201–210 of 222 posts
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Agreed. The Reddit discussion on this is full of anecdotes, questions, first had experiences with the school system and how this happens, etc. HN? Attack the article. And that’s the nicest comments, the ones that don’t attack the people with reading issues.
Where is the reddit thread?
https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rqulik/til_t...
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We’re talking about learning basic stuff, not top tier postgrad stuff. The article is about the majority of American adults being unable to read prose at a sixth grade level - that is, years before SF suggests teaching algebra. That is absolutely a massively distributed pedagogical failure of outstanding degree. Unless the average adult is so mentally disabled that acceptable-or-above teaching should result in this o…
I'm not here to defend the American education system. It's just a big jump from "this issue is so widespread only a failure of teaching can explain it all" to "learning disabilities don't exist".
I probably worded it very vaguely.
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> In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential. My impression from reading the Wikipedia article is that the U.S.’s lite…
>I also wonder how much the immigration rate affects this stat. Probably not much? Looking at reading achievement by race, we see that whites do worse than asians, and blacks doing worse than hispanics. In both those pairs we see the group with more immigrants do better than the group with less immigrants. https://i.imgur.com/sA7vPJ5.png
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1) I would be interested to see your source that says that enough funding gets sent to private schools to impact public school's ability to try and achieve the goals they are supposed to achieve. 2) If amount of money spent were actually a factor then why do we show no plausible link between literacy rate [1] and per pupil spending [2] by the government in public schools. This also doesn't account for how homeschoole…
>and yet homeschoolers spend vastly less in comparison to public and private schools (Finding a public source for spending that I am comfortable with is a little hard, so I am basing this on what I know of spending in my local homeschool groups. The test score comparisons are fairly easy to find.). That seems...off. I would actually appreciate a source there because I just did some back of the napkin math. If you are…
I can educate both my children to a higher standard in a far more personalized education form for less than $5,000 per child per year in actual financial cost. This includes progressive curriculum materials, paid external learning opportunities (things like park/nature center passes, museums, group activities, etc.), travel costs (yes, we actually do a far amount of local and some longer travel in the course of their school year for education purposes), and school supplies.
Opportunity cost tends to be more subjective and harder to realize because the success of opportunity is hard to predict. Does that mean I live in a single-income household? Yes, but my spouse and I chose this because we wanted to give our children as good an opportunity to succeed as we can and this was the way we were determined to do it. My spouse is actually has a higher education level than I do but chose to stay home and do this for our children. My spouse doesn't see this as the loss of opportunity but the gain of ability to spend more time with our children helping them learn and grow into compassionate, driven, and hard-working individuals. The fact that we can do so for less actual cost than the public or private school systems is just a bonus.
(I do realize this is anecdotal, but it is the best source I have right now and other homeschool parents in my area say much the same regardless of ethnic or economic background.)
I couldn't write a coherent sentence until I was 24 years old. A couple years after high school I discovered reading starting with "Cannery Row" however it still took significant effort to learn to write despite thousands of hours of reading. Once I understood the basic mechanics of grammar, fitting words into meaningful structures became second nature. I still can't spell the word coherent without assistance from a…
> People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. People are probably hostile because you're going against scientific consensus and saying a range of disabilities that affects millions of people doesn't exist.
We should be very careful with scientific consensus of a social science. Maybe we should say if you lead a horse to water, it doesn't drink, and you need that horse to work on the farm to grow food to feed your family, you are going to have a very bad time instead of what teachers told me time and time again, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." What type of person gives up on a horse that doesn't drink instead of figuring out what is wrong with the horse or understanding animal behavior to train the horse to drink and pull plows and stuff?
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We’re talking about learning basic stuff, not top tier postgrad stuff. The article is about the majority of American adults being unable to read prose at a sixth grade level - that is, years before SF suggests teaching algebra. That is absolutely a massively distributed pedagogical failure of outstanding degree. Unless the average adult is so mentally disabled that acceptable-or-above teaching should result in this o…
Both exist. Teachers make a huge difference, and there is absolutely a range of ability amongst students. (For dozens of reasons) When I was teaching programming I realised that by best students were going to become excellent programmers regardless of what I did. Like, if I literally didn’t teach them anything and left them to just goof around quietly on their computer on their own, they’ll still end up great. Teachi…
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> People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. People are probably hostile because you're going against scientific consensus and saying a range of disabilities that affects millions of people doesn't exist.
> scientific consensus We should be very careful with scientific consensus of a social science. Maybe we should say if you lead a horse to water, it doesn't drink, and you need that horse to work on the farm to grow food to feed your family, you are going to have a very bad time instead of what teachers told me time and time again, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." What type of person gives…
Ones who aren't good at what they're doing. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with school.
I think some of the aversion to the "doesn't exist" claim is it seems to leave a hole. There are two ways of saying something doesn't exist / isn't real. You can say the cause isn't there or the effect isn't there. Take malaria. As you might know, the name means "bad air". People used to think bad air from swamps and jungles made you sick. If I didn't believe this I could say "swamp air can't make you sick, malaria doesn't exist". Which, sure, the disease doesn't come from the gas. But people do seem to get sick in a similar way at swamps that they don't get sick in dry areas. Isn't that real?
Another reason people will react to you with hostility is you're pattern matching people who have been hostile to them. People with depression get told "it's all in your head". Sure, that's where the brain is. "No, it's just the way you look at things". Sure, yeah, bad at looking at things. Still depressed. I don't think that "gently scolding" people has show up as effective treatment. But the point isn't to help. It's to dismiss and degrade.
You're also still only half way to looking at things holistically. You want to zoom out (based on what you've said about yourself and the horse example). But instead of looking at the system all together, you're pulling the blame from 100% on the student (something you got as a painful message) and putting it 100% on the teachers. Neither is representative of reality.
Is someone disabled if they can't see well enough to drive? What if they don't want to drive? What if they can drive with glasses? What if there aren't glasses good enough for them, is it that optometrists are disabled? What if they can't afford them? These are all really interesting social questions and there are no perfect answers. But if I get the sense that someone is trying to ignore the reality that some people can see fine and some people see poorly and suffer for it, and that any of this suffering is at all localized on the person who can't see, I'm going to think they're trying to pull one over on me.
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> To give an analogy: someone who can't walk has a disability, but it would be a failure of the instructor to make 5K running the only way to get a passing grade in physical education And that individualized education would have no effect whatsoever on their place in the eventual statistic that x% of Americans cannot run 5k.
And why would that statistic be important? Also, imagine running 5K being a requirement for admission to college.
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Well, that's literally how children read -- they figure out the sounds from letters and pronounce syllable by syllable, then repeat the whole word (if then don't forget something in the middle of it). Naturally, if there is more than one way to read everything, it kinda doesn't work.
But that's well before sixth grade level. It's possible it is a huge factor, but it's also possible it's less than 5% of the problem.
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But that's well before sixth grade level. It's possible it is a huge factor, but it's also possible it's less than 5% of the problem.
I would expect that to accumulate over years, because less proficiency in early age would mean less exposure to texts of increased difficulty. And if reading is not fun, cool and neither is it easy -- why even do that. Add absence of reading parents and general socioeconomical situation and it makes a disaster.