General Forum

That's a facsimile of his signature on the contract that Topps gave him to allow them to produce cards of him. I personally like the "signature" printed on this card b/c he is not American and was able to print it in English. It shows that he learned some English Type while growing up in the Dominican Republic.

That is just shocking to me! I could understand it more if it was someone with autism or some other mental or physical disability. I just don't see how anyone could graduate from High School without knowing how to read AND write. I seriously don't know how someone can get TO the High School Level without being able to do both of those things!!!

It is really sad to see the state of education these days coming down to just being able to type things on a keyboard! Yes, I can type really fast, but it's not exactly the way they taught me to type in HIGH SCHOOL! That's when I was first introduced to computers and how to work with them. I will be 39 years old in July! I took a typing class in 10th grade and a computer science class in 12th grade. Both of those classes are completely obsolete now, but I still know what I am doing in front of a keyboard. The problem for me is that the buttons keep getting smaller, but my fingers stay the same size! Now there are cell phones with texting and even my pinkie finger is bigger than the button for any letter.

Technology is both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. The older ones learn how to use it, as the younger ones don't know how to do without it!!!

Actually, computers aren't ALL they teach in schools nowadays!  You can't forget about the all important skill of filling in little bubbles on standardized tests so a machine can read them and tell them exactly how worthless or worthwhile they are (and by extension how good their teacher is)!  I definitely think education has been going downhill for quite a while.  Back when I was in school, there were so many things that they had the opportunity to teach people that would be so useful in the world, but chose not to.  And today, they don't even teach half of what they did when I was in school.  

When I was in school, homework as a pretty good chunk of your grade.  And you could get marked down for things like incomplete or run-on sentences (even in papers for classes other than English), misspelled words, improper grammar, any number of things that you had been taught (back then anyways).  I was blessed with exceptional writing skills, and even I would get bad grades on papers if I ever got lazy and left something out or anything like that.  I had one (history) class that I got an A- in (yes, I was one of those guys who got really upset with anything but an A) because I had missed two assignments.  My oldest stepson kept track of, and is proud of the fact that he graduated high school having turned in less than 10 total homework assignments during his four years there.  My younger stepson (who, granted, is autistic, but very high functioning and is actually a very good writer), didn't have his first big (more than one page) writing assignment given to him until 8th grade.  He didn't want to write that much, so he didn't do the assignment.  His teacher, instead of making him complete the assingment or giving him an F on it, told him if he could write two paragraphs about why he didn't want to do the assignment she'd still give him an A.  He wrote 2 paragraphs (kind of, each paragraph was only 2 sentences long), and she gave him a 100% for it.  That told me a lot about where education has landed recently.

From some of the things I have experienced with my stepsons going through school, is that some of the teachers aren't well educated, yet they are trying to teach our kids.  It ended up not working for her, but my youngest's English teacher in 8th grade (the same one mentioned in the last paragraph) told her class they were going to learn cursive.  I thought that was wonderful!  However, it never actually happened.  The day they were going to start, she went to the board and wrote her name (in print).  Turns out she didn't know how to write in cursive, and was just trying to teach using an old book she had found.  It doesn't take much of an imagination to know how that one turned out.  Things didn't improve after that either.  Just before Christmas break, they were doing a unit on Shakespeare.  I enjoyed that because I was able to help him with his homework very easily for that unit.  But when they got to MacBeth, I again lost a great deal of faith in the teacher after some of the things I heard about the readings they were doing in class.  The first time I had my stepson read part of what they were reading to us, he pronounced the name MacBeth as Makebith.  When I corrected him and said it was pronounced mac like mac and cheese, Beth, like our friend Beth, he said that that was what everyone in the class had told the teacher, but she said it was absolutely wrong and none of us knew how to pronounce it correctly because we were used to English and the name is not an English name.  I'm not really sure what language his teacher thought Shakespeare wrote in, but that just blew my mind.  All I could think was "And this person is shaping the lives of todays youths.  We're in trouble."

One of the biggest things I have learned in post-school life, is that once you're done with school, if you want any children you are involved in the lives of to have any kind of decent education, you immediately become a teacher.  While most people (even parents) don't have the time to spend a full day educating their kids, that's pretty much what it has come to.  School won't teach your kids what they need to know to survive.  So now parents have at least two jobs, their regular paying jobs, and teachers (plus any other side jobs or multiple other paying jobs they might have).  Fortunately for my youngest stepson, I am disabled so I don't work a regular 9-5 job, so I can spend time with him teaching him the things he isn't picking up in school.  

And I thought it was bad when they tried to teach us in school that coins weren't invented until the Renaissaince!

"Modern" coins... Modern.  All about the wording.  Till then they really didn't have a "value" assigned.

Celtic, it's funny that you mentioned the "little bubbles". NOW they are read by machines. When filling in the bubbles on a test started in schools, there was no machine reading it. A punch card was used by teachers to lay over the bubbles. If the holes in the punch card didn't show a bubble that was filled-in, the answer was wrong. Machines just make it much faster now.

As for hand-writing, I learned "print" and cursive in elementary school, but the most important form of hand-writing I learned happened in High School and I still use it frequently. It didn't happen in an "English" class either. In Drafting 1 (architecture) in the 10th grade, I learned "block printing". That has been most useful for all kinds of things. Block Printing virtually eliminates every variation of a letter that you can learn or change. It is taught in that class b/c for a blueprint of a building, everything needs to be exactly the same on each blueprint. For those that know nothing about it, an architect must make several blueprints for any building (even a one-story building). You have overhead-view and vertical-view blueprints of the floor-plan, the electrical, the plumbing, the HVAC system, and so much more. If I remember correctly, there are 16 blueprints for each level of any building, plus the landscaping and even more if there are several different types of rooms on that level of the building. It's exhausting and is the main reason I didn't persue architecture after taking Drafting 2 in 11th grade. But every one of those blueprints has to have the exact same writing on it so that letters and numbers don't get mixed up. If ANY letter or number can be interpreted a different way by any person involved, it could be disastrous! I use block print for anything important so that there can be no error in any way. Before e-file became the norm, that was how I filled out my tax returns every year. I also use it for anything that needs to be handwritten for work or legal stuff. I also learned calligraphy when I was in 7th grade. THAT was useless info! I don't think I have used that since that year and probably can't do a bit of it now.

Yeah, I don't think a lot of people really realize how many different types of writing there really are.  I learned many of them (most of them I learned from my parents though, not school) growing up.  I learned print, and to a minor extent, cursive in school, although my parents greatly expanded on my knowledge of cursive.  I also learned block lettering because my dad was an engineer, so he also dealt with blueprints.  I dabbled in caligraphy, but my penmanship was never good enough to do it justice.  I also learned shorthand from my mom.  She was a secretary and a court reporter when she was younger and she learned it from her mom, and taught me and both of my brothers.

I must say I haven't used much of any of them besides just plain print or block lettering when I write things in hard copy instead of typing them out.  I'm also ashamed to admit that, even though I learned cursive and can still use it, my signature that I use on a regular basis would have been a great example for this thread's original purpose because I had not put any time or thought into my signature the first time I had to use one (on my Ag permit.  Which for those who don't know, is essentially a driver's lisence that you can get when you're 14 in Washington, don't know the age for other states, but you can only drive "farm equipment" and only within a certain radius of the "Home Farm").  My "everyday" signature is pretty much the first letters of my first, middle and last name, followed by incromprehinsible scribbles.  However, I have been working on improving my signature to something much more unique, creative, and more importantly, legible.  Hopefully I'll have it down by the next time I get my license renewed (since that's kind of the unofficial documentation of one's signature).

They actually told us that before then it was barter barter barter and the concept of coins didn't exist. At that time I didn't know better, but now I know coins date to circa 600 BC. The meteorology stuff I learned in 9th grade still serves me well at least. 

By the way, welcome back Kris! 

Thanks!  I've been on and off for a while.  haven't posted much tho.  Glad to see I am still remembered :P  I somehow doubt that the coin site will be the same...