I have never seen such a shitty (picked up that word from Bani’s vocabulary, :D) English exam paper in my entire life. The paper is for 90 marks, and 40 of those allotted to the literature segment! And what to they test in the literature segment??? Bits and pieces of a story by Narlikar, the rhyming scheme of a poem which you have heard only once in your life, and utter rubbish by Lester Brown (god only knows who the heck that guy is, still haven’t bothered to look up the English text book, :D).
I used to think that the Indian standard of English being taught in schools was bad. Well, guess what??? I change my mind! It’s absolutely HOPELESS!!!
Can any one tell me what is the whole point of memorizing the sequential order of events of a story, written by some author that you never might be interested in reading again, because his works were featured in the NCERT textbook?
The British curriculum segregates nearly 100 marks, yea 100 marks (that’s like a whole new paper), for grammar alone. Literature gets the least importance. People would think that instead of trying to teach us English, NCERT would be promoting and publicizing an author’s works!!! C’mon!!! This is a school!!! You’re supposed to teach us something, not let us have 6 free periods a week (I wouldn’t exactly say that part is bad though, :D)!!!
The whole Indo-English story
Saturday, February 24, 2007
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4 comments:
the indo-english story ain't hopeless... its beyond all hope...(they'r the same but thats the kind of English taught here) now as i was saying... u should take a look at the PUC english texts... they'r beyond description in the extent of their sadness...another thing is that in india, spoken english is really bad. this is due to the wrong emphasis of bookish grammar instead of spoken grammar. thats the other mistake. we are still clinging to bookish definitions of grammar terms and definite questions in our papers... they basically tell us wat to do for each q!
This debate can go on for pretty much all of eternity i guess . It is one of the many things that needs to be done rather than revising re-revising and further re-revision of the re-revised version ? :D . The point is this its not hard to see that the literature is not really serving its purpose half the chapters being as boring as they are and most if not all preffering not to read some chapters at all...nowone would blame them either ! a revison required ? i would think so - i really would . Maybe its time we started looking at revising the whole structre-it would be a worthwhile effort atleast ?
Well, vine, if you look at it, the english you're talking about is what is condoned to be taught by CBSE, and it is pretty pathetic. However, the stuff which ICSE students do is pretty darned good, comparatively. International students obvi do good eng.
But, in india, Especially up north, you should realise that english suddenly diminishes in importance. In fact, it is much more prevalent in the south, because the north is pretty much united by Hindi. So, CBSE is thinking about all the people who don't need much english to survive, and hence the terrible level. I've been complaining abt it since 5th.
i so agree!u kno da most pissing off part?tht vr xpected to mug even eng!lyk wid da king tut lesson...nd worst was tht so-clled 'adventure' lesson abt sum retard, prof Gaitonde...nd then sumhow even quantum theory made its way in2 eng!!!no wonder u feel dis way!
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