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

201–210 of 225 posts

Re: My Students Can't Read

#201

Post by ludicrousdispla »

stult wrote: post #80
jhbadger wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Legal language is basically a programming language for lawyers. It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it any more than to expect a non-coder to understand source code. Even most politicians keep staff to do the actual reading of bills.

That's not true at all. Modern legal education has focused on plain English drafting and avoidance of arcane jargon precisely to make legal documents comprehensible to non-specialists. There are almost no situations where legal drafting requires use of jargon. Jargon is pretty much only necessary where the domain requires use of jargon. Contracts are meant to be followed by the parties, and if the parties can't under…

"comprising" and "consisting of" have very different meanings in patent law, but I expect most people would consider them synonymous.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#202

Post by xethos »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #150
raddan wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies. Perhaps this is the case, but it is a great loss to civilization if true. The fact is that there are many ideas that take time and length to explain. Read any good scientific paper. These things are not fluff. As the author of a number of scientific papers (at least a couple of whi…

> The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually t…

> Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually type anything :)

Sure, that's why this [0] XKCD was made - getting pulled off on a geeky sidequest, automating something that has (almost) no business being automated, and spending far longer configuring, debugging, and refining your "time saving" scripts than actually doing the damn task are what I expect a dev to get lost in.

Which, sure, is a form of laziness, but it has a different vibe than getting an LLM to do everything for you IMO.

As an aside, a common refrain is that the best computer people are innately curious; they wanted to see how the computer responded if they broke or changed something. LLMs make putting up with the (relatively) long slog to find out less likely to happen; in a way, I'd argue they destroy curiousity itself: a horrifying proposition for anyone that looks to the future of computing, or even humanity in general.

[0] https://m.xkcd.com/1319/

Re: My Students Can't Read

#203

Post by GregDavidson »

I learned to read English the same way I learned to understand it spoken: exposure. As a young child a relative would put me in their lap and a book I liked in my lap and read to me. After awhile I was reading fluently without effort. Most schools teach reading as a conscious intellectual decoding task which leaves little brain power left to engage with the material - the same way most schools teach "foreign" languages. Engage the brain's language centers and language skills will be fluent.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#204

Post by lordfrito »

nsainsbury wrote: post #84

Yep. Smartphones and social media were the jab, jab, and now AI is the knockout punch. We're raising a generation of people who quite literally do not know how to think for themselves and completely lack the motivation (and attention span required) to even try.

I use the term "programmable people" for people like this, in that they believe what the screen tells them to believe and they do what the screen tells them to do. It bothers me that it won't be long before these programmable people represent the overwhelming majority of voters. Not sure what happens then but history tells me it won't be good.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#205

Post by jagged-chisel »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #135
jagged-chisel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Response looks cherry picked. I’d be curious to know the methodology here. I’ve seen intelligent students twisting in an attempt to satisfy the instructor that they (have been trained to) assume is trying to trick them with puzzles; the kind where “gotcha!” is the typical teaching method; where common sense is frowned upon.

IIRC the paper is behind a paywall. But this article has some good snippets from it: https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliewexler/p/struggles-with...

In this specific case, I am left with questions: Why do these students need to read 19th century novels? And why do they need to understand the details of day-to-day life of over a century ago?

These are mostly rhetorical because my point is that you will not get the same answers from instructors, teachers, professors, parents …

If you want people, especially children, to read, it needs to be interesting to them. If you want them to learn by reading, they need to have had good experiences reading.

“Here, read some Dickens and we’ll discuss it next week …” without any amount of preparation by the teacher to a) help students understand the times within which it was written, and b) prepare them for the meandering prose is indeed a recipe for disaster.

Examples:

“as here he is” - so he's already doing what he ought? Or is there an alternate reading of this phrase meaning "he's physically here, but the situation is not as it ought to be"?

“… addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers…” - by the time we get here, is he saying the advocate is present, or that the advocate ought to be present but is not?

The sentence ran on, against the education we’ve been so wearily handed over the years. If we are not permitted to craft such things, how can we be expected to ever understand them?

The most productive way to invite a student to begin parsing this, in spite of their education, is to have someone - one who understands the passage, and can render the correct inflections and emphasis - read this to the class.

Barring that, if students are expected to parse, understand, and discuss prose and topics so many generations removed from their own lives, Education® needs to get off its butt and educate.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#206

Post by rahimnathwani »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #205
rahimnathwani wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the paper is behind a paywall. But this article has some good snippets from it: https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliewexler/p/struggles-with...

In this specific case, I am left with questions: Why do these students need to read 19th century novels? And why do they need to understand the details of day-to-day life of over a century ago? These are mostly rhetorical because my point is that you will not get the same answers from instructors, teachers, professors, parents … If you want people, especially children, to read, it needs to be interesting to them. If…

You're missing the point. They were given excerpts to read and, even with access to their phones to look up unfamiliar words, they were not able to understand what was written.

No one forced them to read full novels or even full pages.

No one expected them to know what 'Lord Chancellor' was. They could look it up.

"The most productive way to invite a student to begin parsing this, in spite of their education, is to have someone - one who understands the passage, and can render the correct inflections and emphasis - read this to the class."

The purpose of the study was to test reading comprehension. If you replace the 'reading' part with listening, you're not testing reading comprehension.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#207

Post by LocalH »

pclowes wrote: post #28

We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate. Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness. 90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest…

The US has a really bad problem with parents thinking they should have deity-level say over every single aspect of how their kids are raised. This is very ironic, since the US also has a really bad problem with other parents thinking they can tell people how to raise their kids (witness all the "free-range" children who have innocently gotten their parents in trouble because some other parent saw them alone and called the police).

Re: My Students Can't Read

#208

Post by yonaguska »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #24
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'm refreshing a language on Duolingo and I'm careful not to blast through the exercises without actively processing them. You can treat it as mindless puzzle solving without internalizing anything. I suspect many reading averse digital natives do something similar when they can't consume video or audio.

I highly recommend comprehensible input if you're refreshing a language. Free via youtube.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#209

Post by yc0042 »

floxy wrote: post #66
jimbob45 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic. Math teachers had the balls to radically revamp their curriculums with Common Core and now their teachings are no longer formulaic but instead stimulate original thought and cre…

Citation needed for American public high schools that have a Shakespeare-heavy curriculum.

class of '23 here. Not exactly a Shakespeare-heavy curriculum, but was made to read Romeo & Juliet and Othello as well as various sonnets in high school.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#210

Post by andai »

andai wrote: post #63

>I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I recorded some tutorial videos for some kids a while back, to help them prepare fo…

I was thinking today that there is no longer a forcing function for knowing how a computer works. I think that went away in the 90s.

People who got into programming in the 80s generally learned assembly because it was the only way to get the job done (BASIC being too slow for games and graphics).

They don't generally use assembly much anymore, but often still rely on that knowledge (checking the disassembly).

This ability is no longer forced by the environment, nor is it taught. So the last few generations of programmers did not learn how a computer works.

Post reply on HN