(no subject)
May. 20th, 2025 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyMetafilter 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!
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!
no subject
Date: 2025-05-16 12:31 pm (UTC)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!