I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
Never enjoyed the stuff that got assigned in school though. I’d probably like it now.
I read because I wanted to all the time, but every reading assignment was a chore.
It's a tough position to be in, although I'd imagine it could be remedied by having the kids pick whatever book they want. So they can read whatever they want, but they do have to actually read it. Form a learning/teaching point of view, this is probably ideal, but I'd imagine it's not really possible from a logistical point of view, since the teacher would likely have to familiarise themselves with as many books as they have pupils, which isn't viable unless the class is fairly small.
The problem is that if you don't force them, they never actually become literate enough to discover that reading is fun later in life.
Maybe if I wasn't forced to read a book in an outdated language about some Christian farmer 300 years ago while I was not in school, and if I could access a succinct version 1/10th of the length of the book, I'd read it.
Maybe if I wasn't asked to describe minor details to prove I read the book, I'd actually focus on the story and not on every irrelevant detail.
Maybe if my teacher didn't force their religious holier-than-thou attitude and allowed us to form our own opinions, I'd be more engaged.
What school taught me was how to get away with not reading the books. I skimmed books by skipping tens of pages at a time or asked friends for the TL;DR or just got an F.
Now I have a feeling of uneasiness and dread when I try to read fiction for fun. So I don't.
Most 300 page fiction books I had to read could've easily been condensed to 30 pages without any loss of information.
Being forced to read and memorize poetry was the absolute shit. A lot of people won't care about poetry no matter how hard you try to force them to like it. And half of it was propaganda - how $nation survived $struggle, how $nation is so great or beautiful or how $hero did $ethical_thing.
no cap Mr Darcy ur parties are bussin fr fr
The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare. So who cares what they do with their time.
This is why I, despite my deep appreciation for the pursuit of knowledge and having spent a significant chunk of my life in the academia after graduating, want my kids to spend as little time as strictly necessary in primary or secondary schools. And the need comes from the fact that I need some of that childcare, not that I need someone else to teach my children anything.
it seems like thinking is a form of torture for some... but maybe its our work/lifestyle that makes it so.. idk
I objectively find myself to be an independent thinker, and I mostly find it distracting. I could be much more functional to society/work/relationships if I spent more time thinking about the kinds of things other people think about, in the way they think about them.
I observe most of the most successful people in society, are successful _because_ they have mainstream thought patterns, people look up to them because they understand them, and they develop solutions that are in line with what most people need/want/desire.
I would cut almost every other class from the curriculum before cutting English.
Because they can't read or write, and neither can most adults, including developers.
That said, maths aren't much different. Being bad at maths is a cultural marker of sorts, since many maths classes are very bad indeed at teaching much beyond basic addition and subtraction.
See this very website on people who complain that they can't digest a pretty straightforward article
Out of all of Žižek's writings, that article really isn't that bad. I agree it could do with some headings, but you shouldn't need ChatGPT to summarise it for you, but I'm not surprised some people do.
Because people VASTLY overestimate their ability with their native language or their command of native language literature.
The SAT English Achievement tests used to absolutely obliterate even students who got good AP English scores. This isn't limited to English--even native Japanese speakers struggle with the advanced JLPT levels, for example. Grammar is hard, yo.
If you don't actively study your native language, your working vocabulary is quite small and your grammatical constructs are excessively simple.
As for shared literature, we were in front of what was claimed to be the house of Jonathan Swift with a bus full of tourists from various English-speaking countries, and the tour guide cracked a joke about "A Modest Proposal". I snickered a bit but didn't think much else. The tour guide pulled me aside later that I was the first person to get the joke and it was almost the end of the year--we're talking hundreds to thousands of people from the US, Australia, India, etc.
I mean, just ask someone to name three main characters and what they did in the last book they read. Most people will struggle. You need to spend some discussion time in order to affix a book into your memory.
And how are you, right now, communicating? You're writing in English. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, all written down, is its own subject that people aren't born knowing or can acquire like they can speak.
In addition, it's English Literature and Language in the same, so yes, about knowing partly a canon, but how how to interpret texts, both nonfictional and fictional and poetic.
> It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear.
I don't know how to explain to you why it's important to educate humanity.
Most school districts do allow students to test out of classes and get placed at higher grade levels. The majority of people would never have tested above grade level. Your presence here means that you likely would have.
> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.
Providing every child with an education has been pedestrian in the developed world for less than a hundred years; it is far more expensive (and generally far more worthwhile) than mere childcare. The majority of people now living on earth never had the opportunities you and I had in school. This wasn’t because their caretakers didn’t love them, it’s because there was a dearth of resources available to educate them.
> The purpose of English class was to provide a field for interdisciplinary subjects. We learned how to write the standard five paragraph essay. We learned how to detect dishonest and manipulative messaging in advertising. We learned to relate themes in literature to contemporary society.
This is how I remember my English classes. We did not spend much time at all on grammar after the 9th grade. We didn’t study any classic literature besides reading a Shakespeare play every year; you had to take a separate course for that. This is also how the classes are treated in most colleges these days; you’ll get English majors who spent 4 years reading critical theory and bad contemporary novels written by friends of the department head, rather than anything with serious cultural cachet.
This is the only serious criticism of the subject, in my opinion; the applications that grammar has in logical reasoning, composition, interpretation, and foreign language acquisition are too significant to shrug off, but it isn’t being taught particularly rigorously anymore.
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'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?
>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
On a white board or diagram, block letters seem like the most legible choice.
Everything else is typed.
Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
Is this like....a personal feeling? Or something with actual data behind it? But even if so - why does it matter? If you write short notes, do you not write them in cursive?
>>Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
That's beyond pedantic, I struggle to imagine that anyone other than the a professional linguist would call a ball pen a machine.
It does make sense to hand write short notes in cursive if you're hand writing short notes at all, but many people never learned it, or are so rusty it would take deliberate practice to restore proficiency.
And again, that doesn't really answer my question - if you don't write in cursive, how do you write?
Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.
> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.
So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
>>But of course this is HN where most people are technical.
For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change the fact that hand writing is still the best(for me) way to save and recall information.
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 what I wrote when I come back to it. I'm just a little too sloppy. It would take effort for me to get to the point where my cursive is neat and I frankly just don't handwrite enough to warrant that effort.
Consider this, do you use shorthand? I'd assume not. But why not? It's the fastest way to write anything. Cursive, by comparison, is both a lot of effort to write, is slower, and it wastes space.
I'd say for (some of) the same reasons you likely don't write shorthand, I don't write in cursive.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
Anyone using paper + pen? Writing a letter or thank you note?
You know, stuff only people who grew up before the internet was popular still do.
I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.
There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.
My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.
I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.
I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.
I basically had to teach myself all over again. Not much fun.
There’s a program called Arrowsmith that has a summer program called the Cognitive Intensive Program. It’s basically 3-4 hours a day of speed reading analog clock for 7 weeks. You start out at 2 handed and work up to 8 handed.
Changed my son’s life. He was a completely different student afterwards, for the better.
Needless to say this trips my crank/cult smell meter.
I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.
I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.
It’s bizarre stuff to say. What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?
At the end of the day the AP exams didn't test you on your knowledge of The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby. The exam tested you on your ability to read an excerpt and answer questions about it as well as your ability to write a multi-paragraph essay from a prompt while a proctor wearing the most hideous smelling blackberry perfume bathed you in an olfactory assault every time they walked by. In-classroom writing assignments were the most effective way to prepare and we did them frequently. As a reward for doing well you got to skip a couple of 100 level English credits in college.
Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today, but it feels like the education system never takes a moment to look inward and acknowledge that The Scarlet Letter and My Antonia are dreadfully boring reads. It took me three tries to finish 1984 because the beginning is such a slog. It is strange to say kids aren't interested in reading (from the article) when a lot of the subject matter is objectively dull. Four of the six books in the article header are books I don't even want to think about let alone read.
functionmouse•3h ago
gscott•3h ago