Political Correctness Gone MadFreddy Woo writes: "I once worked on an animation to help highlight the issues homeless people face in winter. The client was happy with the work, then a note came back that the ethnic mix of the characters were wrong. These were cartoon characters. They weren't meant to be ethnically anything, but we were forced to make one of them brown, at the cost of about 10k to the charity. This is how your donations are spent. Wisely as you can see."
How has PC affected you? (Please add your own tales - not five-year-old news stories cut-and-pasted from other websites)
(, Thu 22 Nov 2007, 10:20)
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A couple of years agoI was teaching English in Brighton for EF (a shoddy con job to exploit rich kids from abroad) and at the beginning of each term there was a group photo with the classes. My class was all Scandinavian - not a dark face among them.
So I blacked up. Nobody asked me to, but I just thought it would look better. I was fired with immediate effect.
(, Fri 23 Nov 2007, 9:37, 9 replies)
"Language Trips"I know very few Swedish kids who haven't been on language trips. It isn't really a rich-kids thing, it's a normal thing.
It's one of the many things that makes Sweden a truly bi-lingual country.
*waves swedish flag*
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Humpty Dumpty was Pushed Is unaware of having any limits., Fri 23 Nov 2007, 9:52,
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PerhapsBut there were no kids from Sudan on the course.
(, Fri 23 Nov 2007, 10:05, closed)
EF can be alright if one has a good teacher, who doesn't rely on the books for the whole lesson.But seeing as you can't use the right form of the verb 'be' for past plurals, you probably weren't that teacher.
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The Awful Puppy Bakery is still bored, Fri 23 Nov 2007, 10:27,
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Past plurals"was" is correct. "Class" is a singular noun.
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K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 23 Nov 2007, 10:31,
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OK pedantsClass is one of those nouns that can take a plural or a singular verb depending on the emphasis - whether stressing its individual members or as a single collective whole. Ditto 'team' etc.
I've written a book on grammar. I'm a fucking Jedi on this stuff.
(, Fri 23 Nov 2007, 10:44, closed)
Singular+countable.So unless you want to sound like a chav or a 'merkin, you should stick to 'were'.
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The Awful Puppy Bakery is still bored, Fri 23 Nov 2007, 10:45,
closed)
I think you've missed the pointIt's not about class. It's grammar. There are rules about this. They can be found in books.
EF is shit because (in my experience) it's a profoundly disorganised set up. One of my classes was without books for half of their course - books they had paid for and wanted to use. I was the only qualified teacher working there. The others were just undergraduates, some of those not even English natives. The kids all cheated in their placement tests and ended up in the wrong groups with their friends. You'd have Germans and Swedes with almost fluent English alongside Chinese who had excellent grammar but who'd never had a conversation in English.
Oh, and I had an interesting chat with the Swedish professor who writes the books for EF and he told me that he thinks the whole operation is a pile of shit.
(, Fri 23 Nov 2007, 10:51, closed)
Point taken.EF has gone down hill ever since their HQ relocated to Shanghai.
Out of interest, how in God's name can anyone cheat in a placement test, aren't they oral tests?
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The Awful Puppy Bakery is still bored, Fri 23 Nov 2007, 10:56,
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placementHa! With so many students, there's no chance of doing an oral test of each student. They give them all a written test with about 25 multiple choice questions. Oddly, these are roughly accurate. If they don't cheat. And cheating is in the DNA of many international school kids: Italians, Greeks, Poles, French, Spanish...
(, Fri 23 Nov 2007, 11:31, closed)
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