Posted on 02/11/2024 3:32:01 PM PST by algore
Recent years have seen successive waves of book bans in Republican-controlled states, aimed at pulling any text with “woke” themes from classrooms and library shelves.
But at the same time, the appropriate response is, in principle, simple... and we can replace those individuals with people who want to reverse those policies.
Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place.
As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators.
I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch.
For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts.
Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.
Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways.
Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core.
Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade—except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health.
We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I said I have a college degree. But not a doctorate in Liberal Educrat Verbal Diarrhea.
That one is beyond me!
Somehow, many generations learned to read without porn.
Actually, he’s right. I read the gibberish with no problem. The mind and how it works are beautiful things.
I like it.
I know a retired teacher who now subs and tutors in elementary school. She says that there are fewer and fewer "smart" kids who get everything easily. And most of the rest are in special ed - turns out there are financial incentives both for the schools and the parents to have more kids with IEPs. And each kid's IEP mandates different conditions - one has to have the questions read to him on a test and only given 2 choices instead of 4 or 5, for example, so the teacher is testing multiple children in different ways in the same class. Who can teach or learn anything in an environment like that? And whenever a "SPED" kid acts up, they are not allowed to be punished unless they physically hurt someone, so they all know to act out to avoid doing anything they don't want to do.
This is the future of America......
“That one is beyond me!”
It was a hilarious sentence!
But something magical happens with language when a black child is born. Parents who couldn’t get through two pages of “Dick, Jane, and Sally” are able to cobble together letters and create unique (trashy) name for their kids. They even throw in an apostrophe from time to time.
It’s magical.
In our school in the ‘50s and ‘60s, we had “SQ3R”, which was much like your dad’s method. I loved it.
I was reading before I started kindergarten.
Since when did teaching kids how to read become the job of publik skrewl teachers?!
I’d forgotten about that. It’s interesting.
That sounds like what boys did with Playboy when I was younger.
You see you have to know how to read FIRST to figure out what the words could mean. And you can not decipher them with the same fluidity that you can words that are spelled properly. Which means you are not actually READING. You are attempting to figure out what some illiterate jerk is trying to say. And it is undoubtedly not worth it.
I know that people who want children illiterate are desperate to try to show that it is all the kids fault not that of the teachers but they are as usual wrong. There is a right and wrong way to teach someone to read, not just know what a string of meaningless symbols represent.
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