Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Students Can't Read

chronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 225 posts

Re: My Students Can't Read

#151

Post by ngriffiths »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #134
marcus_holmes wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days. I'm not sure it matters anyway. I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points. I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points. I know many people who don'…

> it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the…

So be it? Everyone under 30 being permanently worse off due to a decline in education is an extremely depressing outcome, that seems like the whole argument for fixing it

Re: My Students Can't Read

#152

Post by altairprime »

altairprime wrote: post #38

See also: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM (5 days ago, 866 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309233 If you can read cursive, the Newberry has a job for you (62 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607255 Kids rarely read books anymore, even in English class (5 months ago, 346 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259233 US high scho…

U.S. students from educated families lag in international tests (12 years ago, 59 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744918

Note: I could not find posts about US reading / writing educational failures prior to this in the archives, though they may still exist; but there are still many about math education and bad business writing. However, I believe this post was the bellwether warning of what would follow:

A writing career becomes harder to scale (16 years ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109011

Re: My Students Can't Read

#153

Post by awepofiwaop »

duped wrote: post #62
ngriffiths wrote: post #20

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which…

Bills are not hard to read. Especially the closer to local government you get. The problem is that bills are worth the paper they're written on until courts affirm what the language means in the context of the legal system.

Bills are not hard to read because they are complex, but because they are poorly written. They generally contain lots of comma-separated lists in sentences, as well as nested conditional clauses.

If they were written in a structured format instead of in prose (think nested bullet points, conditional blocks like a programming language, etc.) then they'd be _significantly_ easier to understand.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#155

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #132
abaymado wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor. For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually dese…

I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for. We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change. Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The ric…

[deleted]

Re: My Students Can't Read

#156

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

pclowes wrote: post #19
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #13

>And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. Well… yes. The loans are secured, so it is within the college’s interest to make 13th grade. >showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive test…

I think 13th grade is a stretch. It seems more like they are charging mid six figures to teach grades 6 through 10.

That’s fair.

When I was in school we joked about it being 13th grade, that was seeing all the kids as freshmen who CLEARLY didn’t belong there, but their guidance counselors told them for 12 years about how they need to go to college.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#157

Post by godelski »

pclowes wrote: post #139
godelski wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for. We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change. Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The ric…

Standardized testing so far is the worst solution, except for all the others. Sure, wealthy people can pay for standardized testing prep. However, test prep is a much lower barrier than having to pay for exotic experiences abroad to pad admissions essays or connections to gain political exposure so you know the appropriate shibboleths to utter or racial features to highlight.

My point implies that you have to be dynamic. If your evaluation methods are static for too long they get hacked. You have to balance that though. Change too often and your system is overly expensive and cumbersome. Change too infrequently and the cheaters end up at the top.

You're right that it can always be worse but you're wrong to say that we can't do better now

Re: My Students Can't Read

#158

Post by GuB-42 »

jkubicek wrote: post #133
GuB-42 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be? You need to give these people something to do. You say they just want to get the job, another way to say it is that if they don't graduate, they won't get the job, so what are they going to do instead? Some low skill jobs don't require much study, but there are only so many in modern society, and we don't reall…

> The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be? Doing the exact same thing they’re doing now, just without wasting 4 years in college and being $100k in debt

I wouldn't call the 4 years in college a waste, you still learn something even if it is not what will make you money later in life. General knowledge spread out over the entire population is a good thing I think.

The debt however is an other problem, a US specific one it seems. Many other countries have a lot of students and no student debt problem. But one way to think about that debt is that it is someone else's asset. Money is debt (maybe that's the kind of useless thing you learn in college ;)) and getting rid of a $100k debt is like removing $100k from the economy, and it will be felt in one way or another. I still think that student debt situation is terrible, but "solving" the student debt problem by removing students is not the way to go IMHO.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#159

Post by baggy_trough »

beej71 wrote: post #107
baggy_trough wrote: post #59

Do we have the courage to do what's necessary to fix education in the United States? That is: - abolish teachers unions - fail / keep back students who don't meet standards, in a completely objective fashion with no regard for racial / ethnic / gender sensitivities

You left off: pay teachers top wages to draw top talent, didn't you?

California already spends half the state budget on education. Isn’t that more than enough, if spent with a modicum of sanity?

Re: My Students Can't Read

#160

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Avicebron wrote: post #11

Haven't we trained everyone to context switch between screens at all times? I suspect that has something to do with it.

I enjoy doing home-lab project work at home because I have to plan things out and concentrate on a single problem for a contiguous string of time, and at the end I feel a sense of achievement in reaching, or getting closer to, the goal.

At work I spend maybe five minutes on something before being asked a question about something else, and it doesn't feel as if I really achieve much at all.

I don't get paid for the first one and do get paid for the second one, but I think for the quality of work (as a direct result of the continuity of attention) it should be the other way round.

Post reply on HN