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My Students Can't Read

chronicle.com

211–220 of 225 posts

Re: My Students Can't Read

#211
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…

It should be less stigmatized to fail, study, try again, and pass. This way more people would have the credential because they have the knowledge as more people would have the knowledge. The credential would mean something, even though most people would have it.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#212

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…

I think people say they want a meritocracy, but they actually mean "everyone can succeed", which are different. In a meritocracy where everyone is trying hard (like in asian cultures), then hard work is not enough, not everyone can succeed. In America, there is some slack so hard workers can succeed with below average genetics (which is why, practically, meritocracy="everyone can succeed") but I think things are chan…

"Anyone can, but everyone can't" probably

Re: My Students Can't Read

#213
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…

we have a school system that rewards graduation and punishes punishment. our public school especially is geared around progressing the lowest common denominator forward at all costs. private schools can run how they want, public schools are paid to do 2 things: 1. get butts in seats 2. have kids move up when the year is over

There is something about devoting effort to maintaining the form of a thing while ignoring its essence.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#214

> 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…

> which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it Literacy isn't just the ability to read words, it's the ability to interpret them. You can read while still being illiterate

Yes, and there are sometimes many layers to it, which is why you can think "cool, I get that" while still missing something important that would be obvious to an expert.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#215
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, debuggi…

> LLMs make putting up with the (relatively) long slog to find out less likely to happen

My experience has been the opposite. I get claude to go down those rabbit holes a lot, precisely because the effort of doing that is smaller, and claude usually has some insights that help. Often mistaken insights, but still.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#216
post #199

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'…

> If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me". And the person reading the essay would ask their LLM for bullet points. One wonders what the LLMs are for then, can't we just send each other bullet points directly? Must the bullet points be encoded as prose and then decoded again?

Or indeed, what essays are for, if the bullet points are communicating the same information

Re: My Students Can't Read

#217
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > IQ is about aptitude > Meaning it can be learned. Trained. […] In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ. You make this argument on the assumption that the effect is causal. But in reality one cannot distinguish whether education raises IQ or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.

> or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college. If that were the case a person's IQ wouldn't increase during that time. It's also pretty well known and well studied that you can train people to score higher on IQ tests. I'm not talking about years of training either

Whether things like "intelligence", "cognitive ability", and "aptitude" (some of which may be synonyms depending on your view) are innate vs. learned or fixed vs. variable over time are orthogonal to each other. And for each of those pairs, the answer may not be as simple as a binary division or even a gradient (it may decompose into something weirder, being causally determined by multiple factors where some of those factors are fixed and others aren't).

Moreover, both of those questions are separate from questions that get at what IQ measures (does it measure aptitude, does it measure factual knowledge, does it measure social knowledge or acculturation within a specific context, etc.).

Lots of things are easy to identify as both substantially genetically determined and variable over time and mediated by environmental factors, e.g., height. Lots of things are likewise easy to identify as significantly environmentally determined but also largely stable over time if not altogether fixed (e.g., personality, attachment styles).

It's also at least possible for all of the following to be true at the same time:

  - IQ tests correlate with socioeconomic status
  - IQ test scores vary over time and can be increased
  - some IQ score increases, or some part of a given IQ score increase, reflects a genuine aptitude increase
  - IQ tests are somewhat gameable in that training for IQ tests can increase scores so that some of the measured increase does not measure improved cognitive ability
where aptitude means something like fluid problem-solving ability, speed of learning, etc.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not? This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time. In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot. My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids o…

> In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot. No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.

Is it? I thought the point was to learn. Most reading is just busy work that doesn't actually advance the learning objectives.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#219
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If spent with a modicum of sanity. Is California paying top salaries to instructors to draw top talent?

Re: My Students Can't Read

#220

There was a study "They don’t read very well: A study of the reading comprehension skills of English majors at two midwestern universities" last year where they had university students try to read the opening of Bleak House by Dickens, they couldn't do it at all. Text: "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill." Respondent: "It’s prob…

I consider myself quite literate, and (I think) can both read and construct complex sentences that remain grammatically- and content-descriptively-correct. Having said that, when I read Thomas Pynchon, and I've only progressed through four of his more beginner-friendly books, in a number of places I feel that reading his work is something that is passively happening to me, as opposed to my actively following along wi…

I only tried reading Gravity's Rainbow, but boy, was that a totally different literary experience than I've ever had. I could only make progress while listening to trance.
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