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

Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 364 posts

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#271

Post by mmooss »

j7ake wrote: post #237
credit_guy wrote: post #234

How about us, the adults? In the latest "War on the rocks" podcast [1], Ryan Evans asked his guest, Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson, what books he has read lately (he often, maybe always, asks that question). The guest answered basically that, as a politician, he does not have time to read books anymore, because he is very busy with other things. I think most listeners of the podcast are absolutely ok with this.…

Literature is like classical music. One can argue Beethovens 9th symphony is one of the greatest pieces of music of all time, but that doesn’t mean we all have time to sit through 70 minutes a day listening to it. I bet important people don’t even have time to sit and watch a full movie.

You can learn far more from art than from anything else, if you try. Should important people go to religious services? Without that at arts, where do they get deep, full thoughtful perspectives on the world?

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#272

Post by lelanthran »

rayiner wrote: post #253
scoofy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff. We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people…

I’m a nerd, but we were never a nation of nerds and things turned out pretty well. The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squa…

> The reality is that, even for smart people, the world is pretty hard to navigate with book learning. I’m reminded of the last president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, a professor at Hopkins with a PhD from Columbia who wrote a book called “Fixing Failed States.” Yet he was spectacularly unsuccessful at fixing the problems that were squarely within the field of his expertise.

Outliers.

You cannot come to conclusions based on examining outliers only. The better conclusion is from taking a sample of the population, and checking the correlation between test scores and success.

> Given the limits academia’s predictive power with respect to complex issues, I think it’s more important to select for and socialize pro-adaptive “gut feelings.”

There's plenty of studies that determine the correlation between academic performance and success. Have you possibly even considered that the basic "gut-feeling" only gets better (i.e. more predictive successes) with better academic scores?

IOW, the more you know, the more you learn, the better your heuristic is when making snap conclusions.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#274

Post by lelanthran »

atmavatar wrote: post #79
scoofy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society grows great when people plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The problem is that we aren’t raising all of the kids right. It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff. We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people…

> It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff. Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted. For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts a…

> For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution.

Is this actually common? The argument is quite common, but I expected that the actual number of schools who do this is a very very tiny number.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#275

Post by lelanthran »

techjamie wrote: post #194
apparent wrote: post #186

They're axing honors classes in our high schools so they can mix all the kids together for equity. But because some of the students can't read very well (even in 10th grade), they have to read the books aloud during class, since it would be inequitable to require the kids to read on their own at home. Not surprisingly, when you're rate-limited by read-aloud speed, you can't get through that many books and excerpts ar…

Probably has to do with the method for teaching reading being terrible for several years, depending on if the school dropped phonics. I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules. This did not have good outcomes, and last I checked, there was…

> I saw some stuff about literacy dropping because they went from teaching to sound out words, to, as I understand it, basically just showing the word and teaching how it's said, hoping kids would naturally pick up the rules.

I've read a lot on this; it's "phonetics" vs "look-see".

For a really depressing read, read "Why Johnny can't read", then the sequel "Why Johnny still can't read", and then look at the dates of those two essays.

We already knew decades ago that some methods never worked in the past, and don't work now, but we still hope that they will work in the future, so we keep them around because there are powerful and mostly invisible (to the parents) interests in keeping these discredited methods around.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#276

Post by lelanthran »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #160
TitaRusell wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting how everyone parrots that art is important when the vast majority of the population will never actually engage with it. Opera? Ballet? Literature? Poetry? Classical music? Modern art? Do the numbers it seems most people can do without them and still be functional.

Avengers end game is also art. I engage with this type of art. I don’t consider opera the art of our modern culture. It is unfortunately a niche.

> Avengers end game is also art. I engage with this type of art. I don’t consider opera the art of our modern culture. It is unfortunately a niche.

That's the thing, though - in English literature class, there is nothing stopping the teacher from using popular media to introduce things like tone, ambiance, character motivations, arcs, etc, and then ask for parallels to the set works.

They don't do it though, the system is not set up to produce a bunch of critical thinkers from English Lit.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#277

Post by mattkrause »

lelanthran wrote: post #264
mattkrause wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those quizzes are part of the problem. It was so dispiriting to read, even enjoy, the assignment and then get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket.

> It was so dispiriting to read, even enjoy, the assignment and then get dinged because you couldn’t remember whether the protagonist put on an otherwise irrelevant blue sweater or red jacket. Maybe things have really changed a lot since I was in school, but that was certainly not the type of questions that were asked of set works. The questions were asked such that, the more the student got into the book, the higher…

We certainly had questions like that as part of bigger assessments and they were pretty reasonable.

However, some of the teachers at my school also had short pop-quizzes meant to ensure that everyone kept up with the reading. These were usually just some details from the assigned chapters and, IMO, often veered into minutia. One really was about the color of something and I don’t remember it being particularly plot-relevant or symbolic, even if it was mentioned a few times.

It wasn’t a huge part of one’s grade, but I distinctly remember being frustrated that these quizzes effectively penalized me for “getting into” the book and reading ahead.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#279

Post by dragonwriter »

theultdev wrote: post #196
apparent wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading I would not assume this, given that the states with the highest literacy rates are mostly rural and at least half red (NH, MN, ND, VT, SD, NE).

Break that down further and you'll see it's blue cities in those red states that have the highest illiteracy rates. Same with crime. Kind of goes hand in hand. Education in blue cities needs to be fixed.

> Break that down further and you'll see it's blue cities in those red states that have the highest illiteracy rates.

Not true; in both red and blue states, its rural (usually relatively redder for the state) areas that have the highest illiteracy rates.

> Same with crime.

OTOH, with crime its true that higher population density areas (which also tend to be bluer) tend to have higher aggregate crime rates (though some important categories of crime, notably firearms homicides, reverse this.) But the fact that general crime rates do that has been recognized not merely longer than the current ideological divide between the US major parties, but longer than the existence of electoral democracy; the driving factor being density => opportunity => crime. Opportunity scales with dyadic interactions which scale asymptotically with n² (n=density). It's also worth noting that areas within states don't have the kind of Constitutional sovereignty against states that states do against the federal government; with no equivalent of the 10th Amendment protection that states have against federal encroachment. They don't generally have the power define serious crimes, or define punishment for serious crimes (they may have the power to define and punish infractions and misdemeanors), define correctional and rehabilitation policies that apply to serious offenders, etc. All those things are done at the state level. They also have very limited (because of state law) control of public health (mental and physical) policy, taxation levels and distribution, etc. So even if it was policy and not population density driving the difference in crime rates, the local areas aren't the ones in control of most of the potentially-relevant polices, the states are.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#280

Post by prennert »

The headline should have been ...especially in English Class.

Even in the 90s most people got book summaries to get through the curriculums. I would say, the highest performing language students and teachers pets at school did exactly that.

School unfortunately is largely about reciting of the teachers knowledge, so there is no need to read the source and think for yourself.

Post reply on HN