
Assumptions about how children learn to read have been disproven by research - dsr12
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/557915?single_page=true
======
redwyvern
"But if readers can’t supply the missing information, they have a hard time
making sense of the text."

This is what angers me the most about the ACT exam. I recall that passages
with vague and uninteresting topics were difficult to comprehend. What was
even more infuriating was a passage on a capacitor physics experiment in one
exam. I initially enjoyed the passage because I had a thorough understanding
of capacitance and voltage across two plates, but it turned out that for the
sake of the "comprehension," the equation for capacitance was INTENTIONALLY
rearranged in a way that violated the laws of physics. In other words, the
meaning and relevance of the content of a passage in a comprehension exam like
the ACT was intended to be misleading for the sake of testing attention to one
tiny detail.

~~~
36bydesign
Do you recall when you took the test? I’d like to find the test because I work
with ACT tests daily and have never seen a passage where the laws of physics
were intentionally violated for sake of “comprehension.”

Additionally the ACT reading passages are very focused, not vague. They may be
uninteresting but much of a student’s college experience is reading
uninteresting things. The ACT is designed to predict how students will perform
in college, not how “smart” they are or how “good of a reader” they are.

~~~
kurthr
I similarly had a question on my 4th grade qualification exam. In the science
section they asked a multiple choice question as to what would change the
weight of a glass of water. One of the "wrong" answers was heating it...
luckily I knew that I wasn't supposed to know relativity so I answered it
correctly.

~~~
z3t4
That's when you leave a friendly note. But I guess you are not supposed to
think for yourself. Just react.

------
ghaff
It's not clear to me that this article is arguing for methods that improve
learning as opposed to improve testing. One of the main points seems to be
that, if we taught history etc. in a more standardized way and then tested
everyone for reading comprehension on those standard topics, reading
comprehension scores would go up because the topics would be familiar. That
makes sense to me but it also doesn't suggest to me that the students would
actually be any better when reading to obtain new knowledge.

~~~
verteu
Indeed -- it's become fashionable to replace tests of critical thinking with
tests of rote regurgitation, since the former are "biased" towards students
with wealthy or intellectual parents.

I'm skeptical this is good idea. Even the famous "oarsman:regatta" SAT
analogy, oft-cited as a culturally biased question, had a _lower_ black/white
gap than culturally neutral questions on the same exam [1].

> In countries that specify the content to be taught at each grade level,
> standardized tests can test students on what they’ve learned in school. But
> in the United States, where schools are all teaching different content, test
> designers give students passages on a variety of topics that may have
> nothing to do with what they’ve learned in school—life in the Arctic, for
> example, or the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

[1] [https://archive.org/stream/TheBellCurve/bell-curve-
richard-j...](https://archive.org/stream/TheBellCurve/bell-curve-richard-j-
herrnstein-charles-murray-1994-jewish_djvu.txt)

~~~
acdha
> Indeed -- it's become fashionable to replace tests of critical thinking with
> tests of rote regurgitation, since the former are "biased" towards students
> with wealthy or intellectual parents.

That sounds like a misunderstanding of the issue. It’s not shifting to rote
memory but rather being cognizant of where the test implicitly depends on
knowledge which isn’t broadly shared — e.g. how well would poor kids do on a
question which used a lot of jargon related to sailing or polo? – so it’s only
measuring the intended skills.

In the AP tests this has apparently meant making the tests more self-contained
so you’re testing someone’s ability to reason about it rather than trivia
recall. The science teachers I know (all former postdocs) this has been
received positively since that’s closer to how actual science happens — nobody
works without an Internet connection.

As for The Bell Curve, linking to decades-debunked pseudoscience is not a good
way to start any discussion which will end well. There are less tainted
sources for any valid argument.

~~~
burfog
No significant number of kids have any experience with sailing (regattas at
least) or polo. This thus doesn't favor the non-poor, and certainly not white
people. The kids from rich families are so rare that you can treat them as
non-existent, and even those kids aren't too likely to be into sailing and
polo. Basically nobody does those things.

The only bias is toward those who should score well: the students who read a
wide variety of material and are thus well-prepared for the reading demands of
college.

~~~
lsc
>The kids from rich families are so rare that you can treat them as non-
existent

not so if you are trying to get into an elite school... 15-20% of the kids
going to the really top schools come from parents in the top 1% of incomes[1]
- if you are looking to get into an elite school, well, you are competing with
really wealthy people.

And if you want a job at one of the top bay area tech companies... well, i'm
not saying it's impossible without a degree from an elite school, hell, I know
people here who don't have any education... but it seems to me like a large
proportion of their hires come from elite schools.

[1][https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-
mobilit...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-
mobility/brown-university)

~~~
burfog
The top 1% isn't rich. That is merely upper middle class.

Those people still aren't in regattas. At no income level will you find a
significant portion of people who are in regattas. Regattas just aren't a
thing, generally.

We could say top 0.0001% even... and still essentially no regattas. People
don't do regattas.

The question is fair.

~~~
lsc
> The top 1% isn't rich. That is merely upper middle class.

yeah, we can argue all day about what defines a class, and by older standards,
99th percentile still puts you solidly in the 'working class' as defined by
people who, you know, had to work, rather than those rich enough to let their
capital do it all.

but... the point remains that there's a huge difference between someone in the
top ten percent of incomes and someone in the bottom ten percent of incomes.
(I'd go so far as to say that there is a bigger difference between the top 20%
and the bottom 20% than there is between the top 20% and the top 0.1% - just
'cause having a top 20% income gives you access to most of what society has on
offer.)

And this difference is wide and deep and has a lot to do with what sort of
information you encounter; I think it's fair to say that you are likely to
know a lot more about boating if you are wealthy, just like how poor people
are likely to know a lot more, say, about football or the price of fast food.

>We could say top 0.0001% even... and still essentially no regattas. People
don't do regattas.

So, I'm closer to the top 20% than the top 1%, but I've got family members who
own sailboats, and even a family member who was pretty into competitive
rowing. I think this is more common than you think for this income tax
bracket. I bet that'd be a lot less likely if I was born into the bottom
quintile.

------
Clubber
>Students from less educated families are usually the ones who are most
handicapped by gaps in knowledge.

Entire article can be boiled down to this. Takeaways: education is controlled
by the states, and many states don't make it a priority. Over the past 20
years or so, the federal government has shifted the burden of education to the
states by cutting subsidies as well, making matters worse.

My family has a lot of teachers in it. They've all retired in the 1990s, and
it's far worse today than it was yesteryear. I would enjoy teaching, but
wouldn't do it for the world.

It's not all the states fault either. There are some students that just don't
want to be there, yet we force them to be there and disrupt the students that
do. When I was growing up, they sent those students to "bad kid" schools to
keep the rot away.

~~~
rayiner
> Entire article can be boiled down to this. Takeaways: education is
> controlled by the states, and many states don't make it a priority.

Education is a classic state issue. Why shouldn’t people be able to
deprioritize it?

~~~
zanny
There has to be an argument that when you deprioritize education so kids can't
read or do basic arithmetic yet are expected to do taxes and follow arcane
laws immediately upon hitting age 18 that its extremely harmful to future
generations to defund it.

Basically, if you vote on a single issue to change speed limits everyone
having the law inflicted upon them is also a voter. Or at least a hairs length
away from being one if you get your license as fast as possible at 16.

If you vote to defund public schools so the power goes out intermittently and
there is black mold in the ceiling and cockroaches in the lockers, you are
directly harming those who have no say in what happens to them.

It comes back to general issues of regional politics in a global world. If
China wants to manipulate their currency and violate IP or if Russia wants to
invade and conquer its neighbors or if the US wants to occupy countries for
decades on end the citizens of, say, Greece never had anything close to a say
in any of those happenings but are still subject to the consequences of them.
Just because you get to write your own laws doesn't mean those without a voice
in your decisions will be heavily, often negatively, impacted by them.

In the US that problem is more pronounced, because the freedom of movement
within the US means that states that actually educate their population have to
deal with the influx of uneducated that enter them when their economies
prosper with an educated employed population and the states that didn't
educate their people have crippled economies incapable of growing because
nobody can read beyond a 4th grade level.

------
ianbicking
While a lot of people here are focusing on the testing, and it does seem to be
an important negative feedback cycle, there's also a discussion on pedagogy
that's worth having.

I've noticed what the article talks about when reading with my own daughter.
She's a natural whole-word reader - meaning she might think through a few
syllables, but ultimately comprehension is a gestalt event. This is where
everyone usually arrives, and it's necessary because you can't really sound
out words... and really, if you sound out "rug-bee" or "rug-bye" it doesn't
matter that much unless you know what rugby is. (And haven't we all
encountered avid readers who pronounce things wrong even though they fully
comprehend the word?)

Carefully watching my daughter read like this, I also realize it only works
because she knows a lot of words (and phrases, literary devices, plot details,
etc).

Decoding words (ie phonics) is useful scaffolding, but it's only scaffolding.
You also just need to know a ton of things.

And of course there's also the depressing findings on class and privilege, and
the number, variety, and quality of words children hear. The differences are
staggering.

------
rayiner
This is extremely misleading. The lack of increased scores in the student body
as a whole is the result of a large growth in the proportion of students from
disadvantaged and ESL backgrounds. Reading scores have been going up _within_
each of those demographics, however.
[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf)
(Figure 3). In fact scores for black, Asian, and Latino students have gone up
faster than for white students.

~~~
komali2
Wouldn't that be a separate, socioeconomic analysis issue? The fact remains
that as a whole, Americans are not getting better at reading. So the country
still suffers regardless if specific classes of people managed to improve.

~~~
klodolph
> So the country still suffers regardless if specific classes of people
> managed to improve.

The phrase “specific classes of people” seems to miss the entire point of the
parent comment… according to the linked study, _all_ groups of people improved
from 1992 to 2015, not just “specific” groups. This is a classic example of
Simpson’s paradox.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox)

Imagine, for a moment, that you start a school that teaches reading and
writing. You have 10 ELL students and 90 native students. When you test them
in 2015, the ELL students score 50 points on average, and the native students
score 100 points on average. The average score for the school is 95.

Now imagine that your school is well-known now, and you hire better teachers
(all test scores go up 10 points), and 40 more ELL students join your school.
Now you have 50 ELL learners averaging 60 points, and 50 native learners
averaging 110, so the average score is 85.

Even though everybody’s test scores went up by 10 points, the average test
scores went _down_ by 10 points because the demographics changed.

To be honest, this is horribly unfair. Somehow ELL students are seen as
“behind” the native speakers when that’s only when you measure them in
English. This propagates the idea that it’s better to be an excellent English
speaker than it is to be bilingual but less proficient at English. And it’s
unfortunate that ELL students who study, e.g., science may get poor grades at
times because even though they understand the concepts and know the
terminology, the terminology is from their native language.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> To be honest, this is horribly unfair. Somehow ELL students are seen as
> “behind” the native speakers when that’s only when you measure them in
> English.

This does not reflect the reality of US practice, in which students may be
labeled "ELL" even if they prefer to speak English at home and/or with their
friends. You graduate from the ELL designation by passing a standardized test,
so it's more of a designation for "who's stupid" than for "who has trouble
with English". It's not really surprising that a group defined by their
inability to score well on standardized tests turns in poor scores on other
standardized tests.

~~~
klodolph
This comment is perfectly representative of what I was talking about. The
entire idea that ELL is a “designation for ‘who’s stupid’” is exactly what is
untrue, and the limitations of standardized testing propagate this false
belief.

ELL is a bucket that has people with learning disabilities mixed with
immigrants and children of immigrants. The fact that a 14-year-old Korean kid
who just moved to America can’t remember the English word for “photosynthesis”
is not a reflection of poor skills in science but poor skills in English. I
argue that the intent of a science test is to test knowledge of science, and
that giving immigrants poor marks for subjects they are good at is nothing
more than a failure of testing. This failure should be known and understood
when analyzing test results—no test is perfect, but we should be able to
account for known sources of error. Simpson’s paradox is the classic example
of what wrong conclusions you can draw when you fail to account for variables
which are known to affect the result.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I'm saying that labeling children of immigrants "ELL" corrupts the system and
makes the category basically useless.

I agree with you as to the Korean immigrant. But ELLs as a class are not
"behind native English speakers only when you measure them in English". They
are native English speakers themselves, and they are behind the non-ELL class
because they are selected for poor performance.

------
zokier
While there is undoubtedly a lot to improve in education, it is worth noting
that (if I'm reading the article right) American students haven't gotten any
worse at reading either. Considering how much critique education generally
receives (as is apparent in this thread), I'd say that this is half-good
outcome. I'm not sure even upon what the assumption of ever-improving results
is built upon. Maybe we are just reaching the tail end of the S-curve in
education, which doesn't sound completely implausible considering that reading
is one of the oldest subject matters to be taught generally.

------
nxc18
I've been amazed at how bad people in my peer group (I'm 23) are at reading
and writing. Even in college it seemed no one was up to the task of writing a
five paragraph essay without major stress. Heaven help them if they tried to
read anything above 12th grade reading level or anything written before 1950
(ye olde English is hard, but should be doable).

I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm encouraged by the idea of
exposing kids to difficult texts early. Kids can learn really quickly when
challenged. As long as it is a safe environment (you're not going to be
punished for struggling with a too-hard text) I've seen that be very
effective. Treating kids like they're dumb is the #1 way to make them dumb.

~~~
threatofrain
But much of high school education in English involves reading ye olde public
domain works, and I'm not sure they're actually that helpful for reading or
writing. I feel like what kids are doing is practicing how to carry the
pretense of intellectualism, but in a way that they, their peers, their
teachers, or anyone else around them, feels is absolutely toy and obvious.

It's one thing to begin riding with training wheels, and it's another to keep
them on even past high school. For some, indefinitely.

I feel what's important for future optimism is improvement on specifically
scientific literacy and observational writing, and not Catcher in the Rye type
assignments where nobody, you included, is expected to believe in anything you
write. I don't think that's a healthy attitude for the next generation.

~~~
ghaff
There's something to be said for learning the "canon" but high school English
only does that in a very superficial way under the best of circumstances.
There are fairly classic books--at least some of which are admittedly more
recent than ye olde public domain--which are pretty readable today. But IMO
Henry James, Bronte sisters, Tolstoy, etc. are going to be a pretty tough slog
for most modern readers, especially at high school age.

~~~
skookumchuck
They're boring, too. Why not read Tolkien instead? Or Asimov? or Clancy?

------
zaroth
Read to your child for 30-60 minutes a day from Day 1 and by Kindergarden
there are books piled on every flat surface, books piled in the car, books in
the refrigerator, and you won’t be able to tear the book from their tiny
little hands.

~~~
p1esk
In the age of smartphones and tablets?

~~~
kurthr
The disturbing thing is that you're talking about giving a kindergartner a
smartphone/tablet... which is asking for trouble even if I've seen it done.
This is exactly because their apps are designed to be so addictive.

~~~
patcheudor
When I was a kid I played with Lego. Every free moment was spent with Lego. My
parents were continually warned by their friends and even our family doctor
that I shouldn't spend so much time playing with Lego. It was 'addictive' and
the time I spent playing with Lego was time I wasn't concentrating on
homework, throwing ball, and other important things a child should be doing.
The point is, every generation tends to have a play devil, the thing that will
lead to the destruction of our society and hamper our children's long term
success.

~~~
ghaff
When I was growing up it was television that was the great satan.

------
helloworld
The implication here is that American students, on average, should have gotten
better at reading over the last 20 years.

But might their performance in fact be asymptotic to some maximum possible
achievement level, as constrained by general intelligence?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_\(psychometrics\))

~~~
ticviking
That would imply that the G factor might have something to do with the gap in
achievement though. And if that were the case we'd have very little
justification for aiming to improve low income scores.

Since we have evidence that students do better as family income increases I'm
thinking we are wondering why we can't close the gap called by other things.

------
mrob
"A sixth-grader at one of his schools was frustrated that a passage on a
reading test she’d taken kept repeating a word she didn’t understand: roog-
bye. The unfamiliar word made it hard for her to understand the passage. When
Rowe asked her to spell the word, it turned out to be rugby."

I wonder if the test conditions are to blame. In real life, if you don't know
a word then you look it up in a dictionary. It takes a few seconds, and you
always have a dictionary with you (a smart phone). If you don't know a concept
then you can look it up in Wikipedia. Rugby is an unpopular sport in the US,
so I think it's reasonable that a sixth-grader hadn't heard of it. For a
general reading test, and not specifically a vocabulary test, I think she
should have been allowed to look up a definition. Are dictionaries generally
allowed in reading tests?

~~~
walshemj
How do you get a oo sound from u ?

~~~
mrob
Suit, super, sue, suicide, suet, etc.

~~~
walshemj
Ah I take the point

------
icc97
A rather prescient quote from Alan Kay's Dynabook paper in 1972 [0]

> For many years it has been a tradition to attempt to cure our society's ills
> through technology: "You have slums? Let's build low-cost housing!" "You
> can't afford that TV? We'll build a cheaper one and you can buy it on time,
> even though it will break before you've finished paying for it!" "Your kids
> aren't learning and education is too expensive? We'll build you a teaching
> machine which will guarantee your kids will pass tests!"

[0]:
[https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html](https://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html)

------
dahart
> The long-standing view has been that the first few years of elementary
> school should be devoted to basic reading skills. History, science, and the
> arts can wait.

For a long time I've thought math education has this problem. Math as a
subject is abstract and lacks context. Learning subjects like physics or
computer graphics or robotics requires learning math along the way to get
something done, but they come with goals and results and context that can be
far more motivating to the average person than just learning the mechanics of
linear algebra or calculus in isolation.

------
projektir
Isn't reading the kind of thing that should be taught by parents before the
kid even goes to school?

I have no idea how kids manage to learn how to read at all in schools,
American or otherwise. Reading is... difficult. The school environment does
not promote the study of difficult things well. If you haven't been prepared,
you'll have trouble.

Sometimes I'm not sure what we're measuring, education quality or just how
good someone's parents are. Pretty much everything I knew that helped me at
school/college did not come from school/college.

~~~
learc83
>Isn't reading the kind of thing that should be taught by parents before the
kid even goes to school?

No, most kids in the US start school at the age of 5. Consensus is building
that forcing kids to learn to read before they are read is detrimental, and
the vast majority of kids aren't ready to read before they are 5.

~~~
projektir
I'm not mentioning age anywhere in my post?

I don't recall starting school at 5, I think it was later than that, but it
wasn't in the US. In the first grade already if I didn't know how to read
prior, I'd be in huge trouble. Most students were actively struggling to read
and continued to struggle for 2 more grades. If you are not ready to read at 5
before school, why would you be ready to read at 5 in school? Why would
teaching someone to read 3 months prior would be so much more horrible than
waiting for them to hit the school system and suffer in there instead? If
that's the argument, school should just start later.

I came into the US school system late but people were seriously struggling
with reading in 6th grade, as well. People for whom English was their native
language. I am not really seeing that parental interference is not needed.

> Consensus is building that forcing kids to learn to read before they are
> read(y)

This is a tautology. I'm not sure what is the magical age at which children
are "ready" to read, but I am very sure that people should be able to
comfortably read by grade 6, and I'm similarly very sure that the educational
system alone won't accomplish that.

~~~
learc83
>I'm not mentioning age anywhere in my post?

You said "Isn't reading the kind of thing that should be taught by parents
before the kid even goes to school?". Since most countries start school at
either 5 or 6, 5-6 is implied in that statement.

> If you are not ready to read at 5 before school, why would you be ready to
> read at 5 in school?

You wouldn't. 5 is probably too early for most kids, less than than 5 is too
early for an even greater number of kids. 3 months is 5% of a 5-year-old's
life. Starting 3 months before starting school, which is probably already too
early, isn't going to be helpful for most students.

>If that's the argument, school should just start later.

School probably should start later. In Finland, one of the highest ranked
school systems, kids start at 7.

>I am not really seeing that parental interference is not needed.

Where did you get that? I said _most_ children shouldn't be forced to learn to
read before they go to school--not that parents should never teach their
children.

>This is a tautology.

No, it's not that children won't learn to read before they are ready. It's
that forcing them to try to learn before they are ready is actively harmful.

>but I am very sure that people should be able to comfortably read by grade 6,
and I'm similarly very sure that the educational system alone won't accomplish
that.

You're arguing against points I'm not making.

------
quantumofmalice
The article is the usual more-effort-is-needed pablum one expects from
articles on education.

Any analysis of American children that ignores demographics is silly. 44% of
California children don't speak english at home. What on earth do you expect
from these children if you test them in english proficiency?

~~~
sverige
The percentages of kids who didn't speak English at home were pretty high 100
years ago, too, but they definitely were better at reading English then. The
problem isn't effort. The problem is recognizing that there is value in
learning to read.

~~~
concrete-faucet
Where I live, there are gifted schools for kids that speak Polish, Spanish and
Russian. Their only goal for English is to make sure the child is proficient
by the 6th grade.

The kids section at the local library branch (there is one in every
neighborhood) will have half the books in English and the rest in whatever
languages are common in that neighborhood.

Language barriers are only a problem if your local city makes them one.

My son is in 3rd grade and his NWEA MAP reading score put him at the 11/12
grade level, so he got put into an advanced reader class. In the fall, they
read books about history, wrote about and discussed them in class. This
spring, the teach chose a young adult novel that I guess is entirely
appropriate from a reading-level point of view. But some of the subject matter
goes way over the heads of the kids and other stuff in the book is disturbing
to them. Our son simply refused to finish reading the book. The teacher wasn't
going to switch books because a couple kids didn't like it, and the class
depended on discussing what they read... What can you do but stop reading
and/or drop out of the class?

~~~
wiredfool
That is really hard. My oldest was reading at roughly that spread, and finding
books that were emotionally approriate but also engaging at his reading level
was difficult. It took a long time for him to read Harry Potter because it was
just too dark. It didn’t help that he’d tear through trilogies in a day or
two. You might win once or twice, but a week later you're in the same boat
again.

------
dboreham
Something odd about the word "gotten" in the context of student literacy? Or
is it just me?

I see the headline here has since been edited to remove that word.

Perhaps this is some clever "English as she is wrote" kind of joke that flew
over my head??

~~~
jwilk
What's wrong with "gotten"?

~~~
dboreham
To me (British English native) it sounds like a non-word. I'm well aware of
its meaning and that many "Americanisms" are actually old English usage. It
still sounds to me like something a cartoon weasel would say.

------
motohagiography
Sort of hoped it was because American students had in fact become better
instead...

------
justherefortart
I'd say one of the biggest shifts since 1998 is the wider availability of the
internet and then computer like devices in school. Instead of doing the rote
learning, they make learning into a game. Where everyone advances at a glacial
pace from what I've seen.

Now that kids are growing up using handheld phones/tablets for their
consumption, the likelihood of them sitting down and reading a book (be it
digital or paper) seems less likely than during my childhood when we had to
dream about these futuristic gadgets.

~~~
brightball
For what it’s worth, I basically had to force my son to read the 1st Harry
Potter book. It’s slightly above his grade level and I had to actually ban him
from electronics until it was finished and we quizzed him on it to make sure
he actually read it. There were tears because he felt it was too hard without
really trying.

After he finished it, he loved it. He’s on book 3 now, reads every night
because he wants to, makes a point to take the books with him, takes the
accelerated reader tests for them at school (and aces them).

Now the kid loves reading... :)

~~~
rootusrootus
Is that because the electronics were more attractive, or because he was still
in the 'learn to read' phase and it was work to get through a large book?
Crossing the threshold into 'read to learn' skill level is a huge turning
point in how a kid looks at books [in my experience].

~~~
vostok
As an adult, I think it's because electronics are more attractive. As a kid, I
gladly slogged through the Silmarillion. Given my choice of verb, I'm not sure
that I could do it today. Reading the comments on HN gives me a much quicker
and sharper burst of pleasure.

~~~
rootusrootus
My hats off to you. I didn't try Silmarillion until I was in my 20s, but I was
unable to stick with it to the end.

I think it has to be the social part, not the electronics per se. When I was a
tween, we had mostly non-networked PCs and games (e.g. Atari, NES). We played
on them plenty, to be sure, but I still spent most of my time with friends
outdoors. Today it seems like most games have a social aspect to them, and
right along with reading/replying to comments on places like HN, it's the
feeling of connectedness that is addicting. Electronics is how, not the why.
In my opinion :)

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gaius
The last person you should ask about education is a teacher. It would be like
asking the waiter about farming or the supply chain or vetinary medicine.

~~~
wisty
No, the last person you should ask about education are the people who teach
teachers. Unless they're the kind who looks at meta-analysis and goes "huh,
the textbook is encouraging stuff that's essentially a placebo".

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wadeboggs
Hard to get better when ur the best

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gaius
It's a miracle that in the UK they can read at all given the quality of
teaching

