I know I shouldn't make fun of the mistakes of non-native English speakers, especially considering my poor grasp of Spanish after years of instruction, but this email we received (about an ebay auction) was too funny:

Would you send me to Brazil by Air Mail?
Payment PayPal.
I would like to know the sending cost for Air Mail for Brazil?
I would like to know if I won, if I could send the payment through payPal in 07/10,
the reason is the limit of purchases of my card this month. Thank you.

He asked only 45 minutes before the auction ended, and we didn't see it in time. He didn't win.

I received a spam today where the text appears to be an excerpt from White Fang. The HTML attachment is the actual spam. I'm sure this is common enough (I don't usually pay any attention to spam, but read this one by accident), but it was kind of neat.

As neat as spam can get, anyways.

Speaking of my poor grasp of Spanish... I've been thinking about it, and it makes a lot of sense that I can't understand Harry Potter. I have the vocabulary of a 2 or 3 year old. This means I have the opposite problem of someone who is learning to read in their native language - I can read the words just fine, but I don't have the vocabulary to know what they mean. I'm not entirely hopeless - some I remember, some are close enough to English that I can guess, and sometimes I can figure out from context.

I'm not sure I'd do all that much better with a book aimed at first graders. The vocabulary isn't all that much different - the sentences are just less complex.

I suppose if I work my way through it with a dictionary, I'll get there eventually.

I realize that none of this is exactly rocket science, but it helps me to think it through.

Educational baby toys (and probably the majority of educational toys for older kids) are a capitalist plot. By marketing these flashy, noisy, migraine inducing things as educational, they're implying that if you don't buy it for your kid, they won't be able to develop some vitally important skill and will end up STUPID! Or at least not as smart as all the other kids whose parents were smart/rich/nice/gullible enough to buy their kid a multicolored dancing hippopotamus that sings a different song each time you poke its eye. Look! They're learning hand-eye coordination, cause and effect, and the delight of gouging eyes (utterly vital in the business world. Your child will be a failure if s/he does not learn this as early as possible) all at once!

Because poor deprived kids like Laura Ingalls, who was happy to get a single tin cup for Christmas, were STUPID, you know?

For a while now, I've been reading pregnant teen communities with kind of a sick fascination. Much of the time, it's like watching a train wreck. A number of the members can't even spell pregnant.

Something is seriously screwed with our educational system if kids bright enough to figure out LJ can't spell pregnant by the time they get their first period, let alone by the time they get pregnant.

Then again, the youngest mother ever was 5 years old. If they're that young, I'll excuse them for spelling it wrong.

And then you see someone who's 18, having her second child, and getting her Master's degree. Impressive.

Gee. Twisted and snarky are not valid LJ moods.

I am now a living example of the subjectivity of standardized tests.

I took the IQ tests at http://www.highiqsociety.org/flash/nonmembers/iqtests.htm. On the first test I took (the Ultimate test, which covered a range of subjects), I got a 142, which is pretty durn good. Higher than I usually score on these silly web IQ tests.

Then I took the verbal test, and got 124. Not awful, but not quite high enough to join their snazzy little elitist club.

Then I took the logic test, and got a 97. Below average.

Now, seeing as the Ultimate test included both verbal and logic questions of the same type and approximate difficulty, it doesn't seem right that someone who scored a 142 on the ultimate test would get the scores I did on the other two test. There was more to the ultimate test than just verbal and logic, but I find it hard to believe that the other areas could make that much of a difference.

My guess is that, by the end, I was both physically and mentally tired, as well as bored with taking stupid tests.

It really does make me wonder about the validity of standardized tests.

The verbal portions were a good example of how cultural differences and education can effect score. In many cases, you have to understand the meaning of the word in order to determine the relationship between them. It's about your current knowledge level at least as much as potential ability. Potential ability seems like the more useful trait, but the test's ability to judge potential is limited by the knowledge you already have.

They freely admit this on the test, and encourage non-native English speakers to take a different test instead. However, they don't take this into account in many other standardized testing situations.

It does make me wish I'd taken the SATs over again. My score was significantly (50-100 points) lower than expected based on my scores on other standardized tests. This IQ test experience leads me to believe that having a bad day or something could really lower my score that much.

Then again, does it really matter for anything except an ego boost? I got into the college I wanted regardless, and it's not like my SAT score will ever matter for anything else in my life.

Of course, there's always the possibility that the scoring system on this test is broken, and I'm really a 31337 near-genius in logic, as well. Or vice-versa, and I'm really below average in everything :)