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My Students Can't Read

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Re: My Students Can't Read

#71

Post by pclowes »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #61
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…

And what if the 35% failure rate had a disparate impact, would you still fail them?

Yes. You can’t put equity before excellence or you erode both. Passing students to avoid “disparate impact” to me is highly ignorant and often deeply racist.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#72

Post by KPGv2 »

pclowes wrote: post #67
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…

Additionally any college grad that: 1. Takes out six figures of loans for a degree in a field with no hope of commensurate income 2. Pays minimum payments below interest 3. Whines on social media that after X years of not even covering the interest payment they now owe more than ever Should: 1. Lose both their college and HS degrees. They clearly dont understand HS math. 2. Their college’s accreditation should be inv…

So your solution for the system failing a person is to punish the person but reward the powerful people engaged in the bad behavior. The ones who brainwashed the kids into thinking that this is what they're supposed to do.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#73

Post by johnobrien1010 »

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…

This assertion seems light on sources. What evidence do you have to support your claims?

Re: My Students Can't Read

#74

Post by cjbgkagh »

D-Machine wrote: post #69
cjbgkagh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if the 35% failure rate had a disparate impact, would you still fail them?

Requiring years of schooling that is essentially worthless / provides credentials with no information also has disparate impacts, possibly worse than just properly failing people and letting them sort themselves / be sorted into positions that are actually suitable for them and allow real growth. Schooling is a huge percentage of a modern person's life now.

Are you willing to risk a lawsuit to stand on your principles? Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist?

Re: My Students Can't Read

#76

Post by kys11 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #48
jimbokun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who the hell can go 10s of thousands of dollars in debt to have Socratic discussions without gaining a credential valued by employers at the end of it?

Why would you pay 10s of thousands of dollars to get a credential everyone knows is meaningless? The first ChatGPT grads are just now entering the workforce. I have a son entering his junior year of high school. Who knows if a degree will be worth even the time investment 5 years from now.

[dead]

Re: My Students Can't Read

#77

Post by atmavatar »

ngriffiths wrote: post #20

> 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…

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today

Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?

In an age where there's a million things demanding your attention, a 20-page article is asking for a lot of someone's time, and my experience has been that 19-and-a-half of those pages are nearly always filler. The student commenting they kept losing track of what the paper was about suggests the assigned article probably follows the same pattern.

A writer that meanders about most of their article with mostly unnecessary setup before getting to their point in the last paragraph is disrespectful of their readers' time and undeserving of a full read-through, in my opinion.

A common trope I see in longer articles is to give detailed narratives of one or more people's life stories before finally telling me about some recent struggle they've run into, as if I was both interested in their biographies and incapable of empathizing with their struggles otherwise. I can feel bad for someone whose tap water is flammable without having to read they were a girl scout and a national merit scholar who helped a neighbor escape a house fire and now houses local homeless people in their basement.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#78

Post by cjbgkagh »

pclowes wrote: post #71
cjbgkagh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if the 35% failure rate had a disparate impact, would you still fail them?

Yes. You can’t put equity before excellence or you erode both. Passing students to avoid “disparate impact” to me is highly ignorant and often deeply racist.

It is easier to make that call when you’re not at risk of being sued.

Re: My Students Can't Read

#79

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: My Students Can't Read

#80

Post by stult »

jhbadger wrote: post #47
ngriffiths wrote: post #20

> 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…

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 understand the terms of the contract because of obscure drafting, they can't abide by the terms.

Also legal language is in no way a programming language. And I would know, I'm a lawyer and a software engineer. It would actually be a dramatic improvement if lawyers were more consistent in their use of terms of art, but in practice there are very few terms of art that aren't either in general use or easily understood with a brief definition, and none are defined with anything like the precision or consistency of a programming language.

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