I have an office job that entails a lot of interaction with people who in the construction industry, small business owners, developers, bankers, etc. I'm too androgynous for my employers to feel comfortable with letting me meet people in person (thank god) so most of it is through email or phone calls. They all vary in education and income; some have PhDs, some never finished high school, some are rich as fuck, some are struggling to get by. Most of them are local but I work with quite a few people from different parts of the country.

There's something that is common between a lot of these people, maybe even the vast majority, is that they cannot do extremely simple tasks or understand simple concepts, even when I try to explain them visually (like I'll share a spreadsheet with them and go through each individual thing I'm doing to show them what I mean). Very few of them get it. I'm not particularly smart or amazing at math or anything, but I'd like to think I can understand simple instructions. Sign this, add these numbers, make this match this. I can't imagine what it's like working in retail if the average person is this dumb.

  • RowPin [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

    This was a cool article about how we're just teaching kids to read wrong now.

    Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.

    The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."

    But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone." Rodney breezed right through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.

    Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

    "Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

    • RowPin [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      When I asked [the scientist whose work underlies the current approach] what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

      "Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."

      He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept. [They are not.]

      Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does. And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

      "My science is different," Goodman said.

    • grouchy [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Huh. That explains a lot. I knew about the "reading wars" debate and similar various math reform controversies and at one point participated in some workshops about how to teach reading (for non-professional reasons), but had no idea this was the context behind all the wacky shit I've seen over the years. Worst part is how obvious it was that a lot of petty politics and snake oil peddling was affecting everything behind the scenes.

      As another person who was reading way beyond "grade level" as a kid, I probably got lucky in that my immigrant parents insisted that I learn phonics. I'm not sure they understood the context of all the debates either, but it was probably a no-brainer to them. Both other languages I learned as a kid were definitely introduced with the equivalent of phonics. (To be fair, both were nonalphabetic languages.)

    • GalaxyBrain [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Jesus, that's wack. I knew how to read just fine, I just pieced pronunciation together from how English works and other words I knew with similar syllables. I was even told that being able to piece it together that way is also good but not what they were testing for.

      Edit: I also did everything but English class in French which was a second language so that probably helped. English comprehension was easy mode