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How bad are childhood literacy rates?

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Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#51

Post by ryao »

AngryData wrote: post #48
chimpansteve wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is English your first language? If it isn't, I completely agree with you. However if it is, then I would make the argument that it's exactly the right way to teach it, particularly to young people. As you point out, it's a very fluid language with a lot of rules that are completely arbitrary. As a native speaker, it's more important getting to grips with the, I dunno what we'd call it on here, pseudocode rather than…

I don't know if I would agree that how we teach it now is really the best way, but I overall agree with you that in order to really learn english you need an extremely wide and varied exposure to english in order to learn all the "rule breaking" and make english across the world and through time intelligible.

People can learn this outside of school. People who learn English as a second language do. Forcing it on me as a child meant that I did not learn English properly, until well into my adulthood. I am a native speaker in my 30s and I am still finding faults in my English education that need correction. One of the most recent ones I have found is using “pet” as a past tense. The correct past tense is “petted”. If school had properly taught English without forcing me to read incorrectly written literature that confused me, I would not have been saying this wrongly for decades. Another issue in my English that I found in recent years was use of the word “wrong” where I should use “wrongly”. Adjectives are not adverbs. :/

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#52

Post by spwa4 »

sureglymop wrote: post #50
donsupreme wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some AI going to be the best teacher for any children

Not sure if you're being sarcastic. I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with. It may have been because they had shown kindness or that they were overly interested in their own subject or something else, but there was a sense of "not wanting to disappoint" the "good teachers" and thus pay more attention and try to excel. I think we are very far from suc…

> I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with.

Not me. Knowledge and patience do it for me. Computers do pretty well on the patience front, but are a bit more "DIY" than I'd like on the knowledge front. I'm hoping AI can fix that. But I have met humans who did well on both, and boy did I advance in skill studying under them. They are far superior to anything I think AI could ever become. But they are few and far between, at any level of education (even at uni, they're exceptional).

Most teachers I was far smarter than the teacher and they were a waste of time. Plus I've been burned extremely hard by teachers I felt a personal human connection with (and then social workers) "trying to help". Never again. Hell, I literally fought my way out that situation, physically, many individual fights with actual people getting hurt, and not by choice (did you know, for their own ease and budget savings, social workers put kids who get bullied into the same group bedroom as kids who pulled a knife at school (and don't make sure they don't have a knife). That's how much they ACTUALLY care). Never again.

I also would like to point out the priority. A patient teacher with knowledge and zero human connection: anyone who wants to learns A LOT. People who really don't want to learn, learn a little. A teacher with knowledge but no patience: everyone learns a lot, but there's a lot of shouting. It becomes painfully clear who is best. A teacher with lots of human connection without knowledge: everyone learns very little. A teacher with lots of human connection and no knowledge or patience: worst of all possible worlds. Bullies run the classroom. Nobody learns anything.

This last kind of teachers, lots of human connection (at least in their mind) and very little knowledge, rules the schools of our country.

In other words, you want to do well for students: for teachers, knowledge comes first, by 100 miles. Human connection is somewhere between nice to have and destructive. Patience: same. Makes things look nicer from the outside, but is actually kind of destructive.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#54

Post by lelanthran »

ryao wrote: post #24
HEmanZ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being sarcastic? I completely disagree with you here. Even at a young age people can understand that Huck Finn is a novel told from the perspective of a southern boy in the 1800s, not how you’re “supposed to write” when in another class you have to write and essay about Marie Curie. I think I was like 7 when I could tell this difference. And Huck Finn is for 12-14 year olds. Books like Huck Finn are critical…

> Are you being sarcastic? I was serious. I cited Huckleberry Finn because it was the most egregious of the books that were forced on us, but it was by no means the only one. Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books and I hated being forced to read them because I could see how it was confusing me. > Books like Huck Finn are critical to building the model in your head that every writer has a differe…

> Many examples of incorrect grammar were normalized by books

I don't recall that in Huckleberry Finn outside of dialog (I may be misremembering, though; I'm 50 so you can probably guess the year that I read it in).

If it's dialog, sometimes but not always, enclosed in quotation marks, why would you expect correct grammar? People don't talk in correct grammar.

If the entire book is a narration, then the entire book will be filled with grammar as it is spoken, not grammar as it is written.

A few exceptions come to mind (Alan Paton's "Cry The Beloved Country" and some other stories I recall reading that used broken grammar as part of the plot, story or for effect), but on the whole most books have had grammar that follows the rules.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#55

Post by pirates »

ryao wrote: post #32
_alternator_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re pointing out a real problem, but the solution is backwards. English, like any language, is not a formal rigid system like a programming language. “Undoing” the supposed ‘rules’ of language with good literature shows that the true rules of language are more complex and nuanced than the heuristics we use to teach children, and that these exceptions create richness, variety, and culture. Ultimately it rea…

People get plenty of this outside of school. If they get it in school too, they will always be confused, like I was.

I got it in school and was not confused.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#56

Post by lelanthran »

7thaccount wrote: post #14
nobodyandproud wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important…we did too much of that focus”. Without knowing the before and after, it’s not safe to say it’s still very early. Few additional weeks? Few additional months? Few additional years? At some point and grade a class should be moving past the time-consuming out-loud reading and pronunciation corrections to timed (and silent, focused)…

Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter. I taught my daughter to read when she was 4 and she was reading ~30 page books in kindergarten. Nothing outrageous, but she was pretty far ahead of her class that were still going over ABCs. This was outside of a few other kids who had parents tha…

> Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter.

My experience matches yours: My child is now 5.5yo, and reads books up to 8 pages in one sitting, consisting of 3 paragraphs per page, with maybe 12-20 words per paragraph. No pictures in any books.

Here is the conversation between myself and the pre-school teacher when she brought up that he has trouble reading:

Me: What specifically did he have trouble reading?

Teacher: Some of the numbers, such as "Eight".

Me: I was told you taught reading by phonetics?

Teacher: We do. We teach reading by phonetics only.

Me: You don't teach by word memorisation at all?

Teacher: No, the curriculum is phonetics only until the higher grades. No word memorisation at all!

Me: Did you teach the kids how to pronounce 'ight'?

Teacher: No, that is only covered in grade 2 and above.

Me: So how are the kids supposed to know how to pronounce 'Eight'?

Teacher: We teach that.

Me: How do you teach that?

Teacher: We show them the word next to the number.

Me: Isn't that teaching by memorisation of words?

TBH, that was effectively the end of the conversation even though it limped along for another few minutes. The teacher remained adamant that they don't teach by the look-see (or any other memorised-word method), but continued giving examples of words the kids are supposed to know because they had lessons with pictures next to words like "fox" and "lamp", etc...

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#57

Post by Wild_Dolphins »

WillAdams wrote: post #15
SamPatt wrote: post #11

This seems bad on its face, but I wonder if this is specific to reading comprehension or to all comprehension? If our society moved from text to video as the primary way to transmit information, would our ability to communicate and comprehend the world necessarily be diminished? Text has been around for only a blip compared to oral communication. I love reading, and it feels bad to see it decline, but I'm trying to b…

The thing is, back before writing became prevalent, Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience watching a performance, then afterwards, writing down the entire thing from memory. Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poem…

>Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience... writing down the entire thing from memory.

This would have been VERY difficult as Shakespeare wrote plays in iambic-pentameter, a form of decasyllabic verse; which could be considered a kind of very-loose 'checksum'.

The audience member who was pirating-Shakespeare plays would have to recall the dialog-from-the-play absolutely perfectly to render it in the original iambic-pentameter. Possible, but super tricky.

Shakespeare has built-in copy-protection. Renaissance style.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#58

Post by lelanthran »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #34
logsr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

literacy is only important if you don't want to live a subsistence poverty lifestyle. other than that, completely useless.

There's not just one kind of literacy though. I have no problem reading books or blog posts on HN, but someone handed me a research article and I realised I struggled to understand it at all and had to re read and concentrate hard. Almost like there was some kind of performative obtuseness to the writing to appeal to an in group of other researchers.

> I have no problem reading books or blog posts on HN, but someone handed me a research article and I realised I struggled to understand it at all and had to re read and concentrate hard. Almost like there was some kind of performative obtuseness to the writing to appeal to an in group of other researchers.

I read all the time, research papers included. What I discovered is that when I arm tired in the afternoons I can read and reread a paper and not really understand much, but if I read a paper first thing in the morning I never have to reread it for understanding.

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#59

Post by pjc50 »

SamPatt wrote: post #11

This seems bad on its face, but I wonder if this is specific to reading comprehension or to all comprehension? If our society moved from text to video as the primary way to transmit information, would our ability to communicate and comprehend the world necessarily be diminished? Text has been around for only a blip compared to oral communication. I love reading, and it feels bad to see it decline, but I'm trying to b…

Big "it depends". Video can be used to present good information in more ways simultaneously than text; it can be a more involving artistic experience; but is it? Is the incentive structure in fact to produce youtube-face clickbait four hour videos about why Star Wars is woke now?

Re: How bad are childhood literacy rates?

#60

Post by WillAdams »

SoftTalker wrote: post #26
WillAdams wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, back before writing became prevalent, Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience watching a performance, then afterwards, writing down the entire thing from memory. Similarly, _The Metamorphoses_, and _The Iliad_, and _The Odyssey_ were part of an oral tradition and their structures were created to as to facilitate memorization and recitation --- how many poem…

I couldn't even read those books. Forget about memorizing them.

It wasn't that long ago that books were so rare/valuable/difficult to have access to that folks would read and memorize pretty much everything they could lay their hands on.
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