My grandfather, born in the back hills of West Virginia, was forced to leave school when he was around 6 years old to chop lumber so his family had enough to survive. After he left WV, he worked a press at a forge and was a landscaper at night an on the weekends. He never has learned how to read, and sadly he is in the early stages of dementia so I think that ship has sailed. But... he was always a whiz with finances.
He was the kind of guy that can take a dollar on Monday and give you back $100 on Friday. He owns, I believe at this point, 8 properties including his own home.
I always regret not staying back home for a bit to try and help him, but I think by the time I would have been in a place to do it he would have told me he had just accepted the fact he would never learn to read. I can't imagine going through life like he did, how much I would hav missed.
But it also was always an inspiration to me. Every time I would feel my motivation for something academic or professional start to wane, I remind myself that this man who gave me and my siblings anything to help us succeed didn't get to do 90% of the things I take for granted.
It's really sad to see some folks on this thread call this man an idiot. From first hand experience, that's not necessarily the case and often people like him become far more clever than I'll ever be as a means of survival.
One of my grandfathers was illiterate as well. Not a finance whiz, but not stupid either. He was a rural blacksmith and he was rather good with engines and small appliances, repairing them for paying customers.
This is also a good moment to meditate on "right of repair". As recently as approx. 1970, most of the machinery in daily use could be repaired by a skillful, even though illiterate, person. The advent of semiconductors did away with that and nowadays even highly qualified people struggle to update a firmware against the vendor's wishes.
It's interesting you mention this. I got a chance to visit the family holler (rural mountain farmstead) when I was a teenager. Everyone back there was still driving old pickups, most of their tools were pretty old as well. You could tell a lot of things were kept just because of that very idea that they could repair them.
I know my grandfather, growing up as poor as he did, NEVER threw anything broken away until he was absolutely convinced that it could not be repaired. I wouldn't be suprised if most of his gardening equipment was from the 60's and 70's.
There is a little bit of a survivorship bias with regards to old tools. The crappy ones broke long ago but the quality ones survived. But also, there were not the modern manufacturing methods we have now back there. There was no hammer with a plastic integral handle, everything was wooden and cast iron or tool steel. You could easily buy or make a wooden replacement handle when the old one rotted away. There was no dirt cheap Chinese forged metals so everything was more expensive and you took better care of the metal parts. Dulled edges were sharpened, peened hammers would get grinded down, broken rivets could be replaced. The few electric tools were beefy, simple, and offered easy replacement of the brushes. You also may have just experienced what happens when poor people have little access to the latest and greatest cheap stuff at the store, they make do with what they have. Compare that to the numerous old cars still on the road in Cuba, parts are difficult to source so when something breaks you'd go to the mechanic with a rudimentary machine shop that could fabricate a replacement part.
We still have quite a few tools from the early 1900s at home. Scissors, a hammer, an old meat grinder. Everything made of iron, heavy as hell, but nigh indestructible.
The cleverest, wealthy guys, I know, barely finished high school.
I'm talking self made guys, and not guys from wealthy sympathetic families whom fund their kids until something turns a profit. Jonny at Dentek--you don't count, but daddy was a wiz.
If I had a child, buying real-estate, and learning the stock market, would be right up there with the three R's.
What you are describing is rent-seeking. Its easy to make money when house values and the stock market are expanding greater than the cost of money, particularly when you buy in at the start of the bubble.
Typically the limitation for real estate ownership is lack of access to credit, or a stable job enabling you to stay in one place.
Rent-seeking behaviour isn't always about manipulating public policy. If public policy allows you to commit rent-seeking behaviour, you can still choose not to carry it out. (Of course, you could make a lot more money by rent-seeking from those who have no other options…)
But yes, your main point is valid: it is entirely possible to (e.g.) be a landlord without being abusive. Heck, you can even give your tenants a better deal than they could've got otherwise, if the circumstances are right. The issue is that this behaviour (in many places) is actively disincentivised, so unethical people can push out the ethical ones.
"Yes the system makes it legal, but ‘landlords’ shouldn’t kid themselves that they are providing value to others."
A landlord who takes care of building and maintainig the house etc. is not providing value?
You think that happens automatically?
I mean sure, it would be nice to live in a world where everyone is wealthy and capable enough to own and maintain their home. But there are actually people who like to rent to not have that responsibility. They just pay money regulary and have a home. And there are surely lots of sharks in the housing and renting market, but that does not mean renting per se is evil.
I guess maybe rich people who could afford to buy but choose not to, like to rent. I live in Sydney, don't know anyone who owns their house or even dreams of it one day. Saying there are people who like renting, sounds to me like saying there are people who like pain, or a terminal illness, or a death sentence. But hey, at least our money is going every week to people who already own more than one house?
I prefer to rent, and am not rich. I live in a large metro area in the US where rent is not insanely high, though. As someone who is single, it comes with a lot more freedom and less to worry about. Probably not the best long-term, but it's less stress in my life in my opinion, so the trade off is currently worth it.
Ok, well, if not rich, it sounds like you have the choice of buying or renting. Lucky you! I don't know anyone who has that choice. The person I responded to initially only meant, I guess, that some people who have the choice, prefer renting. Hm..but they were also talking as if people without the choice, like renting:
> it would be nice to live in a world where everyone is wealthy and capable enough to own and maintain their home. But there are actually people who like to rent
It just sounds like landlord's rationalizations. Also, the landlords here don't "take care of building..the house"—that happened 100-150 years ago or so.
I strongly doubt GP has a choice. Not rich + insane rent means he's probably building up saving too slowly for a house near where his social group is.
It sounds like you've been burned by a landlord in the past and are taking it out on all of them unfairly.
I hate the concept of a landlord, paying a lot without building any equity, unlike a mortgage on property. But I've never had one that does absolutely nothing.
Between tenants, my landlords vacuumed, repainted, sometimes re-carpeted if needed, removed old tenants belongs left behind, etc.
I've had landlords be good about replacements of major appliances too. One thing I learned is you need to be assertive and advocate for yourself. Persistence and following up until they do something is key.
But I've had multiple washing machines, laundry machines, and garbage disposals be replaced for no charge to me, without me doing anything but letting them into the house.
I'm still getting a bit ripped off with inflated rent, but that type of convenience takes a lot off my plate.
I rent, and am plenty fine with it. One thing I like is that we get a yearly home inspection. Some people surely dislike the thought of people trouncing through their inner sanctum, but what it means is that every year they find things that need fixing, and fix them. Last year we got a new (and better) stove out of it. The year before we got our washer/drier dismantled, fully cleaned, and rebuilt with a few new parts, and a new water heater.
They want to keep their units in good condition, and I don't have to do much of the hard work to keep it that way. Air filters are pretty much the only utility maintenance we have to do.
Also, if you have rowdy neighbours, there isn't a whole lot you can do about that if you own and they aren't actually breaking any laws. Our landlord has been rapid at addressing neighbour complaints. However, I have rented a number of different places, and this particular landlord is the first and only one I've had that actively tries to maintain peace and order as well.
I don't think we really disagree, I think we just live in very different places. My point was that renting has benefits in some places, whereas you implied it does not.
I've lived in many countries and while I own a home in my original country to retire to (should that happen), I need places to rent when I don't want to be there. And my home is rented at those times, sometimes for years.
> Where would I, or some other temporary migrant, live if not in someone's house who rented it to me? My owning a home is irrelevant.
Why does the housing need to be supplied by private landlords? There are places that have a lot of social housing, like Sweden. Let the government build and own property, it works well. It also means people from different backgrounds and occupations can all live together, instead of e.g. redlining, which devastates minority communities.
As it stands now only the rich are able to move into cities, with low-wage workers having to commute from far outside the city, which is a pretty disgusting shift if you think about it. Imagine having a crappy cleaning job, cleaning offices at night, and you have to travel hours for your job because you live so far out [1]. It's a reality for more and more people, as the assault on labor intensifies.
I have a residential realtor friend who rents their family house. Yes, he earns his living selling houses, and rents his own house to live in, and they have lived there a few years. good schools, friends, like the neighborhood, etc.
>> "A landlord who takes care of building and maintainig the house etc"
How many actually do this? I don't know anyone who complains about landlords who do something useful. For example: there are people who build/buy and maintain properties to house queer people who've been kicked out of their homes after coming out or being outed. Often by landlords.
No one would hate landlords as a class if useful ones were at all representative.
If you saw a typical apartment unit after people moved out you wouldn’t be asking that.
My parents own a 12 unit apartment building in a small town, and my dad is up there multiple times a week. There’s regular stuff like cleaning hallways, and then there’s stuff like “the tenant on the top floor installed a dishwasher themselves and it leaked while they were gone flooding their unit and the one beneath it.”
After most people move out the carpet needs to be replaced and the walls repainted at the minimum.
Respect is a two-way street. How many of those problems came from the ways people coped with absent landlords not fixing things? How many calls to fix the dishwasher preceded the self-install? How many of those people are on their nth slumlord and long past giving the new one the benefit of the doubt? You only have one side of the story from one apartment building.
Maybe your parents are good ones. Nothing I've heard from the other side gives me reason to trust this account.
"Absent" landlord here. I pay a management firm to handle repairs. If I find out they aren't responding to tenant maintenance requests, I'm going to start looking to replace them with another firm.
But I love my management firm. They get me discounts on appliances, repairs, carpet & paint because they have agreements with local suppliers. If I had been the one to call for a quote to replace the air conditioner, not only would it have been much pricier, I would have gone to the back of the line (because of COVID equipment shortages...) to get the work scheduled. Instead, it was replaced in only 2 days, they did a great job, and it's more efficient - saving my tenant money on their utility bills.
Are there slumlords out there? Of course. But you're painting with a pretty broad brush here and it's unfair.
Why is my broad brush unfair and not that of the person I replied to? That's quite a thing to skip over. Mine is at least based on much more than one 12 unit building. Your bias is showing.
The unit didn't have a dishwasher and they decided to put one in themselves. When someone has an issue my dad is there ASAP.
My entire point was that if landlords did nothing most apartment buildings would be unlivable in a matter of years. I'm not going to defend all of them as I've never been a renter myself, but I have seen what amount of work goes in to a small building just to keep it livable and safe for the tenants.
Real estate is a man-made resource that is created through investment of capital. It doesn't emerge otherwise. Without the freedom to invest in property, there would be less housing, and higher housing costs.
How exactly would housing costs rise without property investment? I’d expect the opposite, as you see in countries that have rent and ownership controls.
With less investment, you would have less money going into building housing.. Profit-motivated investment is the primary way in which market needs are met. When it's impeded by regulatory restrictions, market needs are met less.
>>I’d expect the opposite, as you see in countries that have rent and ownership controls.
The highest rental rates in the world are in the US city with the most ownership controls to prevents developers and landlords from profiting: San Francisco.
> The highest rental rates in the world are in the city with the most ownership controls to prevents developers and landlords from profiting: San Francisco.
Correlation is not causation. The reason rents are high in San Francisco is because it's where the 'owners' of a bunch of high-tech Intellectual Property live. Labor aristocrats have to move there to be able to work on that tech. That is what has driven up the rents.
You make it sound like you don't think people (or corporations) should be able to own property.
I hate to burst your bubble, but someone is going to own the property. And if you insist on it being the government, you are going to severely disappointed by what happens next.
> You make it sound like you don't think people (or corporations) should be able to own property.
Ideas aren't property. Copyright law, patent law, trademark law, service mark law… they used to be very different to property law, and for good reason. “Intellectual property” is the power to silence your critics, sue your competitors and profit from other people's work – if you have enough money to throw your weight around. (Contrast with copyright, which lets you get a cut from those publishing your work; or trademark, which protects your professional reputation…)
>>Correlation is not causation. The reason rents are high in San Francisco is because it's where the 'owners' of a bunch of high-tech Intellectual Property live.
San Francisco does not have the highest average incomes in the world. What puts SF at the top of the rent rankings is the combination of high average incomes, and the most restrictive housing market in the US.
I recommend you read the article I provided on rent control.
> San Francisco does not have the highest average incomes in the world.
Are you joking? I seriously can't tell.
Focusing just on worker's wages, when there are billionaire property owners (specifically owners of IP) living around the corner from you, is just ignorant and disingenuous if this really is your argument.
Steve Jobs famously paid himself $1 a year, remember? I mean, that's probably why he wore those hippy sandals right? He just couldn't afford more because of his measly wage? A few tech CEO's will pull down the average if they all pull off this wonderful tax trick.
Honestly I don't understand why you use these arguments and sources, they seem to me to be completely incompatible with reality.
> I recommend you read the article I provided on rent control.
You keep mentioning rent-control, but I have never said that it's the measure I am for. You do realize rent-control is not the only policy that a city or government can use and enforce right?
I think this 2019 documentary called Push (by Fredrik Gertten) does a great job of showing what is happening to the working classes and their lack of options for affordable housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4
>>Focusing just on worker's wages, when there are billionaire property owners (specifically owners of IP) living around the corner from you, is just ignorant and disingenuous if this really is your argument.
Average incomes within the city are the overwhelming determinant of the demand side of housing supply and demand.
A dozen billionaires are not going to materially affect the availability of housing, even if they all buy huge estates. Average income determines what the vast majority of the city's renters are able to afford to pay for rent.
In any case, San Francisco is not even in the top 10 for number of billionaires among cities:
>>Honestly I don't understand why you use these arguments and sources, they seem to me to be completely incompatible with reality.
I suggest you actually read the article I linked to. It describes what economists at large think of rent control, and what studies on the effects of rent control have found.
>>You keep mentioning rent-control, but I have never said that it's the measure I am for. You do realize rent-control is not the only policy that a city or government can use and enforce right?
I brought up rent control because you wrote the following, which implies cities with rent control have had a positive experience with it:
>>I’d expect the opposite, as you see in countries that have rent and ownership controls.
"Economists at large" being a hand picked few and US-centered. Rent control can take many forms: rental caps, incentives/benefits, zoning and housing policies, etc. The view that it's solely a supply-demand equation is way too simplistic. Rent prices are currently falling as much as 10% in Amsterdam despite an extremely strained housing market with a 50k+ deficit on units available vs demand.
Again, I recommend you read the article, as it specifically mentions polls done involving broad cross-sections of economists, and non-American economists.
Instead of assuming the article has no valuable insights, I recommend you read it.
>>Rent control can take many forms: rental caps, incentives/benefits, zoning and housing policies, etc.
Rent control only takes the form of caps on rent, or caps on rent increases. The other policies you mention are not defined as rent control.
So you read it, and didn't notice the article provided statistics on the views of economists at large - as opposed to those of a handpicked few - on rent control, or the many mentions of non-American political leaders' and economists' views on rent control?
Can you at least admit that the economics field at large opposes rent control?
> Can you at least admit that the economics field at large opposes rent control?
It's pretty pointless to talk about rent control if one hasn't established what the desired outcome is. An "efficient" market? Affordable housing for the common man?
Rent control keeps on providing affordable housing in Europe. Abolishing it would cause the rents to rise (both economists and the people promoting it admits to that) and thus give billions to land lords and property owners. But I guess that's a feature, not a bug?
Rent control makes housing less affordable for the common man. This is the near-unanimous conclusion of economists, who have studied this issue for upwards of a century.
Rent control makes housing less affordable than it would otherwise be in Europe too.
This is simply false. Maybe economists models of an optimal market somehow shows that. But on the ground facts refute it without a shadow of a doubt. One cause of this is usually that government involvement in the production of housing is assumed to be out of the question by those economists.
People are not stupid. Why do you think there's so much resistance in Europe towards market based rents if they think it will actually lower their rents? Should people be thrown out of their apartment they've lived in their whole life just because the property owner can find someone wealthier that's willing to pay more? How is that a desired outcome for the common man? People would rather want that the housing is created by the state than have that crazily class based stratification of our cities.
You're saying that a belief that has near total consensus among the experts is "simply false". You clearly haven't examined the evidence on rent control, and are simply making assumptions to avoid having to contend with the possibility that your preconceived notion is wrong.
>>Why do you think there's so much resistance in Europe towards market based rents if they think it will actually lower their rents?
1. Because economics is a difficult subject to understand, made all the more difficult by the multitude of special interests who need to discredit economics in order to rationalize the anti-free-market impositions that provide them with rent-seeking opportunities like subsidies and artificially suppressed rent.
2. Because people who already have rent-controlled units in high-demand cities don't want to give up their privilege for the benefit of the people of the nation at large, who, by virtue of rent control starving the housing sector of the capital to build more units in those cities, miss out on the opportunity to find a unit in the high-demand cities.
>>Should people be thrown out of their apartment they've lived in their whole life just because the property owner can find someone wealthier that's willing to pay more?
YES! They're renters. If they want the stability of not having to ever worry about housing costs increasing, they need to buy their own units. They can't rent, and then expect the stability of being an owner.
We need to be giving housing in the highest-in-demand localities to the people who can make the best use of it economically, which would be those who are willing and able to pay the most for it.
We also need to be giving investors the incentive to invest in new housing in these highest-in-demand localities so that more people can live in them, and that requires allowing rental rates to reflect the supply/demand dynamics. This is basic economics.
> You're saying that a belief that has near total consensus among the experts is "simply false"
Yes, or at least aren't approaching the problem as others are, namely, what the actual effect of their theories would be in practice. We've seen multiple times how much higher rents get with market rents, and how the common man will be kicked out of their homes. Not sure why you keep denying it when the facts are there.
> Because economics is a difficult subject to understand
So yes, you really think people are too stupid to understand that they will actually benefit. Shameless.
> YES! They're renters.
That's putting profits over people and just plainly unethical and is precisely the kind of outcome that justifies rent controls.
> We also need to be giving investors the incentive to invest in new housing
No, we don't. The state can build housing according to need, like other infrastructure. That way, we don't need to kick out the poor folks from their homes. It's already been done in the past, and is being done in for example Wien, Austria.
> This is basic economics.
It's basic and shallow alright. The world isn't some sandbox for trying naive free market models. It's more complicated than that.
This attitude expanded just a little also applies to farmers who produce a surplus. They're also extracting a toll from others for a basic need. When it's actually used to guide policy farmers get kicked off their land and everyone fucking starves.
>>So he owned other peoples homes? Ugh I hate this system. Why is absentee ownership a thing, why is it seen as ‘success‘?
The more investment capital goes into real estate, the more impetus there is to expand housing supply, and thus the more affordable rental rates, which is the cost of having housing, is.
There are of course numerous other factors involved in determining housing costs, like the municipal government's permit processing efficiency, zoning restrictions on building density, accessibility of residential neighborhoods to job centers via road networks and public transportation, etc, but ceteris paribus, more investment increases housing supply and reduces rental rates.
I knew someone more or less like him. My friend went through high school and later even got into university. He was able to read but very slowly and he read everyday. He had this very large (and complicated) romance with him and he would read one page per day pointing at each word painfully slowly. I have no idea if he managed to understand the story or if it was just an exercise. Just like the person in the article, he was very popular with girls and managed to pull a number of similar stunts to go through tests and exams.
Eventually he dropped out of university and got a job. This was the 90s and he started playing with computers and something just clicked inside. Sudenly he could read normally and became quite proficient with computers back then. I suppose it was some kind of learning disability that went away with time and persistence on his part.
It also shows that schools are not equiped to deal with learning disabilities and push those pupils forward in the hope the problem goes away. BTW, this was in Europe, so it is not a US specific problem.
This also shows how poor the school system was it they did not uncover his illiteracy earlier. In France at least there was such an amount of loud reading at school that it would be hard to hide.
I ready the article with a strong dislike for the guy since I knew he was a teacher. I was pissed off for the pupils.
But it was not that bad, he was a teacher of PE where beside a limited technical knowledge (at the level he was in) the important part are social skills. So maybe it was for the better after all.
Maybe I'm joining the large amount of comments at the bottom for once, but this article is not just about someone who ended up being a teacher due to serendipity — he committed crimes to get there.
I'm all for supporting people with disability, and there is no doubt that it requires courage to admit to being a fraud after so many years — but being dyslexic shouldn't be an excuse for anyone to commit crimes and get away with it (please read what he actually did if you haven't — it wasn't a simple case of cheating).
I have personally seen a lot of academic misconducts that went unpunished that makes cheating in exams seem seem mundane. Fake results that academics don't own up to/just blame their students when proven wrong; made-up results so that a thesis would look better; lying about publications to get scholarships, etc. Nobody ever gets punished and some would eventually go on to hold important positions.
Reading the "supportive" comments in this thread is pretty demoralising for me.
I agree in principle. But I think there has to be a difference in punishment between unrepentant perpetrators who get caught, and perpetrators who come forward on their own volition. If I remember the original Reader's Digest article, this person was already held to account many years ago -- he lost all his credentials, qualifications and not to mention respect and credibility. Even the original story was published much later. If we continue to pounce on people like this many years after the fact, we're only discouraging others with a guilty conscience to come forward.
Yeah, this is kind of a Frank Abagnale type story. He did some incredible yet dishonest and criminal things, but redeemed himself later in life. I’m sure this guy bullied a lot of people to get them to help him cheat. He spent 40 years pretty much as an asshole—he had stolen a life that he hadn’t earned, and had deprived his students of a qualified educator.
Maybe the moral of the story is that people can change and become positive contributors to society. Think of all the people who have been locked up for decades for crimes they committed as teenagers. They were just thrown away by society without a chance for redemption. This is part of what Black Lives Matter means to me—there’s a primitive impulse in people’s brains to say they’re criminals and they won’t amount to anything and just cause harm. This guy got a chance that was denied to millions of black youths.
Speaking of... there seems to be a good chance that Frank Abagnale lied about lying and his biggest con has been making a career out of convincing people of his non-existent previous cons (which in retrospect isn't all that surprising I suppose, there's no a priori reason to believe that an ex-conman has been honest about his ex-cons).
It seems that he had only one big true con: where he conned a woman's family into taking care of him and stealing money from them while he essentially stalked her, was found out and then sent to prison.
Honestly, it sounds unbelievable. I absolutely can believe that people go through life without learning to read. I'm a college teacher and I've met them.
The lengths he went to in college, however, seem so incredible that I am skeptical. Stories like Richard Montainez's claims of inventing flaming hot cheetos and Frank Abagnale's claims of impersonating have been found out to be false so I need actual proof before I believe these kinds of stories are true.
This guy was born in 1939. These events happened in the 50s. It's been a long time, and at no point is the article saying of even implying it's a good thing: it's just some young person struggling to get by doing what he could because he thought it was the only way to get anywhere in life.
I don't understand why some people feel the need to be so damn judgemental and moralistic about things.
I haven't seen any comments that praise him for cheating or stealing or faking his way through being a teacher. The only praise I see is for his learning to read and then coming out to tell his story.
I agree, what this man did was criminal. It doesn't matter how he felt about it, or the great redemptive arc the story talks about (him learning to read eventually), the truth is he short-changed a lot of children on a proper education.
I don't consider cheating in exams a crime so I'll assume you mean breaking and entering.
I doubt the story, but I saw many people do similar breaking and entering for pranks at uni so have no real problem with that.
I also had access to a library of exams. Once I went to an exam to steal? a copy for next year, but I couldn't work out how to get it out of the room. This is what hackers do, test limits on conventional systems. I also did a lot of work.
You seem to be confusing a job (academia) with his life as an undergrad student, they are not the same.
He worked hard at Uni the way he/BBC tells it, that's good enough for me. I don't believe his story, I am sure it's not as clean as he says, but unless you have the info I'm commenting on the BBC tale.
It’s a natural consequence of a culture that praises competition. “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying” is the motto of those who only have a tenuous chance at success. No point accepting your “just” lot in life: may as well cheat if the consequences from cheating aren’t that much worse than the expected quality of a life lived legitimately.
In 2008 when my kids went to VPK in Florida I was surprised to find out why they memorized words instead of learning how to read. The lady I spoke about this was a veteran teacher of 25 years. She said it was all BS and that a decade or two earlier they had used a book called ‘Learn how to read in 100 lessons’. With that systems, she said, they never had anyone fail. Every child that passed through learnt reading. She said it was like a miracle. But, at some point, the higher ups fell into the trap of having to introduce new regiments and systems because of ever changing fashions. They were forced to introduce silly approaches, changing them every few years, leading to kids suddenly unable to read. Whenever she met parents she would tell them about this book and everyone had success with it and was as shocked as I was how it worked and how it was missing from the school curriculum. I ended up teaching all of my children how to read with it. It’s one of the most precious experiences. They all learnt to read at a very early age. There are many stories like this about writing and early math. Many years later, I read the episode In Feynman’s book ‘Surely you must be joking’ on his encounter with school text books and his disappointment - to say it lightly. One great experiment I can highly recommend is collecting textbooks from the 20th century and compare the decades and (basic) skills taught.
> With that systems, she said, they never had anyone fail. Every child that passed through learnt reading. She said it was like a miracle.
From someone familiar with the trenches of teaching: claims of 100% success need to be met with skepticism. There could be other classes where the lower performing children go (and fail).
There is actually a lot of research on how to teach reading. I'm not saying every school district uses research-supported materials, but I am saying nostalgia for decades-gone-by methods of teaching should be looked at with a (very) critical eye. Who is successful? Who is not? Are there alternative approaches for students for whom the main approach does not work?
On this specific claim: VPK = voluntary pre-kindergarten. Presumably this teacher is not claiming that 100% of children are learning to read before kindergarten? To critically evaluate this claim, one would have to know the grade level being taught. If they were teaching introductory reading to 7-8 year olds (instead of typical US kindergarten ~5 years old), then success rates would be higher... And in fact one of the trends in education has been pushing the skills to lower grade levels, where they (of course?) become more difficult to master - which makes these claims plausible but again, you need to know if you are comparing the performance of 2nd graders from decades ago with kindergarteners now.
I once worked with a Chef that couldn't read. He made it through culinary school, had his own catering company at one point and owned two residential properties. He was a charismatic guy but very cunning and deceptive. I figured it out after a couple of weeks working with him. I tried to offer him help but he just brushed it off and said that he was dyslexic. Smart phones have many features that make it easy for illiterate people to survive.
A friend who worked as a doctor in the Fens of East Anglia said that many of the older farmers she treated (in the early 2010s) were essentially illiterate. If she gave them a form or a letter, they would hand it to their wife to read because they considered reading to be women's work.
This is so similar to the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. In the world of the Stormlight Archive, called Roshar, men from the Vorin religion are not expected to be able to read (it is considered even blasphemous). Even many scholars cannot read or write and instead dictate to their wives to write down. This led to many women secretly making corrections to their husbands' work in the margins!
There a funny short story I read in H.S. - The Verger by Somerset Maugham - about a guy who's in a position not unlike this. He's illiterate but competent. He doesn't bother to hide it though and is fired from is job as a verger because of that. It's a short read as I remember so I won't ruin the end but the punch line really stuck with me for some reason.
On Google translate you can test new phonetic spelling. "Wii shäl miit tu dei in Nyy Jork" works best in Polish, Icelandic and Finnish. I suggest we just ignore weird sounds like θ and ð and just use "th" as "thö" sounds reasonably good in those languages.
I learned to read in one month like any other Finnish child ever. But it took a month longer to understand what I was reading. Like my small brain was using all its capacity in pronunciation and I forgot what I just said.
English is like Chinese, you have to learn all pictorials and their meanings. Learning the pronunciation is different process. That is why English takes years and years to learn.
If you try "Wii shäl miit tu dei in Nyy Jork" in Google, it works quite well in Inglish too, except thö "Nyy Jork".
It would be easy to organize meeting of all Anglos and accept this as an alternate spelling. Polish have some weird sibilants, so that it could be the starting point.
I can understand what's intended with "Wii shäl miit tu dei in Nyy Jork" without even knowing what system is being used. In IPA this is "ʃæl miːt təˈdeɪ ɪn njuː jɔːk", and I have no idea what that says at all.
I find IPA fairly inaccessible for the casual user. There's a reason other systems exist.
"th" isn't really used in Finnish (at least in modern kirjakieli). Even loan words just drop the "h" (e.g. "termostaatti"). There probably are some exceptions, but none that I can think of right now.
Finnish has only 3 words, all loanwords that didn't drop the h: thai (+ thai food, thai boxing etc), theeta (name of the Greek letter) and thorax (medical term, common word is rintakehä).
That's surprising to me, perhaps because "th" appears in inflected words such as "ovathan", dialectal words such as "vasthaan", compound words such as "oluthana" and names such as "Elisabeth" or "Porthania".
Also, I wonder what's the share of the pronounciations "t", "th" and "θ" in the word "theremin".
What do you mean by having 'th' as a phoneme? If you mean the sound "θ", I don't think any of the words are pronounced with one in Finnish, typically. Rather, they have a "t" sound followed by a "h", or just a "t".
I used to be an ESL teacher for foreign students transitioning to English in the USA before I was in tech. I've also taught high school English, Latin, and History. These days the only English teaching I do is helping adults learn to read. John Corcoran's story is incredibly inspiring and courageous. It's hard to imagine the amount of courage it took for him to go public with his illiteracy. It's never too late to right a wrong in your life. If you know an adult who cannot read, please encourage them to seek help. There are many people who are generous in donating their time to teaching reading skills in a non-judgemental and caring way.
I know you're joking, but I have actually had coworkers who literally could not program at all. And I'm not talking about high-pressure situations like interviews, non-realistic examples like algorithms, or a one-off fluke: they consistently couldn't program even the most basic of stuff.
How these people managed to stay employed as programmers is doing non-programming tasks and such, and copy/paste from Stack Overflow.
haha that was expected. I'm waiting to hear about imposter managers. and no, not imposter-syndrome managers, and not managers who are not expected to know how to code. I mean actual imposters who are expected to code, can't, and still nailed high profile positions.
I don't know about CTO positions but I do know people working as Soft. Engineer barely able to code.
Funny enough -as in the article- they are usually attracted to teaching (medium posts, best practice talks, youtube videos...) and mentoring/managing positions. Maybe as a way to escape from coding. Or maybe they want to safe others of struggling with the same problem they have. I don't know.
As the saying goes, "Those who can't do - teach". I get it, it's a position you can't fail. You're the boss, you always learn (a day prior) and you always "know best".
Case and point: I wear glasses. In fact, I'm almost blind without them: my effective vision ends at about 3 feet. Though I am able to perceive distinction between large objects and people, everything dissolves into a fuzzy mess. In American public schools (in the northeast US, at least) in the early 90s, schools would test student vision every year during elementary/primary school years. They would use the traditional eye test sheet, with strings of letters in smaller and smaller font vertically stacked, to be read at a distance.
It took them 5 years to figure out that I couldn''t see anything other than what was immediately in front of me. I was a smart kid, and never had problems in the classroom as I sat in the front row and listened very carefully to what was going in.
I would memorize the eye test sheet while standing in line at the nurses office, waiting to be tested. They never suspected anything was amiss, and routinely reported to my parents that I had perfect vision.
I was finally discovered when my father, trying to be clever while we were out shopping, asked me about an ice cream parlor in the distance. Despite the name of the shop being written clearly above the shopfront, I bombed the question and my father realized that I couldn''t see what he was talking about.
I have poor vision as well. We didn't have eye sight tests. I couldn't see anything written on the blackboard for at least a few years. I realized I had poor vision and even timidly asked about it a few times. It went nowhere and just like any kid, I felt like it was my own personal moral failing that I couldn't see well enough. (Every failing as a kid feels like that.)
The result was that I spent a few years not being able to see what was written on the blackboard. I had to mostly figure it out by myself. The worst were the tests that teachers only wrote on the blackboard. I'd inevitably have to quietly ask someone around me to tell me what the questions were. I don't think I failed a single test because of it even though talking was forbidden.
The funny part was that when my parents eventually took me to an optometrist they tried to convince me that wearing glasses won't be that bad. I distinctly remember that situation because I kept thinking "I asked for them years ago!"
Eventually my eyesight became bad enough again that the glasses I had didn't cut it anymore. I fell a little bit back into my old habits, but it wasn't as bad as before. Sitting closer and all of that helped immensely.
I was also 8 or 9 years old, and didn't really understand the big deal. On some level, I knew that my vision was different than other kids, but when it came time to test it, I also had a desire to "beat the test." If it seems childish, that's because it was. :)
That seems excessively strong. There's probably just an assumption about something somewhere I'm not getting because of different cultural context or the like.
I did very well in elementary school, though by 4th or 5th grade I often asked to be seated near the front because of the “glare” on the black board. I did not realize I could not see until a science class about clouds, and I could not tell that the sky was overcast, not blue. I was also surprised to see that street lights were points, not large haloes.
I’ve heard many similar stories from nearsighted friends.
Because despite his illiteracy, he is a clever and resourceful person- with enough cleverness and a bit of luck, its possible to do lots of stuff like this. He was able to circumvent the barriers imposed by illiteracy through deception, careful manipulation, or outright swindling. While iliteracy is definitely a huge concern in the world, I hope I'm not the only one out there to admire him for grifting his way through multiple schools and jobs...!
A combination of cheating, life hacks, folks enabling him, and being labeled as a bad - and then good - student, which diverted people's attention away from his lack of reading.
And to be fair: Some of this was the time period. We catch a few more learning disabilities now (not enough, though) and have more tools to help. We just didn't screen so much in the 50s.
His success at gaming the system has plenty of applicability to modern issues with coordinated cheating, purchasing papers, plagarism and so forth. Sports stars who somehow go through school without learning anything academic is a serious issue in the modern day as well. That higher view of the issue like a more interesting topic than the sensational extent to which he fit the bill by falling short of even literacy.
As for him, he was apparently resourceful and charismatic, good at sports, had adequate innate math skills and was dedicated to gaming the system.
"So I was going to be a teacher's pet and do everything necessary to pass that system. I wanted to be an athlete - I had athletic skills, and I had maths skills"
"I ran around with college kids, I dated the valedictorian - the student with the highest grades who gives a speech at the graduation ceremony, I was the homecoming king"
My grandfather was a teacher and in the 50s he started noting that trouble learning to read/write wasn’t linked to lack of intelligence. He started groups for kids (mostly guys) with what we now call dyslexia and tried to help them. He had to invent material and methods.
On his eightieth birthday some of his students, now in their 50s, told how they had always felt stupid until he showed them they were not. Now they had businesses and successful careers.
First time I read about this (Not from the US). I wonder what‘s with his Highschool/College degree? I mean by his own words he said that he cheated big time.
Also not from the US, but I think read about him many many years ago in Reader's Digest. It was a long form that had a lot more information. I recognized the story because of this anecdote:
"I passed my blue book out the window to him and he answered the questions for me."
But the Reader's Digest version mentioned that he was dyslexic (which I don't think the BBC article mentions) and that he taught almost exclusively using audio/visual presentations, activity based learning and guest speakers.
It does sound like he was dyslexic ("for me it was like opening a Chinese newspaper "). But the speed at which he eventually acquired reading and writing doesn't seem consistent with dyslexia; I figure there was some other problem interfering with hiis literacy.
Computationally we don't understand what dyslexia is. Neuroplasticity is happening all the time. Perhaps at one point something changes and he has the ability to aquire the writing form of a language agian.
Similiar to in mathematics where it's a very different process reasoning with symbols v.s. trying to visualize the mathematical construct through communication. Maybe it's difficult to aquire the writing form of graph theory when you are 19. But when you try to do that again at 25 suddenly you can read all of Paul Erdos' papers less daunthingly.
> Perhaps at one point something changes and he has the ability to aquire the writing form of a language agian.
That sounds like what I was wondering. Perhaps something "snaps" into or out of place "catastrophically" (in the sense of almost discontinuously, in the context of the usual timescale of psychological changes). For example, it sounds like his loss of fear occurred pretty suddenly.
I feel a bit awkward speculating about the mind of someone who I know of from just a single essay. That said, he's published a scathingly-honest record of his fascinating history with writing, and presumably he wants it read and discussed. And it's about him, so we discuss him, I guess.
Don't feel awkward about it. We're all minds speculating about minds. My blue will never be same as your blue, and so are my pains, pleasures, etc - no matter how closely some of my qualia may resemble yours.
We're all in our own little specula (watchtower) seeing the world from our vantage points. Thus we can do nothing but speculari, or speculate so to speak.
This is why psychedlic experiences are so meaningful. They help us to experience the meta-ness of the experience per se.
Here's a question: what can be done to make tech more accessible for illiterate people? That seems to be a side of accessibility that usually gets overlooked.
Put symbols and images on stuff... like we already do on most devices. Play, stop, pause, fastforward and reverse are pracitcally never written out in text.
In reality, teaching them to read first, would be best.
I told my friends about this article,they replied no this could never happen in the US, this could only happen in countries like Nigeria.
What a world we live in.
Sometimes we hide something as a child and it gets so ingrained in us that we don't question the child's logic. We just live life hiding something that a child decided had to be hidden.
"Noticing an obvious deficiency in your life and doing nothing about it is in fact idiotic."
So, how many people are overweight and fat these days?
Maybe some things aren't easy to solve. If someone told me to learn writing in Chinese, I would be very creative in finding ways how to do without. It is just too hard for me at 43 years of age.
People with certain disabilities may find English spelling (a notoriously tricky terrain full of illogical exceptions) similarly overwhelming.
IMO this comment takes a very cynical and US centric view of things.
I've found this story was well written and pretty inspiring. Just because people are privileged doesn't mean they don't struggle or that their struggles can't teach us things.
It's surprising to see this sort of toxicity in hacker news.
That's a pretty racist thing to say. Their race has nothing to do with their story. Would your comment have applied if this person was the same race as you?
You can't imagine their struggle because you didn't read what they wrote. You just glanced at the picture plastered at the top. Just cause you don't know how to read/write != you have jeopardized a kid's education.
Please provide evidence. Last I checked most schools have exams, and teachers performance is monitored. You don’t become a teacher, and suddenly face no further professional evaluation.
His says his writing level is roughly 6th grade, and the story reads like it too. I believe it. Illiteracy was the standard for humanity not long ago, and yet there were still teachers.
> If he had called on me I was going to get out of my chair and take two steps, grab my chest, drop to the floor and hope they called 911.
Used this tactic many times myself. You pull it once, they call 911. You pull it twice, they usually do it again. You pull it three times...an awkward silence fills the room...after the sixth time, my boss just carried on with the meeting, and I stopped getting invited. I think they call this life hacking.
I now do it everywhere...in the line at the DMV clutches heart, wife nagging clutches heart, kid wants new shoes clutches heart. People say you can't outrun your problems...in reality, all you need to do is stay calm, pretend to have a heart attack, and your problems just melt away. I think I am going to write a self-help book.
Can you elaborate how you fake the heart attack when you are in different situations? Your idea seems really interesting as a life hack. There must be specific ways to clutch your heart?
Put a self-inflating armband around your upper arm (like those in blood-pressure meters), let it inflate without anyone noticing, and the pulse in that arm will disappear.
Rather than learning how to read, it'd do everyone a whole lot more good to admit that some people are not cut out for school and to send them off to work when they're teenagers.
This poor guy has felt bad his entire life when he could've been an excellent coal miner instead.
Every place I've worked is filled with people like this guy to one extent or another - fearful parents pushing their kids to go to school and pretend to be something they're not. Then people who have an affinity for thinking have to navigate these insecure idiots (sorry, medical term) their entire careers.
It makes workplaces hell for everyone involved, both the idiots and the capable.
People ought to do what they are capable of doing. People ought to be treated with dignity and respect. If we get that far this century, boy, that'd really be something.
Slight devils advocate. Is everyone happier with mandatory schooling for longer? It isn't that we shouldn't give everyone the chance to learn, but maybe some people really would be happier dropping out at 14 and just getting a job. Being at school where all you do is fail does not make for a good life experience!
I think the answer is probably that we don't want parents pulling kids out of school early just to earn money for the family? So legally requiring they stay at school longer protects.
14-year-olds are likely not equipped to make such a decision. If all you're doing at school is failing, then the school itself should provide better support mechanisms.
Better support to what end? Walking out of school age 16 with 4 GCSE passes is not much of an improvement on 2, and maybe we should accept that there exist people who cannot via standard schooling do better than that? Maybe those two additional years of special measures is not better than a couple of years learning on a job?
Unless your claim is that with sufficient support everyone can leave school at 16 with good grades, which is simply not a school of thought I ascribe to.
My grandfather went to school until he was 14, but he was also highly literate, had a keen technical insight, and was generally fairly smart.
He wasn't unhappy in life, or the way his career as a factory worker turned out. At least, as near as I can determine those kind of things: he was an old-fashioned kind of man who didn't have a heart to heart with his grandchildren. He never ate pizza in his life, and refused to eat it when I offered to take him out to try it.
But at the same time I've always felt he could have achieved much more if he continued school. The reason he didn't was because his family was poor and another child working was needed to put bread on the table. A big reason this mandatory schooling exists is for these kind of reasons.
That being said, I do think there's too much emphasis on degrees; not having a college degree is almost something you're embarrassed of. My brother did basically a useless "animal care" study because he felt like he had to do A study (note: it's not a useless education, but there are tons of people doing it and very few jobs, almost no-one who graduates gets a job in that field and the impression I had from his friends is that it's mostly the kind of thing people do when they don't know what else to do).
My (much) older brother has severe dyslexia. He's bright, and now owns his own business, but in his school, they'd already reached the capacity for SEN provision, and he was refused a diagnosis. He could have massively improved his literacy if help was just available, but at that time, it simply wasn't. Branding anyone who doesn't immediately take to school an "idiot" is incredibly myopic.
Replace the word idiot with 'fool' and see if your point still applies.
In other words, the problem is not stupid people (or people with learning disabilities, which I happen to have btw), who undoubtedly exist. The problem is foolish people who think they can cheat their way through life.
My contention is that we're sinking under the weight of foolish people cheating their way into positions they have no business being in.
Foolish as in lacking wisdom. Not foolish as in lacking ability to do calculus. We have plenty of calculus, we severely lack wisdom :)
He's not an idiot, he would have gotten much further, and had a better life, if school had helped him to learn to read and write. Some children need extra help/support lessons (and nowadays usually get it).
He was the kind of guy that can take a dollar on Monday and give you back $100 on Friday. He owns, I believe at this point, 8 properties including his own home.
I always regret not staying back home for a bit to try and help him, but I think by the time I would have been in a place to do it he would have told me he had just accepted the fact he would never learn to read. I can't imagine going through life like he did, how much I would hav missed.
But it also was always an inspiration to me. Every time I would feel my motivation for something academic or professional start to wane, I remind myself that this man who gave me and my siblings anything to help us succeed didn't get to do 90% of the things I take for granted.
It's really sad to see some folks on this thread call this man an idiot. From first hand experience, that's not necessarily the case and often people like him become far more clever than I'll ever be as a means of survival.