Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are playing semantics instead of trying to understand what I'm saying.
What you are saying is semantics.
You have a lot to learn, little boy.
Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
181–190 of 194 posts
Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you are saying is semantics.
You have a lot to learn, little boy.
Please read: http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely you can't mean without teaching. It'd be pretty hard to learn to read without someone teaching you. Perhaps you mean an experiment where a child is raised by a blind caregiver who never talks about reading. Given full access to children's books and other media but no one to tell them about reading, will they pick it up?
In Russian it's much easier. After someone learns the letter shapes, they're able to read anything. The pronunciation is only ambiguous in terms of stress.
I used to say this, until I actually tried teaching someone to read in Russian. Then I ran into all sorts of weird cases I had never noticed: "ничего" and similar, various silent letters, etc.
I mean, I agree that it's much simpler than English in terms of going from written letterforms to pronounced word, but there's still a bunch of weirdness floating around.
Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
#184This is completely anecdotal, but when I was back in the Middle East, tests essentially were games/competitions. Everyone knew everyone else's scores and they were often announced out loud as the results are handed back. Students who consistently get high scores are looked up to and respected. Your academic performance contributed significantly to your social standing in the classroom. Then I came to Canada and this…
I was a kid in post-communist Poland in 90s, and the concept of nerd was absent as well. Being good at math etc was not a problem to your social life (in fact it was sth you could brag about, just not too openly because that's uncool too).
Also there was almost no "jocks" (there were some sport competitions but no cheerleaders, and nothing as important culturally as it is in USA, also teams weren't persistent between classes and there were almost none inter-school sport events).
Grades were public as well (or at least - nobody tried to hide them so teachers would just pin a list with results from an exam on the board). Competition was seen as sth natural (at the time unemployment was 20% and kids were told that you have to be good or you will essentially be a hobo).
On the other hand you were supposed to pretend you didn't had to study a lot, because kids that study instead of playing were "kujon"s = boring, lame bookworms. It was cool to be smart without working for it.
Also cheating had no stigma attached, but telling any authority about any misbehaving was the ultimate social suicide. This obviously included telling teachers that other kids were cheating.
This was probably because 50 years of paid spying of citizens on each other by abusive government. Even now whistleblowing in general is hard because of that social stigma.
Nerd and geek concept was introduced later through movies and internet and in mid 00s it was already established, but still not a negative stereotype (but that may be because I changed environment to CS-related in the meantime and ~ everybody was a nerd/geek/whatever).
Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
When investigating the intersection of unconscious attitudes (often shaped by culture) and performance, gender is more relevant than sex. It's not whether you have this equipment or that but what groups you are perceived to belong to and what groups you see yourself as belonging to. In some cultures there are third genders with different cultural expectations: the Hijra in India, Kathoey in Thailand, some other group…
> When investigating the intersection of unconscious attitudes (often shaped by culture) and performance, gender is more relevant than sex. This is a very broad statement which is trivial to prove false. Look at powerlifting: men perform better than women, and testosterone plays a well-understood role in this performance. This is a function of sex, not gender. And while it's most numerically provable and obvious in p…
> Are we to claim that ovaries and testicles are sex, and the brain and pituitary is gender?
That about sums up the usual definitions, yes.
Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
#186This is completely anecdotal, but when I was back in the Middle East, tests essentially were games/competitions. Everyone knew everyone else's scores and they were often announced out loud as the results are handed back. Students who consistently get high scores are looked up to and respected. Your academic performance contributed significantly to your social standing in the classroom. Then I came to Canada and this…
I was a kid in post-communist Poland in 90s, and the concept of nerd was absent as well. Being good at math etc was not a problem to your social life (in fact it was sth you could brag about, just not too openly because that's uncool too). Also there was almost no "jocks" (there were some sport competitions but no cheerleaders, and nothing as important culturally as it is in USA, also teams weren't persistent between…
> On the other hand you were supposed to pretend you didn't had to study a lot, because kids that study instead of playing were "kujon"s = boring, lame bookworms. It was cool to be smart without working for it.
Yea, where I grew up there was also a term like "bookworm" which was used pejoratively, but it wasn't cause for social rejection, it was merely one of the myriad of ways that kids tease each other. It's not as though the "bookworm" was humiliated or bullied for being so. At least, that's how I remember it.
Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
At risk of being patronizing, you're probably being downvoted by parents who figure you don't have kids. We have spent many years trying to present gender-neutral environments to our children. Yet at age 3 my son completely ignored the giraffe we were trying to point out at the zoo, and would only focus on the irrigation pump. That kind of experience was repeated often with him and my daughters. One daughter would on…
> We have spent many years trying to present gender-neutral environments to our children. [...] > This was before school My son's favourite colour before he started daycare was pink. That rapidly got policed out of him by other children and disappointingly by staff in day care. We persevered - "anyone can like any colour; boys can have pink as their favourite colour, girls can have blue as their favourite colour" and…
> before he started daycare was pink
Pink used to be considered a masculine color in England (a boy color) in the 1800's.
Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
#188"The latest study, in France, involved 80 children, 48 boys and 30 girls" What do i win for spotting errors?
Obviously there were 158 children in total.
Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a newer version of eugenics with a bit of social darwinism in it. Actually I come from a family of people who either hide during the war (jewish/polish origins), or suffered from it. Maybe you'd also label it as "didn't have to struggle too much at life". Eitherway, I don't think society was built to reflect the state of nature and competition. If you think struggle is good, I think you have some skewed b…
Your response is not surprising. "Struggle" is not definitive marker of said expression. Specific protein is, which can be detected if you wanted it. Those with the adaptation, either it is liberal, like you, or conservative, like me, always seek to sustain that environment. Because changing genetic expression is a slow process and not preferred by the body. And your behavior, including this comment, is a result of c…
You know me so well.
When will your book come out ?
Re: Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
And some of us do worse! Everybody overlooks the other statistic from this experiment: the girls' scores dropped as much as the boys rose, when playing the 'game'. I'd be more worried about that. Its not about reading, folks.
The girls' scores dropped half as much as the boys' rose. Similar 'good' numbers for both, much worse 'bad' numbers for boys.
Did we read the same article? Their scores essentially swapped.