Embracing illiteracy
Here I am, a week into my next class, Computers in Healthcare, a little mortified that I'm paying the same for this mess as it costs me for every other (more challenging) course—and perhaps even more because it's not as simple as I expected. I'm struggling with the weird contortions I'm having to go through to get all this MS Word-style junk to work like it's supposed to. Yeah, I expected I would learn a thing or two despite my supposed computer experience, but it's awkward and I don't know if it's because I'm using OpenOffice when the exercises are geared toward Word or because OO is made to emulate something that was goofy to begin with. Going step by step, that old mail merge isn't as effortless as it looks in the instructions because the wizard gets hung up in the middle without telling me why I'm not getting a “next” button. It should not take me two hours rummaging around user forums to figure this out (I had to create a database with addresses first, not just a document as they instructed me), but I guess that just heightens the satisfaction when you finally get something sorted out—nothing sticks with you like when you learn by doing.
Actually, I seem to be halfway through the course already and I would've been disappointed if it were all as simplistic as the first half. Boring as it was, there was some food for thought. A major chunk of the first quarter of the course revolved around things like email etiquette. First reaction was, “Who the heck needs to be told stuff like this? Surely, if you're 'net savvy enough to sign up for an online course, you're well past the point of needing to be told how to create and send an email, right?” I mean really—am I the only one too paranoid to just fire off a missive without running spellcheck to lessen the chance I'll look like an idiot? Does no one else obsess over things like the Blue Book of Grammar? I thought MTs were naturally obsessive about this stuff!
And then it hit me. . . accelerated by the horrible legacy of “no child left behind,” the dumbing down of America actually has created a generation or two of near-illiterates. I see it with increasing frequency on the online message boards and on the job—so-called “medical language specialists” who can't spell, don't understand homonyms or punctuation, or worst of all, seem to have learned a version of the English language by text messaging 12-year-olds on Yahoo. It is with increasing frequency that I see posts on message boards that curl my hair: "cn u help pls? im a new grad an i cant find a job i got high honors in my mt course....srsly iz hard co'z right now... i am havign hard time dealing with it." Not that long ago, such a ridiculous post would get an immediate smackdown by twenty veteran MTs for wasting people's time—never mind the lashing they'd get from QA, should they ever succeed in landing a job. Nowadays, however, any criticism of the obvious reasons that job search isn't going so well will be met with a huffy declaration that, “This is just a chat forum—I'm not at work and it's okay to let my hair down. Who says you have to be perfect all the time?!” Hm. I don't know about you, but either you know the rules of grammar and spelling or you don't; there's no turning common sense off at the end of your shift. It's like deliberately trying to sing off key—either impossible to do or it sets your teeth on edge to try. It's one think to use a more conversational vernacular on a forum or personal email and quite another to throw your brain out the window like it doesn't matter. (Word to the wise: What may appear to be a casual forum is probably monitored by employers scouting for potential hires—as well as applicants to steer clear of. Even with anonymous-looking user names, they can often recognize you.)
The scary thing is that I'm not just seeing this on “informal” message boards, I'm seeing it in emails at work. From graduates who are new hires to management who should be setting a higher standard, it is rare to get a communication with no spelling errors; even worse, more and more I see people lapse into chatspeak like, “pls help nd samplz... thx!” Ugh. Sorry, if you're too lazy to write a proper business communication, I bet you're just looking for a way to get someone to do your job for you, too. And puh-leeze—you advise someone, but you ask for advice. You need to get a grip on there, they're, and their and on to, two, and too. When someone who is paid four times what I am tells me their curiosity is “peeked,” it piques MY curiosity to know how they got the job!
Nowadays, the internet is full of passive-aggressives from Stepford who apparently think “niceness” ultimately trumps everything, including skills. Perhaps these people are a product of the 1990s (see the eBook on the dumbing down link), when Elizabeth Dole and the Dept. of Labor attempted to “determine the skills that young people need to succeed in the world of work,” wherein schools would focus toward the ideal SCANS (Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) résumé that would not focus on hard-core education. Instead, “personal qualities” like “responsibility,” “self-esteem,” and “sociability” were the criteria employers would be looking for. I guess this is when the three Rs and good old phonics went out the window and schools started passing kids to avoid “traumatizing” them by letting their peers be promoted to the next grade without them. Yes, why test students when they would feel so much better if you presented them with a nice merit badge for making an effort...
Flash forward to 2005, and what do the statistics show? Since 1990, the number of students lacking even basic reading skills has risen by a third, from 20% to 27%. Only 35% of high school seniors have reached a "proficient" level in reading, down from 40%. My own family has been frustrated by the inane practices of our public schools, wherein they now “teach to the test” and the yearly FCAT is geared more toward budget and bonuses than really educating kids to think, and with the lofty aim of ensuring students graduate high school with simply an 8th grade education (muscling out the students who don't conform and would just bring down the curve). My own daughter killed herself studying to be able to pass the GED and get out of high school early, only to find in the end that the test was written on a 4th grade level! I have quite a few friends who are college-level English professors and this explains their frustration with incoming freshman very well.
I, for one, am mortified at the state of literacy in this country. I find it especially ironic when these same lazy/inadequately educated MTs start whining about offshoring our work. I'm sorry, but in an age when students in Scandinavia, the UK, Europe, and Japan test so much higher than American kids, have a greater awareness of the world as a whole, and are held to much higher standards to graduate, what is the incentive to keep work here? To compete, we need to offer a better product for the money! Some may be surprised that even if they ace a medical transcription course, a lack of knowledge of basic English can still derail them on the job. Many dictators seem to go out of their way to utilize their word-a-day calendar or simply come from a background of a proper education. There are days you can look at the word help forums and see that over half of the terms people are stuck on are not medical words at all, but common phrases or colloquialisms.
It's depressing that literacy seems to have so little value now, that people would consider it a chore you only bother with when you're on the clock. The problem is by no means confined to the world of transcription, but the fact that MT revolves around language skills, it seems especially tragic to see the field devolve into the pink collar ghetto it's become. The world is geared toward the lowest common denominator, and I only have to go so far as an introductory college computer course to reap the benefits. *sigh* At least I'm not stuck in a classroom and can zip ahead at my own pace. On to spreadsheets!