No, the first is correct. It is an exception to the NO APOSTROPHES IN PLURALS rule. Exeption is there to avoid the ambiguity you point out.
Well there ya go - I have been lending my ears to people writing stuff on the web.
Incidentally, do we write “1’s, 2’s and 3’s” or “1s, 2s and 3s”? I find that whether or not it looks awkward or difficult to read depends to some extent on the font you are using.
To summarize: if there are rules that make for awkward language, we should ignore them. But writing things like “I would of” just makes you look like the uneducated hillbilly you are. 
Here is what the CMOS has to say on the subject:–
I’m all for keeping the formal rules on those. It really is not that difficult, if you’re omitting letters use an apostrophe, and lern to spel.
Americans just suck at English. Some of my favorites are “axe you a question”, “expresso”, and “I could care less”. But I’ve found I could even teach South Africans whom consider themselves grammar Nazis a thing or two about the Oxford comma used in the previous sentence.
Another one I ran into the other day: an otherwise very well educated American telling me about “tied-in-the-wool conservatives”. I would of liked to correct him, but I didn’t have the heart. Anyway, I could care less about dem Yanks. 
Ah, and another amusing one: a person guilty of deceipt. A deceipt is what Zuma gives the public protector instead of receipt. But I see deceipt is actually an archaic and obsolete form, so it’s at least half a word.
Oh well, I am constantly guilty hideous spelling and grammar errors, so I try not to be too much of a grammar Nazi. It does make for a pleasant distraction from the generally catastrophic news about our education system.
Oxford commas are useful for avoiding ambiguity. But they should always go inside the quotes… >:D
Back to dropping maths. In an ideal world, you would get this. From my Wiki page this morning.
Mefi, thanks for that article, it illustrates the point I tried to make that when I had a crap teacher one year, I had to battle the next year to understand new work, and the problem got exponentially greater every year.
Cheers, Brian.
As a side note, I wonder whether different teaching methods for different generations may account for this: Whenever my mom and I went bargain hunting for groceries together, I always calculated the prices per kg, and she tallied up sub-totals and total. Her adding & subtraction skills were uncanny considering the clamor and distractions. I literally used her as a walking calculator because I could only ever get to an approximation by rounding. She, however, found it harder to calculate the price per kg which is a simple thing if you know the tables.
FYI, the dumbing down of math students/standards does not occur only in schools. A few years ago I decided to do a ‘refresher’ maths course with UNISA. Although my matric qualification is acceptable for most university courses, I know my math skills are weak and I wanted to step back and improve it.
- The text books provided just a very brief discussion of each lesson with just one or sometimes two examples - not enough to ensure that the student will grasp the concept. This is distance education - you can’t ask random questions!
- They only provided 2 or 3 exercises for each lesson/concept
- No further exercises were available, even though I requested assistance.
- On 3 occasions during 6 months, after laboriously doing external research to make sure I had actually mastered the lessons (remember… my building blocks just ain’t there) and handing in assignments, the results came back with … “due to the problems many students experienced, this assignment will not count towards your final marks.”
I didn’t bother with the exam.
PS. This was a bridging course for future science students…
How long ago was that? I did something similar through Unisa around 2010 or thereabouts, and the course was excellent: they prescribed a very good textbook, the book’s examples and explanations were very clear and the exercises numerous and challenging.
But it is true that Unisa has gone down the tubes; I wouldn’t bother with them anymore. I know lots of people who have tried studying through Unisa, and they all complain that both the teaching and administration have gotten so bad that it has become pretty much impossible to learn anything from there.
It’s sad to see. I originally did my B degree through Unisa in the early 1990s, and they were absolutely brilliant. There were NEVER even the slightest administrative mess-ups, and the quality of the teaching was superb. In all the courses, they prescribed one or more textbooks, and they specifically chose excellent textbooks. They then also issued students with a study guide that explained some concepts, but mostly just contained very clear instructions on how to use the textbooks, which bits would be important, etc. And then you also had to do a certain number of assignments. These never got lost somewhere in their system, and they were never late in marking and returning them. Where necessary, lecturers would write comments etc.
Then, also around 2010, when I started teaching, I tried to do that infernal postgrad teaching certificate. A few months in I gave up. For one thing, the courses had preciously little to do with teaching; it was mostly just propaganda about how bad the system was under apartheid and how change was essential. For another, to the extent that they said anything at all about such things as teaching, preparing lessons etc, there was no guidance AT ALL. There was no prescribed textbook on it and no study guide. Out of the blue you had to prepare sample lessons and curricula etc, and when I got my assignments back, they were marked but had no comments of any kind. For the first time in my entire academic career I barely scraped through assignments (that’s right - not exams but mere assignments) because I could’t for the life of me work out what was expected, and all queries went unanswered.
I eventually gave up on it: the coursework was the most spectacularly boring load of crap I have ever seen and wasn’t helping me at all. It also occurred to me that the people who presented this course were all supposed experts in education, i.e. in how to get course material across to students. But they were worse at it than any of my biology lecturers, who had no qualifications in education (but were very well qualified indeed in the subjects they were teaching).
I concluded that education is a pseudo-subject, and a degree or certificate in education a pseudo-qualification. This was richly confirmed to me when I observed my fully qualified colleagues at various schools: some could teach well, some could not teach at all, and the ‘qualification’ in education made no difference at all. If anything, it possibly actually made them worse at it, because it contaminates the mind with all kinds of crap for which there may or may not be any evidence. (As an aside, Nassim taleb warns against doing such things as reading newspapers or doing an MBA degree, precisely because it contaminates the mind and makes you actually worse off than if you had done nothing.)
Of course, not being “fully qualified” means I can never be appointed at any government school, but that is something for which I am increasingly grateful…
Now here’s another thing that bothers me about the education department’s attempts at improving things: they often go an and on about how they are going to make sure all teachers are “fully qualified.” By which they presumably mean that they’ll make sure everyone has a B. Ed. or a postgrad certificate. Well, good luck trying to improve education that way…
De nada, Spike—and thanks for you-know-what. 
(It’s possible that I’m reaching here, but I don’t think so.)
I had two disturbing encounters with Unisa about 25 years ago, one with the Statistics department and the other with the Mathematics department. Needless to say, those episodes are quite pointed and relevant in the context of this thread. The first involved an assignment where the inversion of square matrices was required as part of the solution. The marked and returned assignment bore the red-penned comment, “I don’t understand but you seem to know what you are doing.” I had used a matrix inversion method (the adjoint-determinant method, if you must know) which is particularly efficient for 2×2 and 3×3 matrices—so much so that with a bit of practice, one can do the inversions in one’s head. Clearly, whoever had marked the assignment wasn’t anywhere near the top of their game. (At the end of the year, I visited the department head and showed him this mini-fiasco. To his credit, he expressed appropriate alarm once I’d shown him the evidence.)
The second bonce-bumping was with the department head of Mathematics. At the end of an aced assignment, he’d written a challenge for me to see what I could come up with regarding a specific theorem of kernels, image spaces and projections for vector manifolds. With the next assignment, I sent a rigorous, separately enveloped, proof of my own devising for the theorem in question, specifically addressed to him. His response? Basically, that I had “a tendency to overcomplicate things,” followed by what was no less—and certainly no more—than an exercise in hand-waving and (admittedly educated) intuition about the theorem—precisely the approach that mathematics abjures. To be fair, such educated intuition is a remarkably fruitful source, but it should be obvious that passing this practice off as a valid source of subject advancement to a student kinda subtracts from the purpose of attending the courses in the first place: Learn the rules first; you can always work around them later, but to do so, you have to know them well.
'Luthon64
I have to correct myself - these were study guides. No prescribed textbook at all. This was in 2007, certainly no later than 2008.
;D ;D ;D ;D
That’s where creativity comes in, as per your earliest post in this thread. It’s perhaps a little off topic, but according to some people, creativity is fed by chaos, and ‘boundaries’ restrict art. My pedestrian view is that creativity is based on order. If you don’t know the rules, you have nothing to challenge.
I wouldn’t know about accounting, but good luck trying to do matric physics without math. Of course, we can always lower the physics standards, or, er, replace it with African science. That Oubaas Newton, he was veeery clever, but eish, he was white, so he was colonialist. So, you don’t worry. Today, we look at how to burn witches without using matches. You see dees thing? Magnifying glass! i-Physics he is fun!