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

Roger Mills wrote:
>   Well then, you were one of the beneficiaries (or not, there's still
 > argument I think) of New Math.

We had a discrete maths tutorial today (doing questions on blackboards
all around the room, in groups because there wasn't enough chaulk to go
round)...

It seems calculators have replaced brains and I was one of the few
people who could remember long multiplication, ironically because I'm
too absent-minded so I kept losing my calculators and never forgot how
to do it.

>   A similar problem arises teaching US-- Anglophone in general??--
 >students about elementary linguistics, especially phonetics/phonemics/
 >phonology.  It takes them a while to make the disconnect from spelling,
> and learn that "long e" as in meet is [i], "long i" as in bite is
 > actually a diphthong [aI] and so on.

My solution is to make singing compulsory. At the same time, make it
seem like less of a 'girly' thing. Just make absolutely everyone in an
area do it. And don't stop at the end of primary school. And have good
music teachers. I reckon most 'normal' people (such as may exist) who
know that [ai] is a diphthong learnt it because they've done singing and
some stage in their life (you can't sing properly without understanding
that long i and long a are made up of two sounds (unless they aren't in
your dialect :P )). (On the other hand, the problem with this is female
voices aren't as good for massed singing as guys IMHO. But maybe I'm
biassed, I went to a boys-only school with compulsory singing...)

Tristan.