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

On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 08:40:21PM +0100, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>:
[snip]
> > Or like not watering a plant, since that would impede its ability to
> > create new ways of growing. You'll kill off everything except the
> > cactuses...  which perhaps explains why a lot of people are such
> > pricks nowadays.
> >
>
> This metaphor looks extremely valid to me :) .
OK, I was being rather sarcastic when I wrote that. But note that I was
drawing my analogy from the sprouting and subsequent growth of the plant;
John was talking about adult learning which is a completely different
area.

[snip]
> > "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."
> >
>
> I'm a grader in Physics myself, so I know what it is. If the method is
> right, we're not gonna blame the student for making a mistake in the
> final calculation, giving a result slightly off (unless it was easy to
> recognise the mistake, as those tens of people who don't mind objects to
> fly at 10 times the speed of light ;))) ).
Well, personally, I am against grading systems where the final answer
decides whether you get the mark or not. After all, the whole point of
learning is to understand and be able to apply the concept; a careless
slip at the end should not negate the fact that the student did correctly
apply the methods otherwise.

But I think in N. America, people are overreacting to it and have gone to
the other extreme, which is what Tom Lehrer is making fun of in that
quote. The correct answer *is* important in that sense: in the real world,
nobody cares about whether you correctly apply your methods;  they want to
see the final results, and the final results better be darned right. So
while one should be given credit for correctly applying the method, one
must also learn that the correct answer *is* important.

> But in my experience, those cases are *rare*. In 95% of the cases, a bad
> result comes from a bad method. So this idea that the method is more
> important than the result is true, but it really applies to only very
> few cases.
[snip]

Like I said, both are equally important, and neither should be stressed to
the detriment of the other.


T

--
Nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that
leads to himself. -- Herman Hesse

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