351–360 of 364 posts
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Evidently not when you cite one anecdotal counter example and over generalize?
(That's not the same commenter.)
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What? Next you are going to tell me they can’t use an abacus or properly impress cuneiform into clay tablets.
You should talk to teachers, lot of kids can't answer test questions because they don't even understand the words in the question... A growing proportion of kids are close to non functional, with multiple years of delay compared to previous generations.
Comments here are very strange, “Reading books should go the way of cursive! Education is more like childcare anyways.” It’s bizarre stuff to say. What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
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People said all kinds of nonsense about comic books and cheap novels leading kids astray in the past. What actually happened is those kids ended up being slightly better readers. That you don't like something doesn't mean it's actually harmful.
People said that comic books and pulp novels were morally harmful and caused juvenile delinquency, which is indeed nonsense. However that has nothing to do with the quality and depth of the writing so your post is irrelevant.
Since then, people have suggested such things are a useful way to get kids interested in reading, because they've seen results.
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Interesting. Would you share with us their English names and what they're about?
I will only do things from memory, you can use Google yourself. * Die Vorstadtkrokodile "The suburb crocodiles", which is also how the youth gang in the book is called. Boy wants to be part of the gang, which has idiotic tests of courage. Plot twist is that the guy who refused to do this idiotic tests ends up being the tough guy. I don't remember if this was the main character or not. Ends up saving some other boy in…
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This is silly. The 'society' has done very, very many things over the centuries (including other awful ones - slavery, Japanese-American internment, segregation, oppression in Latin America and elsewhere, climate change, etc etc). To pick one and say it's necessary to CO2 scrubbers is just a rhetorical/philosophical game. That can be fun - we're on HN after all - and even informative to explore, but is not tied to re…
The point I’m trying to get at is that you seem to be trying to smuggle “liberty and justice” in under the cover of CO2 scrubbers. But the same “politics and institutions” that created our technologically advanced, prosperous society, also did those other things. Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approac…
> Even if they weren’t individually “necessary” to that advancement, it seems like being fairly insensitive to such outcomes has been a feature of the approach that has made the U.S. successful. So why fix what isn’t broken?
To say taking away people's freedoms and lives "isn't broken" is obviously part of the philosophical game.
If you mean to posit the old Faustian choice: If doing such things is required for power, should we do them? Do the ends justify the means? It's a challenging hypothetical, of course, but these days it's extremely overdone, widely used by bad people as a propaganda assault in order to seize power, and now some fools take them seriously. I'm bored with it, and taking them seriously is obviously ridiculous and dangerous.
The interesting part gets little discussion, and is far more interesting because it applies to reality: How do we take care of all of people's needs: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for all? Cutting the specs down to 'my needs' or 'many people's needs but destroy the rest' is just the corruption of power.
Some of the answer is low-hanging fruit, provided by generations before us, especially in our free democracy. Some needs to be discussed. Shall we start?
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> not linking the letters together then? Correct. > Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower? Probably yes to both counts. However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand…
I don't get your point of not writing cursive. It is literally the same as what you are already doing, but just stopping raising the hand between letters. It is also not like you have that specific cursive, and then it is unreadable. It is a continuous tradeoff of faster vs. readable, so you can just slow down for some letters and not for others. The thing that needs effort is learning to write, why did you waste tim…
As someone who learned cursive by learning a new script first, you're making a big assumption here. Nobody learns to not connect their letters.
I didn't learn to not connect my letters. I learned to write without connecting letters, and never properly learned to connect them (until much later in life), because that was never required (and never emphasised while I was in school anyway). If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess. So I didn't. Not until I learned to write in a new script and could transfer that back to my original handwriting. I still don't write a cursive lowercase F, because Cyrillic doesn't have that glyph, and the one that I'm supposed to use never looks right. Not that it matters, since I only write in cursive for myself.
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Why would you write in cursive? If you care about WPM key board toasts it. If you care about handwritten your receiver cares they got your letter at all not that it's cursive or not. Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
I don't comprehend your stance at all. Where I am from, handwriting IS cursive and the other thing is called print for a reason.
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> 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.
> Between 2007 and 2019, there definitely was progress: from 51 percent of high school biology teachers reporting emphasizing evolution and not creationism in 2007 to 67 percent in 2019. It was matched by a drop from 23 to 12 percent of teachers who offer mixed messages by endorsing both evolution and creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, from 18 to 15 percent of teachers who endorse neither evolution nor creationism, and from 8.6 to 5.6 percent of teachers who endorse creationism while not endorsing evolution.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-educati...
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I don't comprehend your stance at all. Where I am from, handwriting IS cursive and the other thing is called print for a reason.
This is not the case in the US (anymore) and atleast some places in Europe. Print gets taught first and you learn to write with that, then cursive comes later, by this point usually as an afterthought.
That was also the case for me, but the time between that is some weeks to a few months, and you train writing (perfect) spirals in that time.