You folks are mean. Yes, the above is a serious mistake, but none of you pointed out that the error is far more general.

For example, there haven’t been any new sex acts invented for quite a while.

Or, as someone put it a long time ago, there isn’t much new under the sun.

Certainly, this is unrelated to NCLB. There was no golden age of tiny writing classes that I’m aware of. But I think that fewer consistently bad writers graduated from high school and went to or graduated from college, so it may have seems that writing instruction was categorically better.

I will say that there are some pretty decent formulas that if taught well can improve most people’s writing. Some don’t even seem formulaic if executed well. If it’s reasonable to expect a bell curve in writing proficiency, I think formulas could serve the bottom 85% pretty well.

Seriously, how many people born before 1980 can program in 5+ languages?

Seriously, having dealt with people born AFTER 1990 for the past 3 years I’d have to say that the answer is “a helluva lot more than your generation”.

Most of the kids that I see today can’t even use a CALCULATOR correctly, that is to say, that they can’t use it to do math. They can certainly play games on calculators, but if you ask what is 6.28 divided by two-pi you won’t get answers even close to one. And no one seems to notice the error or figure out how it arose.

Programming is more than just knowing the syntax of a language and displaying pretty colors. It requires “domain knowledge”, and that is precisely what this generation lacks.

“Seriously, how many people born before 1980 can program in 5+ languages?”

The real question is how many people born after 1980 can think before they speak? My observation, having been born around then, is… not enough.

Yeah, that’s funny. The history of computing is littered with obsolete programming languages – I’ve worked on compilers for more than 5 programming languages, although I doubt that I can remember any of them besides Lisp. I worked on one project where I was programming in 4 languages at the same time: Smalltalk, C, C++, Scheme and Elisp (C and the subset of C++ that we were using were sufficiently alike that I can’t call them two different languages, although perhaps the puppy with his 5+ languages might). That was confusing, as I don’t think in syntax, and so I would find myself typing Smalltalk code in a C file, or putting parens around things in Smalltalk…

Among professional programmers? Most of them. I could program in 5+ languages before you were born, little one.

Part of the problem, especially at the college level, is that professors are seeing a class of students who they never would have seen before – the ones who don’t belong at college. There are, as always, the fully prepared students who care about success and have taken responsibility for their learning, but they are overwhelmed (especially in the first two years) by those who go to college because its a time for ’self-discovery’ and they had parents who filled out a FAFSA form. Everyone discusses the waste in the bailout bill, but I’d say the government has wasted more good money for ‘higher’ education.
Professors should be angry at their admininstrations for selling degrees to the highest bidders.

I remember the moon shots.  So does Eric Raymond, hacker extraordinaire.