I was in journalism features class today, and I saw something very surprising. Firstly, I have to emphasize that this is journalism features class, so people who are here are presumed by default to have a decent mastery of the English language because it is after all the tool of our trade, the means by which we craft our pieces.
During the tutorial we had to decide what our target publication would be. I decided I would do a feature for an arts magazine since I'd written for those in NTU and the sports and lifestyle departments were full. So I joined the 3 other people already in the group, they were pretty nice and I got along with them very well. After about 5 minutes, and we started discussing who the target readership of our publication would be.
During the discussion, I found it quite strange that I had to keep coming up with suggestions. For example, my groupmates would go like "How do we describe people who use the Internet and phones a lot". Immediately I went like "Highly interconnected" and they were like "Wow that's a good phrase I didn't think of that." I was kind of mystified because I thought that it was pretty commonsense. Another example was when I was asked to describe students' spending habits. I said "High disposable income" and they were like "Wow yes that's a very good term for it." The worst one was when my group members were like what's a term for people who hang out with their friends a lot? I went "Active social life", and they looked at me like I'd just found the Holy Grail.
I was beginning to suspect that maybe standards of education were very different here. But that wasn't the shocker. The next part was. One of my groupmates was supposed to type the contents of the discussion out, and since she was Australian, I presumed that she would do a decent job. It turned out that she needed spellcheck to save her life, because she didn't know that "parents" should not be spelled "partents". And I know that for sure because she had to look through the list of suggested words on spellcheck to find the correct one. If you knew the spelling, you'd correct it straight.
And throughout the document she was making the most basic of grammatical errors, examples of which were so numerous I forget what they were. If not for spellcheck, she would have submitted rubbish.
There was only one thought going through my head at that moment in time. She's Australian, so she speaks only English, and she's bad at it? The worst thing is, she's majoring in mass communications so English must be one of her best subjects. Oh my gawd.
Later at night, I met my flatmate Dan, an American from Texas, while heading back to my room. He was on the way out again to stay over at a girl's place, and he gave me a knowing look that means he's up to monkey business. He remarked that the courses here were easy. For an American to say that, they must be. I was immediately reminded of what happened in class this morning. If people write like that and still pass, its no wonder they say courses here are easy.
Which only means one thing. It's time to have fun. I'm not going to fail. Before I do, the Australian will fail first.