Hewlett Packard College

Parents Forum
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<p>*Before you read this, take note that I am generally not talking about the members on this website.</p>

<p>Too many unqualified students are in college. A college degree is possible for anyone with enough money and time to meet the requirements of the school. Many schools will bring you in as long as you “passed” your high school courses. </p>

<p>Many students out there lack basic English and math skills, yet are coming away with a college degree.</p>

<p>Example: My friend graduated from my school (Big 10) with a 3.7 GPA, and is now involved with Teach for America. Despite his success in school, he doesn’t know when to use “than” versus “then” in a sentence.</p>

<p>What has happened to the education system? Has it always been this bad? I am starting to believe colleges are becoming diploma printing presses, and not paying attention to what comes in and out of their system.</p>

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<p>" Despite his success in school, he doesn’t know when to use “than” versus “then” in a sentence."</p>

<p>Why don’t you tell him then.</p>

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<p>I am sure you are more than his friend.</p>

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<p>I’m sure he would than’ you very much…</p>

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<p>That’s not a good thing, but it’s also not a big thing. It doesn’t mean that he can’t gather information from multiple sources, synthesize it to create new understandings, and then use those new understandings to create new questions. It would serve him well to fix his grammatical flaws, but I once worked for a successful college president whose grammar would sometimes make me cringe.</p>

<p>Brett Favre has a bad habit of throwing into crowds. He gets a fair number of passes intercepted, but that hasn’t kept the Vikings from begging him to return. On the whole, his pros outweigh his cons, and that may be the same with your friend.</p>

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<p>What appears to the OP to be misuse of “then” and “than” could be due to the speaker’s particular regional dialect: particular regional pronunciation a.k.a. his accent.</p>

<p>This is not something to get “all het up about” as they would say where my mom came from. We live in a big country and there are regional dialects that are mutually unintelligible, but are fully expressive to the speakers of those dialects and reasonably intelligible to speakers of yet other dialects. Toss in all of the other varieties of English around the world, and it is a wonder we believe that we can communicate at all.</p>

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<p>Back in my day, we had to trudge uphill BOTH ways in the snow …</p>