conuly | (no subject)

Metafilter is having a, uh, lively discussion on whether or not this study proves that contemporary English majors can't read.

There's a lot of potential ways to divide the commenters into two groups, but the one I expected the most was "people who think the correct way to deal with unfamiliar references in literature is to immediately look it up" and "people who think the first group needs to learn to use context clues already".

As always, I am in the second group, and every time the first group appears in real life I find myself wondering if they somehow weren't taught this skill at school. I well remember the worksheets! (To be honest, they were a little hit or miss for me - 95% of the time they just used text with words they assumed the students would be unfamiliar with, which I was never actually unfamiliar with. But the other 5% of the time they used text with made up words or with blacked out bits of text, and that was fun, and presumably we all learned a great deal. Or at least in theory... one of the reasons I had such a good vocabulary as a kid was because I read so much and never looked anything up except for fun, so... well, the point is, my classmates probably learned something! And I use that skill every time I try to read something in Spanish.)

Anyway, I'm really posting this because of two reasons.

1. Somehow, nobody has posted about the lawyer cat from the pandemic. Did they all forget? Or not see that?

2. This paragraph: One of the interesting thing about the Inns of Court is that we have some early dance choreography and melody lines not found anywhere else, in a collection that was used there to teach the law students how to dance. Of course the choreography document predates Dickens by a couple of centuries...

Somebody needs to explain wtf is up with this because wtf.

Edit: No, I thought of a third thing, which I forgot because of the second thing.

3. When your kids are very little, every well-meaning person everywhere will tell you that it's all right for them to watch a little TV, just so long as you watch with them and discuss what you're watching, and ask them questions about it. Watch actively, and train them to do so. And it wasn't until the niblings were in middle school that I realized I wasn't actually doing that the way people keep saying - instead of talking about the plot and "what do you think happens next" my running commentary during TV shows and movies goes "Wow, that background music is awfully forboding for such an apparently hopeful scene" and "Ugh, he put a blanket over her, I guess they'll hook up now" and "That transition sure is cheesy!" and, once, "You think you'll be happy when you get to Omashu , but obviously not", which prompted the kids to ask why and I had to actually think about it. (Because they left the secret tunnel and then had to climb a mountain which blocked their view of the city while chatting about how amazing it'd be to get to the city. If everything was hunky-dory then there would've been no mountain, they would've emerged from the tunnel and seen the city right there.) I don't know if the way I did it was better or worse than what people kept saying to do, but it doesn't seem to have hurt the kids and their ability to pick up on foreshadowing!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The "they don't read very well" paper is an appallingly poorly designed study on at least two levels.

1. I am in their top 5% of readers, and I would have struggled and been incredibly frustrated if someone asked me to read the beginning of a Dickens novel one sentence at a time, explaining each sentence as I go along. That's not how novels work, especially 170 year old Dickens novels - you CAN'T read them sentence by sentence and expect to have any clue what's going on. They are designed to be read and understood on a larger scale than that. Reading a whole paragraph and then going back and analyzing it sentence by sentence, sure. But that's not what their moderators asked of the study participants.

2. Making generalized judgements about the reading skill of Americans who struggled with 170 year old British prose is confounding two very different things - their actual reading skill, and their ability to handle not just archaic prose style, not just foreign terminology and vocabulary, but also historical references from a distant era they're unfamiliar with (being English, not history, majors). This is the worst kind of bigoted, classist, prior knowledge based intelligence testing, and the authors of the paper should be fucking ashamed of themselves.

Not sure if this merits being a third point:
41 percent of their participants were "English education" majors, not traditional English literature majors. Which means they were interested in learning how to teach children how to read, not in reading and analyzing 19th century English novels. That they did not break those people out and report on whether or not the education majors differed from the literature majors in their ability to understand the opening of Bleak House makes me raise my eyebrows quite a bit.

That said, I am unsurprised that a lot of the students struggled with the passage. It's dense, even for Dickens, and primary schools turn out tons of students each year who have never really learned to read well. Some of those students are going to end up as English majors, despite the poor fit, because they don't actually love books or reading/learning, they are just obtaining a degree credential that they need in order to pursue their chosen career in which they will never need to know how to read and enjoy any novel, let alone a 170 year old British novel. (that there are school teachers out there teaching children to read, who don't themselves love reading and learning, is a huge problem, but that's getting way beyond the question of "can English majors read")

It’s worth noting, too, that before college these students scored on average in the 60%ile on the ACT. We might argue about how meaningful that really is, but 75 years ago most of them would not have attended college at all, and 50 years before that many would not have graduated or even gone to high school.

One obvious consequence of expanding access to higher education that everybody always acts shocked by is that you’re going to have a harder time comparing students of today with students of way back when.

I might have simply missed it, but I was wondering also ... what kind of instruction did they give the tested students? Did the subjects *know* that they were expected to rephrase every sentence in as much detail as possible? Some of the examples made me think, "This kid probably knows exactly what this sentence is; she just doesn't think it's necessary or wanted for her to break it down all the way." I think even if they did tell students, "Use as much detail as possible," it's not likely the students understood HOW MUCH detail was needed unless an example was provided for them, maybe using a different text like Moby Dick and having the facilitator demonstrate the type of translation expected for a high mark.

I don't think giving such an example would have skewed test results. I got the impression there was a disconnect, in some cases, between what the professors considered a good reading and what the students considered a sufficient answer; the students are working with 12+ years of education where rambling at length in your answer is generally frowned upon, after all. They might assume that the facilitators want them to keep it brief, even when the facilitator says otherwise.

This next part isn't necessarily in response to you, just in general:

I do understand the professors' frustration, though. I was taking a class this past spring on Elizabethan Poetry, and there came a time, after a few assignments, where the prof had to stop and recalibrate. We spent a class period going over the parts of speech together -- what's a verb, what's a noun, how do clauses work -- and we analyzed a sonnet together as well. I was a little unnerved to see how little my classmates understood from a very simple poem.

After writing a post about this study on my own blog and sleeping on it, I've come to the conclusion that the authors chose the most difficult passage they could find from a famous canon author. They already knew what conclusions they wanted to draw with their so called "study" and they rigged the game to make sure that as many students as possible would do poorly.

So not just incompetently designed: malevolent.

That the study is evil crap and its conclusions (especially the proportion of poor readers to skilled readers in 3rd/4th year English classes) cannot be trusted does not impact on the undeniable fact that lots of university students with high GPAs are ill prepared to handle the kind of reading that one is expected to do in liberal arts classes. This is the inevitable result of decades of teaching to the test in K-12 schools, plus the credentialism that has caused vast numbers of young people to go to college because they know they need a degree to get a job at all, regardless of whether or not they have the skills required to do well in a university setting (all this to get jobs that their grandparents would have been able to get with a high school diploma, and which do not demand any of the skills one obtains with a four year degree).

Yeah, we’ve pushed college to such a degree that everyone in upper education has to deal with this! Professors are faced with students who wouldn’t have gotten into the program at all ~40 years ago; students who CAN handle a college-level course aren’t given the full experience because the majority of their classmates can’t, and the prof has to adjust accordingly; students who might enjoy certain classes are unable to because it’s taught above their level, and they aren’t prepared, so they resort to apathy and cheating, just trying to get through.

I don’t have data to support this, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the 4 proficient readers may all be male. The example given of a proficient response struck me as a very “male” answer — in general I’ve noticed that female students tend to censor themselves and keep everything brief when responding verbally in class, while male students have the confidence to expound at length and never worry that they’re annoying the teacher or going too far. Not sure if sexism played a part here; not necessarily in the test itself, but the way the subjects were raised, how they’ve been taught to behave in academia. wouldn’t be surprised.

Side note: I’m confident that I’m in the proficient reader category, but I KNOW I wouldn’t score well on this test, for a variety of reasons! (I’m sure EVERYONE thinks they’d be proficient, and you have no reason to trust my self-analysis lmao). But the thing that stuck out to me the most is the focus on looking up and thoroughly understanding Lord High Chancellor, Lincoln Inn Hall, and the Court of Chancery. If it were me, I might look up those terms briefly during a test like this, but I certainly wouldn’t waste my 20 minutes researching them in-depth enough to understand what the Court of Chancery was, which seems to be the expectation here. I would think, “This is Line 1, and that means it’s pretty damn important to the book as a whole. I can definitely keep reading and pick up what the significance is through context.” By the end of 7 paragraphs, I’d know that this was a legal situation, but not precisely what chancery entails, and that might knock me down into “competent” or even “problematic.” But if you read the whole book, or even one chapter, you know!