Date Formats and Currencies

[DallasDad]

Except where specified otherwise on a form, I always use either yyyymmdd (for things that need to be sorted by a computer) or dd mmm yyyy (for things meant to be read by humans).

For example, today is either 2011-04-19 or 19 Apr 2011.

I started using dd mmm yyyy when I was in Junior High because I discovered that mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy were ambiguous. As far as I know, only the U.S. uses one of them, but my 11-year-old brain reasoned that if I were reading a letter from, or writing a letter to, someone in Europe, I'd damned well better know which convention was in use. Worse, what if my European correspondent, knowing the U.S. convention, reversed the first two fields for me, only to have me reverse them back?

The ambiguity struck me as intolerable. The normative alternate in the States is mmm dsuffix, yyyy, which requires not only an extra comma, but uses either one or two digits for the day followed by st, nd, rd, or th. Why bother, when a simple dd mmm yyyy was available?

I taught my children to write dates this way, and also to mark currency with the appropriate abbreviation when there's a chance of ambiguity (AUD, USD, CAD, etc, all use $, so the symbol should be eschewed in favor of the abbreviation if there's a chance it will be seen by someone whose default currency isn't the same as ours).

All well and good, right? Just a quirk of mine -- use internationally-recognized and standardized formats -- to provide clarity.

Welcome to Texas, where five different elementary teachers marked my children's papers are being wrongly dated this year when they used:



01 Jan 2011 (wrong for the leading zero)
05 May 2011 (wrong for being out of order)
05 Apr 2011 (wrong for using a 4-digit year)
13 Apr 2011 (wrong for abbreviating the name of the month)
18 Apr 2011 (wrong for not being all numeric in dd/mm/yy format).

My older son's sixth-grade math teacher, using currency conversion as an example of ratios, marked my son wrong for saying 1USD = 1.6 GBP. The teacher wrote on the paper that he didn't know what the abbreviations meant, and said only $ and £ were valid.

If this had happened to me in Junior High, I would have shrugged. In those days, it was entirely possible to live a life without travelling overseas, reading foreign newspapers, or even having pen-pals in the U.K. But in 2011, it seems wilfully ignorant to insist on a U.S.-centric approach to teaching. Is there anywhere, other than Texas, where 19 Apr 2011 would be misunderstood? Is there anywhere, other than the U.S., where 05/03/11 isn't ambiguous?

[MG1962]

Welcome to Texas, where five different elementary teachers marked my children's papers are being wrongly dated this year when they used:

Your first mistake is assuming the teacher should be at the least as smart as you. If the book says it is wrong, no matter the evidence, the answer is wrong

[McHrozni]

My older son's sixth-grade math teacher, using currency conversion as an example of ratios, marked my son wrong for saying 1USD = 1.6 GBP. The teacher wrote on the paper that he didn't know what the abbreviations meant, and said only $ and £ were valid.

If it makes you feel any better, unless he were to mark USD as £ and GBP as $ (wrong, I know), he would still be marked as wrong.

McHrozni

[DallasDad]

Hah. Good catch. Today's rate is approximately £1 = $1.62.

[ZirconBlue]

While I sympathize with your desire to avoid ambiguity and use more precise formats, I'm not sure you've done your children any favors instructing them to use non-standard (in the US) formatting.

[DallasDad]

While I sympathize with your desire to avoid ambiguity and use more precise formats, I'm not sure you've done your children any favors instructing them to use non-standard (in the US) formatting.

I'll reiterate one of my final questions for you with emphasis added: "Is there anywhere, other than Texas, where 19 Apr 2011 would be misunderstood?"

If the answer is "No," then how have I done them a disservice? If the answer is "Yes," then I think avoiding ambiguity trumps conformance with an arbitrary local custom, unless you are also saying that the "Yes" applies to educated (or even uneducated) persons from elsewhere in the U.S.

This is not entirely an idle gedankenexperiment, by the way. My older son is beginning to learn a bit about my business, including handling correspondence. Since a good half of my customers are overseas, he needs to be able to read and write unambiguously. Additionally, when we travelled to the U.K. last summer, both of my boys were able to read timetables, bus schedules, and event posters because they know and use the 24-hour clock and international standard date representations.

(Our main digital clock in the family room uses the "military" format, and is accurate to about 250 microseconds; aside from an odd alarm clock or two, all of our other clocks are analogue.)

[elgarak]

I'm using the same conventions as you. YYYY-MM-DD, the ISO format, for records and on computers, and something with the month abbreviation for humans. And nearly always four-digit years. I hate ambiguity.

Side rant: Same with 12h times. Why-oh-why? I once booked a flight, thinking it was leaving around noon... in fact, it was the following midnight (fortunately. But think about it: The flight had a departure time AFTER midnight, but was still listed on the date of the day THAT ENDED at that midnight. WTF??).

Regarding school: I don't have children... but thinking back to my own school time, I would probably have tried it once [during high school equivalent, as teenager], to see if the teacher sees reason. If not, suck it up, and use whatever the hell they want. As a parent, that of course means more work: You have to teach both the rational and the other, to prepare for this, because it probably doesn't work well in elementary school.

[ZirconBlue]

I'll reiterate one of my final questions for you with emphasis added: "Is there anywhere, other than Texas, where 19 Apr 2011 would be misunderstood?"

IMHO, almost certainly. At the very least, I'm confident that you would have had similar experiences in many schools throughout the US. Regardless, depending on the assignment, we are sometimes required to follow customary or specific formatting. For example, if you're studying fractions and give an answer of 0.5 instead of 1/2, it can be wrong, even though it is numerically the same.

If the answer is "No," then how have I done them a disservice?

"Disservice" is your word, not mine. You've already seen examples of the downside, though: Getting things marked wrong that would not have been if they had used standard formatting.


This is not entirely an idle gedankenexperiment, by the way. My older son is beginning to learn a bit about my business, including handling correspondence. Since a good half of my customers are overseas, he needs to be able to read and write unambiguously. Additionally, when we travelled to the U.K. last summer, both of my boys were able to read timetables, bus schedules, and event posters because they know and use the 24-hour clock and international standard date representations.

(Our main digital clock in the family room uses the "military" format, and is accurate to about 250 microseconds; aside from an odd alarm clock or two, all of our other clocks are analogue.)

Excellent. Perhaps these are some of the benefits that counter the drawbacks of having some questions marked wrong. My approach is to teach my daughter a lot of different ways to format things and instruct her to use whichever seems most appropriate for a given situation. But, I do not suggest that my approach is superior. Obviously, you are in a much better position to decide what is best for your kids.

[Dale H]

No, this isn't an idle exercise.

In the spring of 1977 I was traveling in the middle east on business. Travelling by car, I left Saudi Arabia and attempted to enter Jordan. The gentleman at the checkpoint would not let me enter. He didn't speak English and my Arabic wasn't up to the task either, so I waited for a half hour until someone else came through who was able to translate for us.

The doctor who gave me my shots in the USA the previous November had dated the vaccination card 11-04-76, which the Jordinian read as April 11, meaning my vaccinations, which were good for six months, were out of date.

Once we were able to communicate, he let me pass.

Dale H

[The Norseman]

Heh.

Reminds me of when I was in junior high school. I must have been a terror for a few months or so when I read about arranging the date into a Star Trek "stardate" format and put that on all of my papers.

No one cared and I let it drop after a while.

These days, I will either put '19 Apr 2011' or '2011-4-19'. The ONLY time I ever put the U.S. style is when I'm literally forced to on government forms or webpages which have only been designed to accept that date format.

[cassis]

IMHO, almost certainly. At the very least, I'm confident that you would have had similar experiences in many schools throughout the US.

Really? It is your position that such a format would confuse a person (with even a rudimentary command of English) as to the date being conveyed? Hogwash. It may not be in the contextually or regionally-approved format, but that is not the same as saying it would be misunderstood. Note that none of the reasons given by the teachers in the OP's example mentioned not understanding the date, just that the formatting was not in accordance with what they were expecting.


"Disservice" is your word, not mine. You've already seen examples of the downside, though: Getting things marked wrong that would not have been if they had used standard formatting.
Careful - doesn't the US use the ANSI date standard which is the same as the ISO 8601 standard, YYYY-MM-DD? I think referencing standards is a rabbit hole even Alice may not want to fall into.


I always have to look at various dates in a list in order to discern the actual date format being used. I am not always so lucky as to find a day beyond the 12th. Very frustrating. Someone earlier said that being right doesn't mean you'll improve your child's marks. But that isn't sufficient reason to withhold commentary that may eventually lead to changes.

Now if someone could explain why the 12:00 am is midnight and 12:00 pm is midday when it would appear to make sense the other way around...

[Dr. Keith]

If the answer is "No," then how have I done them a disservice?

I think you have taught them well, but maybe stopped short of completing the lesson.

The ultimate lesson is to write in a way that the style of writing does not interfere with the purpose of the writing. In other words: know your audience and write for that audience as clearly as you can.

This means following the teacher's instructions for assignments for that teacher. Simple enough. But you can go a step further and help your children understand alternatives and why those alternatives may be better outside of that teacher's classroom. That is a more complete lesson, in my mind.

[TragicMonkey]

Is it more important to be right, or to be understood and to be able to understand the people around you? Because of how I've organized my files at work, I write dates in the format mmddyy (today, for example, is 041911). That works best for me but I certainly wouldn't expect everyone else to instantly understand that formatting. When I need to communicate with other people I adapt to their conventions.

[ZirconBlue]

Really? It is your position that such a format would confuse a person (with even a rudimentary command of English) as to the date being conveyed? Hogwash.

"Hogwash"? The original question was "Is there anywhere, other than Texas, where 19 Apr 2011 would be misunderstood?" Yes, I am certain that I could find people who would be confused by that date in locations outside of Texas. Believe me or not, I don't care.

Careful - doesn't the US use the ANSI date standard which is the same as the ISO 8601 standard, YYYY-MM-DD?

That depends on what you mean by "the US" and "use". That standard may be used by governmental organizations or in specialty fields. It is not the "normal" or "standard" format that the typical American uses in day-to-day interactions. Normal, everyday usage would typically be one of the following:

Format|Example
M/D/YY|4/9/11
MM/DD/YY|04/09/11
MM/DD/YYYY|04/09/2011
Month D, YYYY|April 9, 2011


Or some variation thereof.




I think you have taught them well, but maybe stopped short of completing the lesson.

The ultimate lesson is to write in a way that the style of writing does not interfere with the purpose of the writing. In other words: know your audience and write for that audience as clearly as you can.

This means following the teacher's instructions for assignments for that teacher. Simple enough. But you can go a step further and help your children understand alternatives and why those alternatives may be better outside of that teacher's classroom. That is a more complete lesson, in my mind.

Thank you. That was sort of what I was trying to say.

[Bob Blaylock]

Welcome to Texas, where five different elementary teachers marked my children's papers are being wrongly dated this year when they used:



01 Jan 2011 (wrong for the leading zero)
05 May 2011 (wrong for being out of order)
05 Apr 2011 (wrong for using a 4-digit year)
13 Apr 2011 (wrong for abbreviating the name of the month)
18 Apr 2011 (wrong for not being all numeric in dd/mm/yy format).



These teachers are idiots.

Regarding that middle example, in my opinion, it is always wrong, without exception, not to specify a full four-digit year. The current year is 2011, not 11. The year 11 was two thousand years ago. Abbreviating a year to two digits is not “Y2K-compliant”; it fails to distinguish the year 1911 from 2011 from 2111 or even 11.

[tesscaline]

I can see this issue from two sides.

First: Yes, I think it's a good lesson to teach your children the more globally acceptable ways of writing the date. This gives them a toolset above and beyond what the school is teaching them.

I grew up in an international community where I went to school with many children from other parts of the world. They all wrote the date in the dd/mmm/yyyy format. Our teachers didn't (they used mm/dd/yy), but they never marked us wrong for the way our papers were dated, no matter which format we used, as long as the dates themselves were correct. My father also wrote the date dd/mmm/yyyy, as he worked with many international concerns, and that was the "accepted" way to write it for all those concerns. I adopted the dd/mmm/yyyy format when I was around 13, simply because it made more sense to me to use what the majority of the world used. Not to mention that it looked nicer, to me, aesthetically. To this day, I date official signatures that way and have never had a problem. In fact, I've gotten compliments on it from the non-US persons that I've worked closely with in the past, as it's less confusing for them.

When dealing with computer files, I use yyyy/mm/dd, simply for ease of sorting. Again, a good skill to have, as it makes life easier.

The second side: As much as I think it's stupid that these teachers are marking your child's papers as incorrect simply for using a format they're not used to, and think that you should address that with them as a concerned parent... School is about learning to follow directions, and ultimately giving the teacher what they want. If your child's teachers really want the date in a specific format, they should communicate that as part of their class requirements, and your child should use that format for school papers. If they're not communicating that as part of their class requirements, you have grounds for complaint, and should speak up, as the teachers need to learn to properly communicate with their classes.

If you want him to use your format (our format, the global format, what have you) outside of school, that's fine. But I don't think he should risk his grades by fighting over something so, ultimately, immaterial.

As to the USD vs. $ thing... I can also see both sides. If the symbol was the desired answer and that was communicated in the assignment instructions, then the symbol should be used. The symbols are useful things to know, after all. If the symbol was the desired answer, but it was not communicated in the assignment instructions, then the teacher needs a lesson themselves in how to structure their assignments and communicate properly with their class. Given the second situation, marking the paper wrong for nothing more than using an alternate (but still globally accepted) label is not something I would personally stand for. As long as the numbers were correct (the ones you cited weren't, but that may have just been a typo on your part), your child should have gotten credit.

[ZirconBlue]

These teachers are idiots.

Regarding that middle example, in my opinion, it is always wrong, without exception, not to specify a full four-digit year. The current year is 2011, not 11. The year 11 was two thousand years ago. Abbreviating a year to two digits is not “Y2K-compliant”; it fails to distinguish the year 1911 from 2011 from 2111 or even 11.

Yes, I'm sure that there's a gread deal of confusion over which century the homework was completed in. :rolleyes:

[The Norseman]

This means following the teacher's instructions for assignments for that teacher. Simple enough.


I agree. The issue I see is, however, that we don't yet know if these teachers first taught the way they wished the date to appear and then marked it wrong because it didn't conform to the teacher's requirements, or that the teachers made the assumption that whatever format they used was standard and then marked it wrong based on that assumption.

The former is understandable; the latter, not so much in my view.

But even then, I can't think of a teacher or class that ever graded on a date format, so reading this story is mildly surprising to me.

[JJM 777]

Welcome to Texas, where five different elementary teachers marked my children's papers are being wrongly dated
(...)
math teacher, using currency conversion as an example of ratios, marked my son wrong for saying 1USD = 1.6 GBP. The teacher wrote on the paper that he didn't know what the abbreviations meant
School is a necessary evil, and many if most of the teachers are narrow-minded and self-important masters of their own little universe. Just pass the system, and never mind what scores you get, as long as you pass.

By the upper classes, when the scores will matter something, also the teachers will be a bit smarter.

[ZirconBlue]

School is a necessary evil, and many if most of the teachers are narrow-minded and self-important masters of their own little universe. Just pass the system, and never mind what scores you get, as long as you pass.

By the upper classes, when the scores will matter something, also the teachers will be a bit smarter.


Bitter, much?

[AmandaM]

Is there anywhere, other than Texas, where 19 Apr 2011 would be misunderstood? Is there anywhere, other than the U.S., where 05/03/11 isn't ambiguous?

I've filled out dozens of online forms lately, and I've noticed almost all of them request my birthdate as dd/mm/yyyy.

My mom actually says it this way. You ask her her birthdate and she'll always say the 28th of September. I'm not sure where she got this. I've always said my birthday is October 18th, and I'm sure I learned how to say my birthday from her.

5/03/11 is ambiguous to me. Is it May 3 or March 5?

For my own use, I prefer yyyy/mm/dd because as was pointed out, it's a lot easier to sort.

[Travis]

The important thing is to stick to your guns as a matter of principle. Even if the kids do get marked down they should not just give in to their teachers. Also you should write a threatening letter to the teachers every time they do mark them down.









I would only advise you to act on some of that advice.

[Zep]

For the rest of the world, 911 happened on 11-Sep, not 9-Nov which is what we read it as.

We are dealing with international transactions in my multi-national company, and the MM/DD or DD/MM thing is a right royal pain in the the arse. The amount of confusion this causes with invoicing and payments and such is WAY out of proportion to the values involved. As mentioned above, we have had payments made late, delivery deadlines missed, software licenses expired, etc, etc, all due to this specific misunderstanding.

This is ESPECIALLY likely with people who do not realise or are just not sure that some documents will be one way and some the other, and the only way to tell is to guess that the one from the USA MIGHT be the other way round...or possibly not...but we better send an email off to check and that will take some days. And should your business run its "office" in a subcontinental location...expect calamity.

DallasDad, the rest of the world works the way you taught your kids. Make it clear like that and it will serve them well for life, especially in global business. Meanwhile, though, whatever the teacher wants they should probably get...just to minimise the fuss for the kids.

[arthwollipot]

These teachers are idiots.

Regarding that middle example, in my opinion, it is always wrong, without exception, not to specify a full four-digit year. The current year is 2011, not 11. The year 11 was two thousand years ago. Abbreviating a year to two digits is not “Y2K-compliant”; it fails to distinguish the year 1911 from 2011 from 2111 or even 11.This. For eleven years now I've made a point of always writing the date in four digits.

[Rasmus]

Yes, I'm sure that there's a gread deal of confusion over which century the homework was completed in. :rolleyes:

From someone who spend four years dealing with historical documents: You'd be amazed!

If there is a need to put a date on the assignment in the first place, it should make sense to make the date non-ambiguous. (Why a date is needed in the first place is a mystery, anyway.)

All sophistry aside: Giving the year in four digits might be unnecessary depending on circumstances. I'll happily accept that this homework needed to be dated and that a 2-digit-year was sufficient. But that doesn't make the 4-digit-year wrong by a long shot.

Also, since someone beat me to the stardate reference, did nobody consider using Unix timestamps?

[Information Analyst]

My older son's sixth-grade math teacher, using currency conversion as an example of ratios, marked my son wrong for saying 1USD = 1.6 GBP. The teacher wrote on the paper that he didn't know what the abbreviations meant, and said only $ and £ were valid.
I would have expected your child to get extra points for knowing the correct ISO 4217 codes!

[Rasmus]

My older son's sixth-grade math teacher, using currency conversion as an example of ratios, marked my son wrong for saying 1USD = 1.6 GBP. The teacher wrote on the paper that he didn't know what the abbreviations meant, and said only $ and £ were valid.

Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sign

Now, if it had been a task about grocery bills, prices for train tickets or anything similar he could hope to get away arguing the point.

But exchange rates of all things?
Try to walk into *any* bank and ask for pounds or dollars - if they aren't completely useless they will ask you which ones you had in mind. Dollars much more so than pounds, I guess. (Impress your bank people by asking for foreign money knowing what it's called when they don't.)

[commandlinegamer]

'11

[Kid Eager]

I work internationally. When I'm talking to my stateside colleagues, I use ddmmmyyy and convert all my units of measure to imperial. For the rest of the world, I use metric and dd/mm/yy. Everybody also gets 24 hour clock, with optional timezone prefix if we're scheduling global teleconferences.

The only minor hassle is mentally converting units on the fly when telling stories over drinks at conferences..

[Zep]

I work internationally. When I'm talking to my stateside colleagues, I use ddmmmyyy and convert all my units of measure to imperial. For the rest of the world, I use metric and dd/mm/yy. Everybody also gets 24 hour clock, with optional timezone prefix if we're scheduling global teleconferences.

The only minor hassle is mentally converting units on the fly when telling stories over drinks at conferences..We do too. But that's fine going outbound. Inbound from the USA is the hassle.

Example: We were sent a temporary software license for an international trade show that expired on "6/7/09". That was read by staff here as 6-July-2009 and they made plans accordingly, only to have everything drop dead in front of customers in public on 7-June-2009 (actually the next day, but you get my point). We looked fools, the software people looked like fools, and the customers were severely unimpressed.

[Dates changed for effect - not meant to be a factual statement. But yes, this sort of thing does happen.]

So I always use the old VMS format date: dd-mmm-yyyy, e.g. 21-Jul-2011. Foolproof.

[zooterkin]

I would have expected your child to get extra points for knowing the correct ISO 4217 codes!

Yes, but then a negative mark for getting them the wrong way round. 1.6 USD = 1 GBP :)

[zooterkin]

I've filled out dozens of online forms lately, and I've noticed almost all of them request my birthdate as dd/mm/yyyy.


Oddly, the forms you fill in on the way into the US (customs and immigration) specify the dates to be entered dd/mm/yyyy.

[Cuddles]

I'll reiterate one of my final questions for you with emphasis added: "Is there anywhere, other than Texas, where 19 Apr 2011 would be misunderstood?"

Given that you specifically mentioned Europe - yes, anywhere they don't speak English. And it's worse than just language, not all countries use the Latin alphabet, so they may not even have the letters A, p and r, let alone understand them as meaning the 4th month of the year.

So yes, the various different numeric date formats can result in potential confusion. However, your chosen method does not appear to be any better in that respect, you've just shifted to a different potential confusion. As others have said, an important part of communication is knowing the audience and accepting conventions to making understanding easier. By adopting your own system and calling the others wrong, you haven't solved all the problems with the conventional systems and have added the extra problem of not abiding by the understood conventions.

[zooterkin]

Given that you specifically mentioned Europe - yes, anywhere they don't speak English. And it's worse than just language, not all countries use the Latin alphabet, so they may not even have the letters A, p and r, let alone understand them as meaning the 4th month of the year.


I think DallasDad is making a distinction between 'not understood' and 'misunderstood'. You're saying that '9 Apr 2011' (a better example than 19 Apr) would not be understood, while I believe he agrees with that; he's saying that it would either be understood correctly, or not understood at all. It won't be mistaken for 4th September, which 4/9/2011 would be.

[Dave Rogers]

Welcome to Texas, where five different elementary teachers marked my children's papers are being wrongly dated this year when they used:



01 Jan 2011 (wrong for the leading zero)
05 May 2011 (wrong for being out of order)
05 Apr 2011 (wrong for using a 4-digit year)
13 Apr 2011 (wrong for abbreviating the name of the month)
18 Apr 2011 (wrong for not being all numeric in dd/mm/yy format).


That's not just stupid, it's STUPID. I can understand being marked wrong for exchanging the day and month in an all-numerical format, becasue it's important that everybody in the USA should be taught to express themselves in a way that not only makes no sense but is different to the perfectly sensible way that the rest of the world does it; but this is not that. The test of good communication should be lack of ambiguity, and there is not the slightest ambiguity, not the slightest possibility of ambiguity, in the interpretation of any one of the dates given above by anyone in any English-speaking part of the world.

Yes, the above format could conceivably be misunderstood by anyone reading the document thus dated and assuming that, despite the remainder of the document being in English, the date has been translated into some other language. About that hypothetical individual, the only thing I can say is that they're every bit as stupid as the five offending teachers.

Dave

[I Ratant]

While I sympathize with your desire to avoid ambiguity and use more precise formats, I'm not sure you've done your children any favors instructing them to use non-standard (in the US) formatting.
.
Read the way ALL the formats are wrong....... in Texas...:)

[I Ratant]

No, this isn't an idle exercise.

In the spring of 1977 I was traveling in the middle east on business. Travelling by car, I left Saudi Arabia and attempted to enter Jordan. The gentleman at the checkpoint would not let me enter. He didn't speak English and my Arabic wasn't up to the task either, so I waited for a half hour until someone else came through who was able to translate for us.

The doctor who gave me my shots in the USA the previous November had dated the vaccination card 11-04-76, which the Jordinian read as April 11, meaning my vaccinations, which were good for six months, were out of date.

Once we were able to communicate, he let me pass.

Dale H
.
One of my friends won't park his SUV on the street. The tags expire Nov 2011... Those cars reqistered for the first months of 2012 have blue tags.
His is the red one for 2011...
He's concerned the car will be impounded.
It's not NOVEMBER yet!

[I Ratant]

It's mmddyy at the pharmacy.
When I was back at Pax River, I was amused to find they were using the "Julian date"... which wasn't the Julian date the astronomers use (A Julian date of 2454115.05486 means that the date and Universal Time is Sunday January 14, 2007 at 13:18:59.9.), but "Coordinated Universal Time" as WWV says it, or "Zulu time", which the other branches of the military use, and that's only Greenwich Mean Time.

[ZirconBlue]

.
Read the way ALL the formats are wrong....... in Texas...:)


Well, everything's bigger in Texas. Including the mistakes. ;)

[commandlinegamer]

No-one's mentioned the elephant in the room yet - what do you use as delimiter - period, colon, oblique or hyphen?

20.04.2011
20-04-2001
20:04:2011
20/04/2011

[DallasDad]

For Americans, I usually use a forward slash. For Europeans, I usually use a dash. But I try to avoid all-numeric representations unless it's year-month-day.

Someone uptopic mentioned problems with "Apr" or other representations. In Windows, it's fairly easy to obtain the user's locale and substitute the abbreviation (or full word) for the month using the current language. So for log entries, I normally use dd MMM yyyy hh:mm:ss (where MMM is in the user's current language, no punctuation on the date part other than the space character). For filenames, I use yyyymmdd, sometimes with, sometimes without dashes, depending on whether humans will be looking at the file or not. Either way, it sorts fine, but humans find eight digits in a row harder to parse visually.

[Dr. Keith]

I agree. The issue I see is, however, that we don't yet know if these teachers first taught the way they wished the date to appear and then marked it wrong because it didn't conform to the teacher's requirements, or that the teachers made the assumption that whatever format they used was standard and then marked it wrong based on that assumption.

The former is understandable; the latter, not so much in my view.

I don't see much of a distinction. A few points off of what I assume are minor papers at an early stage of schooling is not an injustice.

Either way the teacher enforced the format they wanted and the kids need to learn to conform to that format for that teacher, while maintaining an understanding of how that format may be inappropriate in other situations.

But even then, I can't think of a teacher or class that ever graded on a date format, so reading this story is mildly surprising to me.

I assumed grade school, maybe early middle school, either way kids under 14 years old. If I'm wrong then the unfairness does start to creep in. Class ranking can be decided by less than that in a competitive high school.

[Corsair 115]

You think date formats come in a variety of options? Take a look at the different formats (sizes) of paper! E.g. U.S. Letter versus A4.

[DallasDad]

Dr. Keith, you have a good point. I do teach my children that part of school is learning what the teacher wants. Most of the examples, alas, are negative in character -- along the lines of, "Yes, you're right that 'compare' means to show how things are both alike and how they differ, but your teacher says 'compare and contrast' because he thinks he needs to. It's the same reason he taught you about 'ATM Machines' and 'The Sahara Desert.' When he asks you the name, say 'Sahara Desert.' When you're talking to anyone else, just say 'The Sahara.'"

I've taught them to look for the faint grayed-out (often redded-out, if I may coin a term) prompts on forms indicating the desired format for dates. If a form does not have a specification, I've taught them to be unambiguous. It was with some surprise that I discovered that some teachers in this area believe formats other than their preferred format are wrong.

Hence my OP.

I'd probably have more patience, and cut the teachers a bit more slack, if they hadn't sent my sixth-grader home last week with a study sheet discussing "Governer Morris" (Gouverneur Morris). I thought surely it was an innocent typo, and corrected it on the study sheet. The teacher sent it back with a note saying, "Insisting on French spelling is an affectation."

I told my son to write "Governer" on the test. I then told him we'd probably be moving away from Texas before long.

[The Norseman]

I'd probably have more patience, and cut the teachers a bit more slack, if they hadn't sent my sixth-grader home last week with a study sheet discussing "Governer Morris" (Gouverneur Morris). I thought surely it was an innocent typo, and corrected it on the study sheet. The teacher sent it back with a note saying, "Insisting on French spelling is an affectation."

I told my son to write "Governer" on the test. I then told him we'd probably be moving away from Texas before long.


Seriously?? A French affectation?

Dumb stuff like this would instantly prompt me to write the date as the French do with the same "logic" that it's also a "French affectation."

[DallasDad]

To be tiredly and sadly honest, I was more surprised that he knew the word "affectation" than that he was confused about a name.

ETA: I must say, however, that in other areas, I'm rather impressed with the breadth of the sixth-grade social studies curriculum so far this year. Not only did they cover the cradle of civilization, but also modern countries in the Middle East, plus Africa and South America. They sort of whizzed through World Wars I and II, touched on the Cold War, and are hitting the highlights of the American Revolutionary War. It's all very shallow, of course, and skips all of Asia, North America outside the original 13 colonies, and Australia (the students are only in sixth grade), but at least it acknowledges the variety of civilizations humans have had, gives a sense of how long we've been doing the same-old same-old fighting, and touches on cultural norms through the ages.

Students aren't allowed to bring home the book they use in class. At the beginning of the year, I made an appointment and reviewed all of the textbooks for all of the classes. I bought one of the books (the science textbook) to have at home, and bought different books for math, English, social studies, and music. As much as we can, we study the school's assignments -- comparing my boy's take-home papers with my memories of what I saw in the official text -- and then suppliment with better material from other sources. The "Governer Morris" things are the exception, not the rule.

My boys -- well, my older boy, at least -- enjoys understanding things at a depth beyond what's taught in class. One of my big challenges is acknowledging the value of accumulating seemingly useless facts, then learning how they fit together to make a bigger, more complete picture. They're all small steps, baby steps really, but they add up over time. The gleam of understanding in his eye when he perceives there's a higher level yet, just above but within reach ... ah, that's sweet. The smile and casual confidence with which he approaches tasks that he's mastered ... ah, sweeter still.

Next year's curriculum is not up to the district or the teacher. Seventh grade social studies, by Texas law, is entirely Texas history. I suppose each state has both the right and obligation to blow its own horn, but with so much to learn, I dislike devoting 33% of middle school's social studies time to Texas. If they have to remain U.S.-centric, or even Texas-centric, I'd rather they concentrated on civics and theory of government. But that's just me.

[Zep]

For Americans, I usually use a forward slash. For Europeans, I usually use a dash. But I try to avoid all-numeric representations unless it's year-month-day.

Someone uptopic mentioned problems with "Apr" or other representations. In Windows, it's fairly easy to obtain the user's locale and substitute the abbreviation (or full word) for the month using the current language. So for log entries, I normally use dd MMM yyyy hh:mm:ss (where MMM is in the user's current language, no punctuation on the date part other than the space character). For filenames, I use yyyymmdd, sometimes with, sometimes without dashes, depending on whether humans will be looking at the file or not. Either way, it sorts fine, but humans find eight digits in a row harder to parse visually.Bingo. I do it exactly the same way. You will find also that most international businesses will be able to manage the English contractions for the months, or can find someone who can. Since I have to deal with international scheduling on a daily basis, I can confirm that this approach eliminates [almost] all confusion over dates. (...unless one of the participants you have to deal with is a particularly moronic der-brain in the wrong job who can't even read and makes Kumar look sane. But that's another topic for another time.:rolleyes:)

[Zep]

Dr. Keith, you have a good point. I do teach my children that part of school is learning what the teacher wants. Most of the examples, alas, are negative in character -- along the lines of, "Yes, you're right that 'compare' means to show how things are both alike and how they differ, but your teacher says 'compare and contrast' because he thinks he needs to. It's the same reason he taught you about 'ATM Machines' and 'The Sahara Desert.' When he asks you the name, say 'Sahara Desert.' When you're talking to anyone else, just say 'The Sahara.'"

I've taught them to look for the faint grayed-out (often redded-out, if I may coin a term) prompts on forms indicating the desired format for dates. If a form does not have a specification, I've taught them to be unambiguous. It was with some surprise that I discovered that some teachers in this area believe formats other than their preferred format are wrong.

Hence my OP.

I'd probably have more patience, and cut the teachers a bit more slack, if they hadn't sent my sixth-grader home last week with a study sheet discussing "Governer Morris" (Gouverneur Morris). I thought surely it was an innocent typo, and corrected it on the study sheet. The teacher sent it back with a note saying, "Insisting on French spelling is an affectation."

I told my son to write "Governer" on the test. I then told him we'd probably be moving away from Texas before long.I take it this is the man's name, not his title? If so, the teacher needs to be sent a link to something from an official government site that shows this.

ETA: Just looked him up. Jeeeeez! It WAS his actual name and he was one of the Founding Fathers! Wow, talk about a problem there!

Also, I have family living in Texas currently, and they tell me of similar incidents of local yokel gross ignorance. It concerns them greatly that the home of the NASA Mission Control Center is also home to this sort of learning problem.

[AmandaM]

"Gouverneur" isn't even pronounced the same as "Governor." !!!

That's as stupid as one of my relatives who insists my middle name is pronounced "Monica" since we're in the US. (It's Monique -- pronounced Mo-NEEK)


Students aren't allowed to bring home the book they use in class.

Excuse me but, WTH?? How are they supposed to do homework without the text book? How are they supposed to study without the text book?

??????


Next year's curriculum is not up to the district or the teacher. Seventh grade social studies, by Texas law, is entirely Texas history. I suppose each state has both the right and obligation to blow its own horn, but with so much to learn, I dislike devoting 33% of middle school's social studies time to Texas.

Our school did that in 3rd grade. All the state history. It's Indiana -- from the 3rd-grader's perspective: YAWN. Then we spent 6 weeks on the history of our town. Even more yawn-worthy. (Our city was actually somewhat note-worthy for moonshining, but of course we didn't hear a word of that. )

[Jalok]

While I can't comment on the Morris thing, but about dates...

I have vague recollections when I started school about being taught how to format things. Most teachers at the beginning of the year would have header format somewhere on their blackboard: name, date, class, sometimes hour, and location on the page. For the most part they were all very similar outside of those who taught different subjects. I can't think of any that changed date format so must have used that format til I graduated and joined the military who shuffled it around a bit.

As for the monetary units while USD and such may be equivilant, you should always answer in the units given in the problem. If the problem is $ to pounds (dont' know how to get that symbol:P) then the answer is x$ = y(pounds); just as someone said earlier if the problem is fractions, answering in decimal is wrong even if empirically the same.

Lastly, just to go with the thread, my 9th grade year was also state specific. While I thought then, and still, that it was a major waste of time, I can't see how talking about the Pilgrims for the nth time, with 3+nth more times til graduation, would have been anymore useful.

jalok

[ZirconBlue]

Lastly, just to go with the thread, my 9th grade year was also state specific. While I thought then, and still, that it was a major waste of time, I can't see how talking about the Pilgrims for the nth time, with 3+nth more times til graduation, would have been anymore useful.

I don't recall any state-specific history, but we certainly covered the period from the Explorers through the Civil War in several different grades.

[Jalok]

I don't recall any state-specific history, but we certainly covered the period from the Explorers through the Civil War in several different grades.

Which is what I mean about the nth bit. A good deal of each year is spent recovering things from previous years. Sometimes it is more indepth, sometimes it's Pocahontas again. How many years do you have math class before you start using variables? At least with the state/local history you might learn something you haven't heard 10 times before, though I still think having had to memorize and regurgitate all the county names was a waste of good oxygen...

jalok

[tesscaline]

Ugh. The governor thing is really really stupid. They're actually teaching kids to incorrectly spell a man's name... *facepalm*


Lastly, just to go with the thread, my 9th grade year was also state specific. While I thought then, and still, that it was a major waste of time, I can't see how talking about the Pilgrims for the nth time, with 3+nth more times til graduation, would have been anymore useful.

jalokI never had, throughout any of my history classes, an entire year dedicated to local history. My local history was taught as part of larger history/social studies and even science curriculum, and was made relevant through those larger courses. Gold rush stuff, plate tectonics (as I lived in california), the act of settling the west and the implications for the nation of doing so, native american studies, parts played in the civil war, etc.

I really can't see dedicating an entire year to the history of a single state. It removes the context, and context is important.

[DallasDad]

I really can't see dedicating an entire year to the history of a single state. It removes the context, and context is important.

Texas history is interesting -- the whole six flags thing doesn't make much sense without studying the surrounding context -- and I have hopes that my boy will learn more than just Sam Houston's life story.

[Dr. Keith]

The "Governer Morris" things are the exception, not the rule.

And I think that is what you need to keep in mind.

You have a good grasp on what is going on and you are having good conversations with your kids about interesting topics. They are less likely to fall for false claims to authority and they will be better consumers of information in the future because of this. And really, what is more important, what they know now or how they learn in the future?

But that kinda talk will lead me to a whole 'nother rant about not teaching kids information literacy skills.

By the bye, I would be pissed too if my kids were getting docked for such silly stuff. I completely understand the frustration. I'm just trying to help you see the silver lining.

[Dr. Keith]

I really can't see dedicating an entire year to the history of a single state.

What about a single country? For much of our lives we look at history through the lens of the American View. Looking at it from the view of Mexico and then the Republic of Texas (to mention just two of the six flags) really helps to put much of history in a different frame.

It is not always us and them, sometimes it is us and the folks who claim to rule us and the folks we would rather be associated with. Much more complex.

It removes the context, and context is important.

In a lot of ways it puts all the other history into context. It gives another view and personalizes a lot of what is otherwise very abstract.

Pertinent to this discussion: In Texas history brother was chided for his pronunciation of the town of Refugio. The teacher couldn't separate the pronunciation of the Spanish word from the local pronunciation of the town's name. (re-FURY-oh)

And memorizing all the counties sucked. Well, trying to sucked, can't say I ever did it. There are 254 of them.

[tesscaline]

What about a single country? For much of our lives we look at history through the lens of the American View. Looking at it from the view of Mexico and then the Republic of Texas (to mention just two of the six flags) really helps to put much of history in a different frame.

It is not always us and them, sometimes it is us and the folks who claim to rule us and the folks we would rather be associated with. Much more complex.



In a lot of ways it puts all the other history into context. It gives another view and personalizes a lot of what is otherwise very abstract.

Pertinent to this discussion: In Texas history brother was chided for his pronunciation of the town of Refugio. The teacher couldn't separate the pronunciation of the Spanish word from the local pronunciation of the town's name. (re-FURY-oh)

And memorizing all the counties sucked. Well, trying to sucked, can't say I ever did it. There are 254 of them.All of my experience with history classes was that the subject being focused on, no matter how specific, was always couched in the context of surrounding events. Even the civil war of the US was not taught to me in a bubble, without giving context from events in the rest of the global community (such that it was at the time).

I'm not saying that teaching local history is bad. Local history is important too. And I was taught local history. It's just that my "local history" was not taught in a bubble. It did not have an entire year dedicated just to it, and it alone. It was worked into larger contexts which informed the perspective of the local history, as well as allowing the local history to inform perspective on the larger picture.