I read a post by 000 and now I want to talk about literacy

[Placid Dingo]

This thread is super-interesting. Just wanted to say that.

What about education? And by that I mean general, solid education in math, science, history and possibly a bit of sociology/demographics/how does our government/country/society work. (And preferably "critical thinking", but that's probably too much to ask for).

I remember Cain saying education is one of the strongest indicators of / correlation with umm economic wellbeing, freedom, equality, happiness, something good (which one was it Cain? or just generally good for most things, I guess).

I recently read this article:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/08/23/america-is-losing-another-generation-to-science-illiteracy/

Not sure if it was mentioned in that specific article or in the corresponding discussion on hackernews, but apparently if you raise the bar just a tiny bit from "literacy" to "functional literacy", this meaning not just being barely able to read and write words and sentences, but testing for understanding, being able to do really simple things like reading a graph, reading two half-page essays and answering questions about differing opinions stated in them, reading a bus time chart, reading a map, looking things up in the phone book or yellow pages, answer questions using a chart, etc etc etc, it turns out that over 90% of US population is NOT "functionally literate" (at least that's what the research quoted in the hackernews thread said).
I was taught and tested for all these things in school. Were you?
[ BTW if you want to see an example of the survey questions, click here, click "Search" to get all questions, and click around to some random pages ]
I mean, we're all really smart here, but if you see people unwittingly voluntary performing a viral marketing campaign for Nestle, while honestly thinking they're raising breast cancer awareness (just a recent example), there's just no way, no fucking way those 90% are going to be able to sensibly form an informed opinion about what's going on in politics and policy making.

Related, my girlfriend is currently doing volunteer work for Humanitas where she's helping a Somalian refugee / asylum seeker integrate, especially concerning all the bureaucratic paperwork form stuff that a socialist (kinda/for now) society inevitably requires. He is illiterate. Though he knows the alphabet and can probably read words and partial sentences with considerable effort. He's not dumb or stupid though, he just was never taught that shit.
But last week my gf taught him to read a map of the city. Now the concept of "map", lines on a piece of paper corresponding to a real-life territory, is probably familiar to just about every culture on earth. But the part where the map has an index on the back, and you can look up a street in the alphabetical listing, and it says you can find your street in the square on the map with coordinates B3-C4.
Imagine if you don't know that, and you got a city map of Budapest [remember that Hungarian is a completely alien language only slightly related to Finnish and nothing else] and you're given a street address to meet later that day. And every street on the map is splleriuethtiky gae, vvnfrueoooonen bej, asssrpi cuntfukkwoehxbss bip ...

Sorry I digress. This thread is not about education and literacy. Please continue!

But this one is!

I wanted just to chat about a few literacy things that go on in schools.

I work in primary, and what we look for there are three levels.

Joseph had a black cat called Pete. He loved Pete a lot. Pete was Joseph's best friend. Sometimes Pete would leave dead birds at his door, and he would sadly shake his head. However he could never stay angry for too long.

Literal: Eg, Who was Pete? What colour was he?
Looking for information taken directly from the text.

Inferential: Eg, Why could Joseph never stay angry for too long?
Looking for the skill to understand what is implied in the text.

Evaluative: Do you think this story is well written?
Passing judgement.

As kids get older we start to look for additional stuff, like

Who do you think wrote the text?
What do you think the author thinks about X?
Why do you think the author wrote this text?

We call a lot of these higher ideas 'critical literacy' designed to help students develop a keen sense of why texts are made in certain ways.

One popular term since mostly retired from senior years is 'Discourse', meaning the attitudes values and beliefs about a certain thing. I think of it this way; if every text is its own world, what is the nature of X in that world.

So the discourse of masculinity would very greatly if we compare 300 (big, strong, kills shit) to Queer as Folk (Never watched it, but a non-heterosexual discourse of masculinity which in itself is rare-ish in media) How I Met Your Mother (Real men get laid) and Atlas Shrugged (Aggressive, assertive cockspank masculinity). These days though, the use of the term 'discourse' is out of vogue.

Anyway, no real point, was just really compelled to bust out a bunch of incoherent shit about literacy without spagging up AE, and offer up a look at what literacy teaching looks like in a classroom in contemporary schools (in my area at least).

[Cain]

That's very similar to how we do it in the UK as well.  We definitely test for functional literacy here, and quite frequently, though I would say up to a third of my class (32 students) struggled with the examples given (they were 9-10, for age reference).

Funnily enough, Literacy is probably where their cross-cirriculum critical thinking skills can be best developed, because right now, the UK cirriculum is so biased towards maths education (an hour a day, every day, at minimum) and literacy is the next in importance after that, so a lot of things like history, religious education, geography etc get shoe-horned into a "literacy" class.  So, for instance, when we did about compare and contrast writing pieces, we used the difference between Roman and Celtic soldiers as our example.

Ideally, we'd be doing this because it was fun and cross-cirricular, not because we have barely enough time to fit everything in, but our government is convinced critical thinking ranks below doing "something boring to instill discipline in the students", which is what they see maths as (they'd really like to bring back Latin...but there's a very small constituency for that, even among the more upper class voters, so maths is the substitute), even though I found teaching maths to be quite fun and actually very engaging.

[Placid Dingo]

That's very similar to how we do it in the UK as well.  We definitely test for functional literacy here, and quite frequently, though I would say up to a third of my class (32 students) struggled with the examples given (they were 9-10, for age reference).

Funnily enough, Literacy is probably where their cross-cirriculum critical thinking skills can be best developed, because right now, the UK cirriculum is so biased towards maths education (an hour a day, every day, at minimum) and literacy is the next in importance after that, so a lot of things like history, religious education, geography etc get shoe-horned into a "literacy" class.  So, for instance, when we did about compare and contrast writing pieces, we used the difference between Roman and Celtic soldiers as our example.

Ideally, we'd be doing this because it was fun and cross-cirricular, not because we have barely enough time to fit everything in, but our government is convinced critical thinking ranks below doing "something boring to instill discipline in the students", which is what they see maths as (they'd really like to bring back Latin...but there's a very small constituency for that, even among the more upper class voters, so maths is the substitute), even though I found teaching maths to be quite fun and actually very engaging.

One of the interesting things I've heard raised is that teachers generally are the people who themselves are better and more interested in literature than math, so we have an issue of students often being introduced to math by people who don't find it engaging.

[Cain]

Yeah, that's definitely part of it.  Mathematicians and science grads can generally make much more money in finance as a quant or in research, so generally teaching is less attractive than it is to humanities grads, where the pay is only slightly lower than most entry level jobs in their respective fields, and is offset by holidays anyway.  There is a reason why history and art are almost always the most competitive fields for teacher training and jobs, and not physics or chemistry.

I'll be honest, I'm not a great mathematician.  I only really needed to know stats for my degree level stuff.  But there is something about it, the way it logically fits together, the rules which can allow you to find an answer more quickly than mentally calculating...that's why I enjoy maths, anyway.  Plus a good grounding in maths is infinitely useful.

[Placid Dingo]

In some ways I find math easier to teach than English. English I intuit a lot so it can be hard to explain WHY something works the way it does. Whereas math I tend to need to review it myself before I teach so I can identify likely stumbling blocks and explain it in clear language that doesn't assume too much background knowledge.

[Cramulus]

I am posting in this thread!

I work for an educational publisher, and my division focuses on English language literacy. (specifically ESL) I don't have much to add to this, but I can try to answer questions about the publishing end of education if you've got any, dingus.

[Cain]

In some ways I find math easier to teach than English. English I intuit a lot so it can be hard to explain WHY something works the way it does. Whereas math I tend to need to review it myself before I teach so I can identify likely stumbling blocks and explain it in clear language that doesn't assume too much background knowledge.

That's true, maths is a lot more logically based, and you're either right or wrong.  There are better and worse ways to teach it, but, ultimately, it's always going to be easier because you have a right or a wrong answer, easy to figure out.

English obviously also has right and wrong answers also, but there is a subjective aspect to it, and an interpretive aspect that is absent in maths.  Sometimes I've found the students will often have very sharp insights into a piece, insights I may have even overlooked.

[Salty]

I don't have a clue whether it's my local school district or the American educational system in general but my English experience in school was a very unfunny joke.

In grades 7-8 the entire school district realized that the elementary education we had received was so worthless the district put a complete stop to all the outlined curriculum and taught us phonetics. 12-14 years old children being taught phonetics. That's totally fucked up, yeah?

High School was laughable, especially after having spent a year in a German Hauptschule. Right now I'm taking an Introduction to Academic Writing course and it's like drinking sweet, crisp water after leaving a desert.

[Suu]

I had a fantastic reading and writing curriculum in school, but I was already reading by the time I was in kindergarten as my mother had taught me a lot of the basics.

The only issue I had was that I had a heavy Long Island accent until I was about 7-8, which often confused my teachers in Florida. My first 1st grade teacher, before I changed schools, thought I was disabled. She was horrific to me (and most of the students) she was a pretty awful person in general. I used to leave school early a lot sick because I didn't like her, and she would make me cry. I really hope she got shitcanned after my mom gave her a piece of her mind. When we moved from Pinellas Park to St. Petersburg and I changed schools, my teacher there adored me, found my accent adorable, and was a lot of fun. My teachers at that school were pretty awesome.

In 3rd grade they had us changing classes between 2 teachers, one specialized in science, social studies, and math, and the other one was reading, writing, and literature. So after lunch, my entire day was devoted to just literacy. After that though I went to Catholic school and went back to having the one teacher format.

[Placid Dingo]

I don't have a clue whether it's my local school district or the American educational system in general but my English experience in school was a very unfunny joke.

In grades 7-8 the entire school district realized that the elementary education we had received was so worthless the district put a complete stop to all the outlined curriculum and taught us phonetics. 12-14 years old children being taught phonetics. That's totally fucked up, yeah?

High School was laughable, especially after having spent a year in a German Hauptschule. Right now I'm taking an Introduction to Academic Writing course and it's like drinking sweet, crisp water after leaving a desert.

Yeah I cant see phonics (phonemes and morphemes are the big ones in primary focus) being much good past grade four or so (aged 9). At least not for a whole class, maybe for support kids.

Cram, I've started doing some ESL outside school hours. We spend most the time reviewing and expanding content introduced in previous lessons, then we read the local paper together and discuss new things we find there. They are Chinese with only very rudimentary knowledge of English (teacher before me started with nothing). Any recommendations on improving my approach?

[Cramulus]

nothing off the top of my head - the conversational approach is pretty good

but let me know if you need some books. I can either get you some free samples or a 25% discount.

[AFK]

ESL or ELL is really tough with second generation learners.  We have a significant population of Somali refugees here where I live.  It's tough because the Parents really can't help with studying at home.  Many Somalis can speak Somali but can't actually read it.  So if you translate something on paper, it can become fairly useless.  I really have to tip my hat to those folks who are doing that kind of work.  It's hard work but it definitely is very good work that is going to help these kids immensely. 

[trippinprincezz13]

I had a fantastic reading and writing curriculum in school, but I was already reading by the time I was in kindergarten as my mother had taught me a lot of the basics.

There are people that enter kindergarten not knowing how to read? I mean, it's been a while since then, and I know we went over the alphabet, but I thought, I dunno, that was just practice. Of course, my 1st grade teacher told me not to write in cursive cuz it'd make the other kids feel bad and we weren't supposed to learn it til later that year or second grade or something, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

[Suu]

No, kids aren't expected to read by kindergarten, I think. I'm pretty sure my sister didn't just on the count of my mom working and being very busy with 3 children at that point to really have been able to focus on teaching her. That doesn't make her stupid, because once she learned, she started reading books constantly and still does.

Not every student has the benefit of being taught by their parents before they enter school.

As for cursive, I definitely started learning cursive in 1st grade. D'Nealian. Remember D'Nealian? LOL. I remember referring to it as D'Nealian to my parents and they were like, "What? No, honey, that's SCRIPT or CURSIVE." When I was in 5th grade we switched to Zaner-Bloser, and everything had to be in cursive. EVERYTHING. I attribute my excellent handwriting to going to Catholic school, because apparently when everyone sees how I write, they always ask if I went to Catholic school. 

[AFK]

They really aren't expected to read, read.  At least, my daughter wasn't.  They'll learn words and numbers in pre-school.  But they aren't really expected to be able to crack open a book and read it from cover to cover.  But they definitely will benefit by having some beginning basics for reading when they arrive to K.