And you take away seven,
> And that leaves five...
>
> "Well, six actually.
> But ... the idea is the important thing."
Hey, I actually learnt something from that song! Which is a bad thing,
because it meant I didn't learn anything in Uni yesterday because in
Discrete Maths, we learnt how to do stuff (conversion between and
addition/subtraction in) with other bases. So yesterday was a long and
boring day.

Tristan.

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