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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3499 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 24, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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As someone who has a fake going on the computer job and a degree, I've gotten roped in to tutoring/babysitting a psuedo family members kids. They go to one of those classical academy style charter schools everybody is excited about and got dANG: These 3rd - 5th graders don't know how to fucking read.

They are learning through something like systematic phonics (probably), where you learn letter and syllable sounds first; resulting in two kids who REALLY slowly scan through a sentence like human recursive descent parsers and one brighter middle schooler who totally ignored the teachers and taught himself how to read on his own by simply picking up a book and plowing through it.

Interestingly, one of the two kids in elementary is doing pretty good in math, so I gotta assume that the IQ is there. Little dude might be a little dyslexic, who knows?

Apropos: Anybody have any experience getting kids who can read but aren't very good at it interested enough in a book that they are willing to learn on their own? What are the kids reading these days? I'm gonna see if I can't find them a bigass children's science encyclopedia, that was my jam as a little babu but I welcome any suggestions from ya'll.

I'd like to second this from @roystgnr :

Comic strip collections ... let young readers who aren't 100% solid manage to grasp more context from the drawings.

I got started with reading on "Calvin & Hobbs," one of the all time greats. I'm not sure if Spaceman Spiff is still relevant, but I know the stuff about ethical philosophy and girls being gross is timeless.

The obvious "nudge" style suggestion is to put on closed captions / subtitles for every youtube video / TV show they watch. Or get them into video games or websites that involve reading a lot of text?

Anybody have any experience getting kids who can read but aren't very good at it interested enough in a book that they are willing to learn on their own?

What level are they at?

Comic strip collections (my kids liked Baby Blues most, IIRC) let young readers who aren't 100% solid manage to grasp more context from the drawings.

Children's science encyclopedias are great; if the kids have some obsession (space, dinosaurs, animals, whatever) then get one focused on just that to start with.

At a higher level, Harry Potter is a classic for this. My eldest went from "slowly moving through 100 page books together because that's what mommy or daddy were pushing" to "finishing 500 page tomes by herself because nightly reading time with daddy wasn't long enough or frequent enough" astonishingly fast.

At a higher level, Harry Potter is a classic for this. My eldest went from "slowly moving through 100 page books together because that's what mommy or daddy were pushing" to "finishing 500 page tomes by herself because nightly reading time with daddy wasn't long enough or frequent enough" astonishingly fast.

Similar story here, started off with the Hobbit and the Jungle Book, graduated to Harry Potter, and next thing I knew little dude was sneaking into our den to steal my books.

Perfect suggestion; they are for sure ready for some comics. I'll find some inofensive manga that they can binge if they like, maybe Dragon Ball. Some good clean slapstick and ultraviolence but fun.

Re. Tomes: The older one is about the age where I found a Wheel of Time book in the elementary school library for some god damned reason and was permanently afflicted with a love of 1500 page fantasy doorstoppers, but I don't want to scare them off.

This is literally one of the hardest societal problems scaled down. The problem of educating the uninterested. And to be fair reading isnt all that interesting as an adult, let alone a kid.

Maybe try gameifying it? Play some game where theyd need to know how to read to succeed, then make fun of them for being illiterate, that'll get em in line.

And to be fair reading isnt all that interesting as an adult, let alone a kid.

I wouldn't be surprised hearing this from a rando on the street, but you're a regular on The Motte, all we ever do is read and argue haha.

It's still a foreign notion to me, I read voraciously the moment letters ceased to be arcane scribbles, I actually did the whole reading labels on shampoo bottles thing well before it became a meme. If I show up late to my own funeral, it'll be because I was reading the obituary..

I read a lot as a child as well. DK encyclodedias, magazines, cook books, whatever was on the book shelf. But you couldnt force me to do it. I would have rather eaten the book than read it.

Recently, I've concluded that I basically agree with Bankman Fried. Most books could have been a 6 para blog post instead. And that reading for the sake of it is like driving to the grocery for the sake of it. Its a means to an end.

Recently, I've concluded that I basically agree with Bankman Fried. Most books could have been a 6 para blog post instead.

I don't necessarily disagree, it certainly doesn't seem to me that non-fiction books are optimizing very hard for succintness.

And that reading for the sake of it is like driving to the grocery for the sake of it. Its a means to an end.

I mean, I disagree, because if you consider simply driving, or even walking or running, many people find it intrinsically enjoyable. At any rate, I can't say you're not well read despite not finding it intrinsically motivating, so who am I to judge?

As someone who has a fake going on the computer job and a degree, I've gotten roped in to tutoring/babysitting a psuedo family members kids.

Speaking of reading well - this sentence took me far too long to parse. You're talking about an "email job" where you are required to do very little? And a "pseudo family member", whatever that means, knows you have plenty of time on your hands?

I don't know much about the subject, but I think what you are describing is actually the correct or less bad way for kids who aren't naturally gifted towards reading to learn to read. You have to build on simple fundamental blocks. For some kids this takes a week, for others it takes years of training. You're not supposed to work your way through the building blocks after years of school, so I don't know what's going on there. I've heard of a far worse trend from California and elsewhere in the US, where they try to teach all kids the smart kid version of scanning a full sentence, and looking for context in the paragraph etc. They're producing total illiterates.

The actual young family members I've seen recently all go to CA public schools as we (the extended family diaspora) all firmly believe that private schools are for richie riches or assholes. They are all doing something like whole language learning, and all are way more advanced in all subjects than any of the charter school kids I know (sample size: like 5. Basically worthless).

That said, they share some of my crazed book addict genes so maybe it's a worthless comparison.

That said that said: maybe I'm seeing these shitty results because this is the puritanical version of phonics where you aren't allowed to even look at a complete phrase incase it makes you go into hysterics, where as the public schools in my area are just doing common sense readings of"The Kuh AH TUH in the HUH AH TUH", you know what I mean?

I swear that fragmented phonics bullshit actually discourages kids from reading. My sample size is similarly useless, but of the eleven kids I know who can read, the three who were taught that way all hate reading and do it slowly, while the two who were taught the whole language method love it (and the other six all learned to read before they started school, and they of course love it.) And while I know it's conspiracy theory talk, it wouldn't surprise me if it was deliberate - an illiterate population is a more manageable population than a literate one after all.

It would surprise me! The people making curriculum decisions—and especially the ones implementing them—are rather removed from those “managing” the population.

Which is why they were told dumb kids need the phonics method or they will be left behind. And did we mention which races have more dumb kids? You're not a racist are you?

I think setting up a con on the entire educating class is where this starts to get implausible. Especially when the current doctrine is downstream of a decades-long political battle over psychology research. Far easier for me to believe that politicians stumbled into this stance as a consequence of general trends in accountability and social welfare.

Oh it's definitely implausible, that's why I called it conspiracy theory talk. It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be true though, after all the other implausibly convoluted manipulation techniques the USG has employed over the past century.

an illiterate population is a more manageable population than a literate one after all.

That sounds like an applause light line. Reading won't save you, if all you read is propaganda, and some of the most easily managed Current Thing followers I ever met are avid readers.

Fair, I can't say my experience with current thing followers is any different. I was under the impression that it's not that being able to read can save you though, it's the not being able to read leaves you at the mercy of those who can. I figure if you can't read, what can you do? Follow instructions, or work out everything from first principles based exclusively on the information in your memory. And when you are forced to follow instructions out of necessity you also implicitly trust the person who instructs you. Same with maths really.

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