(no subject)

[conuly]

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!

Comments

[ethelmay]

I remember having a 1960s reading textbook around the house when I was growing up (I think it was a teacher's version that my mother had bought secondhand) that had little stories about kids reading for context clues - someone figuring out what "aileron" meant was one, and there was another about figuring out what it meant that a girl put on "her mother's old mules" to run outside, or something like that. (Apparently it was called Reading for Meaning: High Roads.)

[sovay]

little stories about kids reading for context clues - someone figuring out what "aileron" meant was one, and there was another about figuring out what it meant that a girl put on "her mother's old mules" to run outside, or something like that.

That's very neat.

[ethelmay]

It was more concrete instruction of that sort than I was getting in class, I am pretty sure. Though it's entirely possible that I paid no attention.

[conuly]

It's also possible that you just don't remember your lessons in elementary school that clearly. I cannot tell you how many times I've gotten into it with people who say, in all sincerity, that it only took a day or a week for their entire class to learn how to do long division (or multi-digit addition and subtraction, or multiplication and division of fractions, or how to do any arithmetic using negative numbers).

None of them have ever been able to tell me what the hell their class did for the other 39 weeks of the school year, not to mention the remaining few years before moving into prealgebra. It's like they remember exactly one math lesson and believe, therefore, it's the only one they ever had.

(I do remember, actually, that in 8th grade we seemed to spend a lot of time going over and over and over negative numbers. Our teacher was really big on cumulative review, but more than that, when I taught the niblings I discovered that they just could not internalize things like "If you start out with 5 - x, and then you subtract 5 from both sides, one side will be left with -x - not "just x"! We spent so much time going over the basic concept of "how to work with negative numbers". When they went to high school they each came back and reported to me, independently, that their classmates all really struggled and they were glad I'd spent so much time drilling them on that specific thing the year before. It turns out that for most students negative numbers are conceptually easy enough to grasp, but doing anything with them past putting them on a number line involves a major cognitive leap. If I remembered my 8th grade math teacher's name I might look her up to thank her! I did not appreciate her efforts nearly enough.)

[ethelmay]

Generally speaking I thought of myself as learning most things at home and very little at school, but I suspect I picked up more at school than I realized. But that seems to have been a fourth-grade textbook and I was reading it in first or second grade, so it isn't surprising or discreditable if they weren't teaching at that level in my classroom.