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

    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.