Excellent submission. That was an extremely well-written and particularly trenchant piece of writing.
It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion.
I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.
It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.
SIMPLE!!!??? You clearly didn't teach your parents to use computers. Teaching people how to use computers is one of the more challenging and frustrating things I have yet to do. Besides perhaps math, computers baffle more adults than anything I can imagine. I used to have 2 hours phone calls with my mom trying to "get her document back". She had just clicked another window and her word doc was behind it. 2 hours later she accidently clicked the word doc again and it came forward. Teaching the computer illiterate is a can of worms I wouldn't open without some serious friends and some serious beer.
I complain to my folks about what I see as major character problems in my little one, only to have my parents smile knowingly (I think they think its justice of some sort). The mention something about that being "familiar" behavior they saw once upon a time ;)
I meant simple in the sense that it would be a pretty straightforward way for me to help people like Ms. L. I doubt it would be in any way easy.
And I taught my mother from basic computer illiteracy into practically a power user (well, a relative power user: email and surfing and transferring images from her digital camera. she's the envy of all her friends, at least...).
The biggest hurdle was getting her to believe me that no matter what she did, she couldn't possibly harm the computer beyond my ability to repair it. I think a lot of people unfamiliar with computers think that it is very easy to irreparably damage them. It kind of discourages taking risks and trying to solve problems on your own. Once I made it clear that she could (and should) do whatever she wanted without fear, she picked it up extremely rapidly.
I was basically joshing you. I agree with you on that hurdle though. Most people think of computers as machines. If you use a machine incorrectly, or in the wrong order, you can break it or even injure yourself. Computers, usually at least, don't work that way. It'd be pretty hard for my parents to mess up the computer more than losing that email they just spent the last hour hunt-and-pecking away at.
I think that it's not only that older people didn't grow up with, say, the Windows interface or, as someone mentioned earlier, a telephone interface where you have to press send to make a call, it's an even more basic issue. They grew up in a world where machinery was expensive, fragile and dangerous and a world where adults seldom learned to operate fundamentally new machinery. Even sturdy, harmless household machinery wasn't safe to "play around" with. One reason you had to dial 1 to make a long distance call, even before exchanges and area codes overlapped, is to reduce the risk of misdialing or misunderstanding your way into a big bill. If you pick up the phone in the middle of the night and dial random numbers to figure out the numbering scheme and whether it takes longer to call cross-country, you'll get a big bill and, if you piss enough people off, get a visit from the police or a stern letter from the phone company. If you enter random URLs into your browser, you're unlikely to break anything.
We (younger people) have an advantage in that we're used to pretty much everything being software driven, so we know that if we screw up our computer, phone or DVD player we can just pull the plug or the battery. We're also used to the idea that not every device will behave the same way to achieve the same function. We press "send" to "send" a call, but not to send an SMS message, even though the latter is standard usage and the former is not, but we don't care because we know that's how the UI works. And, we know that we'll have to keep learning new UIs as we get older. Older people don't have a problem dialing nine for an outside line, even though at home they just pick up the receiver, because they probably learned it in their 20s.
It tries my patience too, but we just have to remember: to the uninitiated, it's all rectangles. You and I see 'windows', 'buttons', etc, but to them it's all rectangles.
We are so far away from an actually usable interface it's disgusting.
We are so far away from an actually usable interface it's disgusting.
Tech interfaces are usable -- they're just not intuitive to those who didn't grow up using computers. Ironically, part of the problem is that the metaphors and shortcuts that some interfaces use in an attempt to make things easier end up make things more confusing:
- Operating systems: "Why is the trashcan on my desktop?"
- Macs: "If I want to eject the CD, I'm supposed to throw it away in the trashcan?"
- Cell phones: "So you're saying I have to hold down the off button if I want to turn the phone on?"
Well, with OSX at least, the trash is in the dock (so not quite on the desktop any more), and most people eject using the single-purpose Eject button on their keyboards. Also, the button is usually marked with an "1/0" symbol, not really an "off", so it really just means "toggle power."
Not many people have to use a lathe. It's designed for specialists to use, and the knowledge of how to use it is a given prerequisite that the designer takes into account.
Cellphones on the other hand are one of the most widely distributed electronic devices in the world, and they're clearly designed for anyone to use. It's certainly the designer's prerogative to assume the user will have a certain level of training and familiarity with it (or will take the time to learn it), but my argument is that in some cases a designer who goes the extra mile and makes a truly intuitive device has the opportunity to capture a much larger user base.
You could say that's what blogger did -- there were many ways to build a blog before, but Evan Williams and co. made it much easier to launch and maintain one, and that paid off for them.
Or also with the cell phone: "Why do I have to press 'send' to make a call? On a regular phone, I just dial the number. I press 'send' when I send a fax."
Yes, in fact we don't have a single cordless phone. We do, however, have a regular phone with a ridiculously long cord that can thus be carried around.
"I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people."
If you do this enough, you will inevitably come up against a real challenge. One of my students could not even double-click. She would raise her hand to hover a couple of inches above the mouse, then stab down with her finger twice. Not only was this too slow to register as a double click, she invariably moved the mouse. with each downward stab of her finger. I would show her the right way to do it, but she would always devolve to her old behavior.
It's that preconception that is responsible for widespread "ageism" in the IT industry.
Do you not perhaps think that correlation is not causation? Maybe "dropping out of the education system early" is in fact a more significant data point than being 40? I'm 32 and if things stay as they are, in 10 years I'll have real trouble changing jobs in this industry. The current crop of geeks are in for a nasty surprise if they think they'll be a hot commodity forever.
The most helpful grade I ever received on an essay was an 'F'.
It was in my first year of university. I knew the course and knew the material but couldn't have been arsed to put together a paper which adequately addressed the subject.
The comments the professor wrote were scathing and it was a wonderful full slap on the face that I'd better get my act together and actually deliver what was expected of me if I ever wanted to accomplish something of value.
I went to college to be an English major. My first paper freshman year came back with a "D" on it and the remark, "Sophomoric Ramblings". It didn't seem logical, a bad grade and a compliment. (Since I was a freshman, I thought "sophomoric" meant "advanced".)
One week later, I became a math major and I've never looked back.
This is a very interesting story. What I'm left with is the question of 'who are these people, really'? Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had any deep face-to-face conversation with them.
Or put in other words; I didn't think there were enough jobs available that didn't require a minimum of college-level skills. A checkout clerk could obviously make do, but I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts.
And other questions arise: Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large after all? You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys. At one level or the other, there is a major problem here - either the educational system is a massive failure, or the rest of us are stupid to assume that everybody has to be particularly intelligent.
I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word.
Correct again. The wikipedia article notes the high correlation of illiteracy to delinquency and crime.
However, a counterexample. One of my first programming jobs was to create a data entry terminal in an industrial setting, replacing the giant paper sheets they used to fill out. When it was ready I beta-tested it on selected people from each shift. The interface was super simple, it just asked you a series of questions and you typed in the numbers -- I figured the guys in the plant would at least know how to deal with ATMs, so that was my metaphor. And it worked well.
The best foreman in the plant brought a friend along -- I shrugged and let them take the test together. He interacted with it in a really weird way and required multiple repeats of the entire session before he understood it. I only realized later that he was illiterate. And, let me just restate: best foreman in the whole plant. He knew what numbers were, and he'd trained himself to fill out the correct numbers in the correct spots on the paper sheet.
So that's when I added big icons and pictures to each screen, diagramming what bit of data we wanted at each stage.
Yep. And if that illiterate foreman was suddenly required to pass a college English 101 class in order to keep his job... the world would lose a perfectly good foreman.
For some reason your story reminded me of Captain Bill Eddy, television pioneer of the 1930s and 40s. Here he is in his own words (from one of my favorite books: The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920 - 1961):
"I started losing my hearing as a kid and was deaf when I entered the Navy, but I had learned to read lips, so every time they put me through the audio tests, they said I had perfect hearing. With the great knowledge of the Navy I was assigned to be sound officer on the submarine. I couldn't hear the signals coming from the enemy submarines, so I went to Kresge's department store and bought some parts and devised an amplifier where the sound signals came out as a movement on a dial. By looking at the dial, I knew if we were on target for an enemy ship and could fire a torpedo. It worked very well, and our submarine was the only one that was scoring hits. Soon, so many people had these amplifiers and were scoring hits that the Navy Department heard about it, and they asked me to develop a model of this amplifier using the finest parts. I put it together and it didn't work. In desperation, I went out to Kresge's and bought these cheap tubes and transformers and put together the Eddy Amplifier and it worked. It became a very interesting patent because it only worked with Kresge parts. That's how I got into electronics."
"In 1934 the Navy finally tripped me up by changing to an electronic system of measuring hearing. I was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for retirement."
Fortunately, the Navy's loss was Philo Farnsworth's gain...
Nice story, neilk. My favorite system development anecdotes have always come from factory floors. Not quite sure why. Maybe because producing vs. not producing was always so much more visible than in a typical office.
Of that 21-23%, how many of them are poor and uneducated immigrants whose children we can expect to be better educated?
That's not to say it's good for there to be people so uneducated, but it might not be as bad as a naïve reading of official figures might make one think.
Instead, it's the illiterate children of nonimmigrants that make me really worry, but I don't know how many of them are.
Rates differ according to definition. It's clear that YouTube commenters aren't illiterate in the sense of total inability to read; they're typing, after all.
'Functional illiteracy' encompasses people who can read and write, but not with the fluency required to function in society, for instance, when understanding and completing a job application.
Let's face it though; do you really think you live in a society where >95% of the population can read and write fluently? Educated people tend to live in a bit of a bubble, surrounded by others like them, but YouTube tells a different story.
Is there really a considerable portion of American (or we could say Western) society that is practically illiterate? This seems counter-intuitive to me, I thought it was hardly possible to function at all without a basic understanding of the written word. If these people are out there, I have certainly never had any deep face-to-face conversation with them.
Try reading the comments on youtube.
I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains to grasp some abstract literary concepts.
A car mechanic has enough brains to grasp some pretty complicated mechanical concepts, but for whatever reason he can quite easily fail to grasp a simple literary concept no matter how well it's explained. In the same way, I'm sure I can find you plenty of professors of English who are incapable of grasping how an engine works. In both cases, I'm not sure whether they're genuinely incapable, or whether they just have psychological barricades set up which lead them to think that this kind of knowledge is "beneath" them.
You'd have a hard time convincing me that most people who can't comment intelligently on 'The Wizard of Oz' are fit do be much more than corporate monkeys.
Most people out there probably just don't think that commenting intelligently on The Wizard of Oz is a worthwhile thing to do.
...whether they just have psychological barricades...
I'm convinced that this is the bulk of the problem.
Perhaps I'm still an idealist, but I have always believed that almost anyone can learn almost anything.
Ever think of asking a parent how many times they'd let their baby fall before they gave up teaching him to walk? They'd look at you like you're from another planet. They'd probably answer, "He'll keep trying and falling until he walks."
Think how far ahead everyone would be if all teachers were like parents of one-year-olds.
Aha, but walking is an inherent human capability, waiting to be learned. I honestly don't think that everyone can learn anything. we can certainly do better than the status quo, but expecting the average layman to grasp advanced physics seems a bit of a stretch. There's something to be said for raw talent.
I was careful to use the word "almost" twice. The interpretation of "almost" is obviously up to the reader.
With that in mind, if you could teach many "average laymen" to grasp advanced physics, I really wouldn't be all that surprised. Of course, there is something to be said for raw talent, lots of which remains hidden because of many factors. The power of human capability never ceases to amaze me, even under the most difficult circumstances.
I have a feeling that almost all three-year-olds could be brought (over time) to an understanding (by age 12-15) of a reasonable portion of advanced physics. However, after a few years of indoctrination in most schools, almost all of them will have become almost incapable of doing so.
One thing to remember about Youtube commenters; many of them are not English speakers. Compared to my Filipino or Mandarin, their English is pretty good.
But if you want to criticize what they're saying, that's a bit different.
I think people overestimate the difficulty of learning a new language. Compared to my Portuguese, their English is downright embarrassing and shameful, and I'm not proud of my current Portuguese due to lack of practice.
It's not that hard to learn decent grammar, especially with the resources available to those with Internet access. The fact that these kids can hammer out imbecilic English sentences doesn't impress me.
How old are you? The baby boom generation seems mostly literate, but my generation, gen Y, is basically incapable of constructing a sentence. In my senior year high school English class I had a teacher who liked me, so she had me grade papers in lieu of some other work. In particular, I remember proofreading drafts of my classmates' college admissions essays. They were deplorable. The best one was grammatically tolerable, adhering closely to the rigid five-paragraph "keyhole" format that we'd all had drilled into our heads, but was all about how much the author loved playing Counterstrike and the lessons it taught him about teamwork. The worst few were outright incomprehensible. I handed those back to the teacher unedited and asked her whether their authors spoke English as their native language. They did. And this was an honors class at what is generally considered the strongest public high school in Florida.
I'm Gen X - the High School I attended, and ultimately received my GED from was inner city. While we had more Ivy League acceptances from our student body than any other local public school, we also had on-campus murders, armed police officers roaming the halls, and a bathroom that no one but drug dealers and users went into.
I left school my senior year, and went into a career in computers. I had been a part of the "computer underground" since 12 or 13, and knew UNIX better than most admins. I couldn't speak or write properly however. Turns out employers, weren't too keen on odd combination of l33+ sp34/<, and street slag. I relied on two co-workers over my first several years of work to teach me English. I think I've been free of "tooken" for nearly a decade. Thank God.
It wasn't the school's fault, I made a choice. I could of easily gone to a decent college, but laziness and lack of priorities could have derailed my life. I was lucky enough to have these guys take an interest in me.
Those statistics end at 1979, but I don't doubt that you're correct. The problem here is not literacy per se: these students would have no trouble transcribing between written and spoken English. The problem is with composition and comprehension.
The vast majority of society functions at a cognitive level that is so low as to be shocking. What's even more amazing is that these people are able to hold a job, earn a living, and have a family.
People who have higher thinking skills live in an entirely different world from the mainstream of humanity. It turns out that intelligence is a lot less necessary to leading a normal life than you and I might think.
I'm just curious, what does it mean to "comment intelligently" on a literary work? It's a skill I never learned (1), nor could I even explain what the skill consists of. It hasn't really impeded my (non-corporate) career, although I did need to learn how to write when I got to grad school (note: I learned to write based on Principles of Software Engineering, not Strunk&White).
(1) I took english 101-102 at a community college, similar to what author describes. But the professor neither explained how to write literary papers, nor read student papers before giving out grades.
> I'd expect even a car mechanic to have enough brains
How many things in your life can you fix by yourself? The typical car mechanic is far less dependent on others to keep things running.
> Isn't academic aptitude strongly correlated with ability to succeed in the world at large
No.
In fact, even in the areas where you'd expect academia to be most relevant, half of the genius' are academic failures. (The academics do dominate the middle, but that's probably because academia is used as a filter and that keeps out all but the best of the academic failures.)
> the educational system is a massive failure
Not massive, but anything else that "succeeded" as well would be considered a failure. However, the bigger failure may be outside the educational system, expecting things from it that it can't deliver.
Then again, that may be academia's fault. Who else would think that the ability to comment intelligently on the wizard of oz has broad predictive power.
FWIW, the guy who wrote Babylon 5, which is full of literary representation and symbolism, ie abstraction, says that he can't handle "let X = 5".
Thoreau said, "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root."
Here is my attempt.
Shortly after we're born, we begin to perceive a certain amount of value in everything we encounter. We assign value to food, attention, comfort, safety, pleasure, affection, entertainment, possessions, virtue, appearance, and a million other things. We assign value to a thousand instances of a hundred types of those things - particular tv shows, certain cars, particular kinds of attention, certain types of pleasure, even one virtue over another. Automatically, they line up along a spectrum of desire and the sorting continues each moment till we die.
Some people value books more than people. Books have never hit them. Some people value an infomercial on tv more than any book imaginable. They still remember all those years ago how the class laughed when they had to read aloud. They don't feel stupid watching tv. They don't feel poor, inferior, or much of anything while it's on. A superficial man can see a woman and in a tenth of a second assign a value to her. We call him superficial in hopes that he will start valuing her other qualities more. A child of six in a bad neighborhood somewhere has never seen any of their friends or family open a book for fun. With perfect logic the child's mind takes note of what seems valued and what does not, by people like him. A very reasonable, and very wrong valuing ensues.
And there is something out there that each person on this website ought to value but doesn't for the very same reasons: We haven't yet encountered it, or we didn't understand it when we did, or the people around us didn't seem to value it, etc. High school art class comes to mind.
You are on this website right now because at this very moment you value it more than everything else that can at this moment be had. Not because of your DNA or inherent intellect, but because at some point you began to value time on this website, and before that websites in general, and before that time on computers, and before that a million other things that compose rungs on a ladder to somewhere.
And by my simply saying that, many of you will suddenly call into question the value of being on this site right now. That questioning is the combination of your own ability to reason, imagine, and introspect as well as your environment of which my words are now a part. And those four ingredients more than anything else are what have formed your beliefs, including your beliefs about what is to be valued.
Scholastically, life works out better for people who value books more than television. And better still for people who value knowledge more than almost everything else.
Things work out better when we value things of value.
> Scholastically, life works out better for people who value books more than television. And better still for people who value knowledge more than almost everything else.
"Truly rich people talk about ideas, poor people talk about other people."
The classic nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. The problem with your argument is that it's simply not backed up by evidence. There are plenty of cases of children who grow up in virtually identical environments, yet go on to have widely varying interests. My brother and I grew up experiencing basically all the same stimuli: same parents, same TV shows, same music, same magazines, same everything. As adults we couldn't be more different.
There's more to this picture than just stimulus response/valuation/categorization.
Just wanted to point out. You and your brother cannot possibly have had the same stimuli. You were his elder brother (say) and he was younger to you. People sometimes resist each others ideas. My friend took to piano lessons because his brother hated it. Sibling rivalry factors ever so little especially at the early stages of growth, and it tips everything later on.
Technically true, but sophist's experience is consistent with scientific findings. Sibling studies have repeatedly shown that genes do account for a significant amount of variation in behavior. While environment plays a role as well, the "blank slate" theory is flat wrong.
For an overview of the evidence, I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.
As far as I can tell, no one here has posited the blank slate theory.
My point was that the conclusions we come to about the world around us are the largest factor in determining where we end up on the spectrum between mediocre and extraordinary.
If we really thought DNA was more important than our beliefs, we would spend less time trying to correct and inform each other on Hacker News and more time getting our genes sequenced.
Well there is one easy way to scientificaly prove whether genes or DNA determine a certain behaviour. While I agree with the nice explenation given by the main comentator I do think that he has largly ignored the role that genes play.
Twin studies have shown, as far as intelligence is concerned, that when two identical twins are raised in two different environment their intelligence is quite similar.
Now who plays the greater role? Well who came first the chicken or the egg?
Was it the environment who turned on a certain gene, or was it the gene who went to find a certain environment?
When children start education most are the same. Most watch television, most go to school. Does the child prefer watching television because of his genes or because of the environment?
I personaly can not doubt that both play a role, but also I can not doubt that in most circumstances the environement tends to play a greater role. Nonetheless neither can be discaunted and both are crucial.
I think you're right, but what would it mean if the more is chaos? Have you seen the Price is Right game "Plinko" where identical starting positions lead to totally different results? What if the more isn't nature or nurture, just pure chaos.
Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X?
The author seems to think one aspect of education is to propagandize a certain political view, and that the success of the same would validate forcing education on people. If it makes him feel better, then...yes, of course reading such things will have an effect. Where did you get your ideas from? Obviously, a brain not so capable of absorbing information tends to stick to its instincts. That's why not every human quality is curable.
I do wonder if the author realizes that many police officers come from a poor background, probably much unlike his own. Maybe they don't need Steinbeck to learn about the subject.
Perhaps a police officer works with a somewhat skewed sample of the poor population in the same way that a TA for a class tends to deal personally with a non-representative sample of students from the class. They would both do well to remember the context of their occupation. Not that it would necessarily come from novels, but it's an argument for a general education.
When I made the parent submission to HN ~2hr ago which contained this article, I was going to post to the original source shortly but good to see you do it. That is what it is all about, helping each other :)
(I deleted the submission as it linked to this article in reference rather than the original, and did not follow the “Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter” in http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Anyway, if you find the article interesting you may enjoy some of the other ones I was reading at the time (also with good links) that were useful...
Very insightful view into the mind of an essay marker. I've always loathed the subjectiveness of English courses, that's why I took computer science :)
I agree with the author, not everyone is cut out for English classes, but I think an alternative to these "trying help you an write essay" classes should be some kind of "just read a book and enjoy it" class. It would be a start anyway. In school, any hope of loving English literature is usually destroyed by some kind of forced book dissection or compare and contrast garbage.
The problem with dissecting a book is that -- just like dissecting an animal -- at the end of the exercise, the subject of the dissection is dead.
While mulling over a good book and discussing it can be enjoyable, the attempt to squeeze deep meaning out of something that the author put in by chance simply kills the joy of a good book.
Besides, I find that often the books that tend to be chosen for literature classes (at least in high school) tend towards empty, meaningless "classics" about empty, meaningless people. Reading this sort of book really ends up sucking the joy out of an English class.
My favorite 'English' class in high school was a journalism class, which was centered around learning to write well and communicate something effectively, with none of the BS about "hidden symbolism".
I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest, and that, truth be told, if the author wanted to tell me something, he ought to have come out and said it directly instead of beating around the bush with "symbolism" that to me was as clear as mud, and that in the process he would have saved us all a great deal of time because his message wasn't really all that difficult to summarize in a paragraph or two.
"I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest,"
I think I've already used this story once on HN, but what the heck.
The assignment was to address Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra. I pointed out several instances of Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra, then as a conclusion, said that I actually didn't think there was really any Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra at all, but "found" some to fulfill the assignment.
When I got my paper back, it had positive remarks in the margins, until the remark at the end saying "Jim, we need to talk about this."
Do you know how zen koans work? They help you understand yourself. They don't do it by telling you about yourself, but rather by tricking your mind into paying attention to nothing other than yourself, even though you might not consciously want to.
In the same way, symbolism is intended to trick the mind into grasping a concept it consciously has problems with understanding, or perhaps outright disagrees with. It's like grinding a vitamin into dogfood--the dog won't notice, but it's getting healthier. You might be an ardant anti-___ist and never want to hear a single word on ____ism, but a carefully crafted allegory about ____ism might have you more of a believer than you knew.
The thing is, I'm not a dog, but a person, and I am actually quite willing to listen to people I disagree with as long as they are polite and reasonable.
There's listening, then there's listening. When someone is really learning, you are dealing with the edges of their model of the world and their conscious perception. When you are really teaching, you are playing in this dangerous interstice. Sometimes, the best way of teaching people is tricking them. Sometimes, if you just tell them, they'll just rationalize what you have to tell them away.
This is more apt to apply to classes in history than to computers, however. Even then, there are popular misconceptions to deal with.
Mark 4:10
When he was alone, those around him and the Twelve asked him about the parables.
Luke 8:10
He said, 'The secret of the kingdom of God is granted to you.'
Mark 4:11-12
'But to those on the outside, everything comes in parables so that they may look and look but never perceive, listen and listen but never understand.'
I know literary criticism is about as popular as Windows ME here, but reading good examples of it can be as enjoyable as the text itself(1). Of course there's always the question of how much authority the critic has -- but it's kind of like having someone with a lot of expertise explain the Linux kernal to you, even if it's not Linus.
To your last point -- I feel bad for you if those are the kind of books you had to read in high school. What were they?
(1) If you want to know what I'm talking about, try the Viking Critical Edition of Don Delillo's 'White Noise'. It has examples of criticism both of the kind I'm talking about and the kind that pg and others rightly mock.
I haven't read any especially good literary criticism, however (as I obviously failed to make clear) I do enjoy reading and discussing a book.
What I hated was attempting to mash meaning into every word in the story, even when there was obviously none intended by the author.
An example I remember was when, in The Great Gatsby, it was mentioned in passing that someone had blue eyes, and the teacher went on and on about how that represented sadness, how it showed the economic differences between the classes, etc, etc. No, it meant that the eyes were blue. stop putting words in the author's mouth.
As for the kind of books that I had to read -- I found the Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) to be utterly horrid. Bad writing, large plot holes, poor continuity, etc.
To be fair, many of them (eg, A Streetcar Named Desire) I disliked simply because I found the characters distasteful and unappealing. ("meaningless people with meaningless lives")
I got so fed up with discussing Phineas and Gene in high school that even the mention of them makes me convulse in hatred. That story did not just die while we were dissecting it. Its corpse rotted away and its bones decomposed completely, leaving nothing but a faint stench.
I can still hear my English teacher saying their names over and over again...
Me too. I found it fascinating. I also didn't read it for school, but ironically 'borrowed' one of the copies from the English class that was currently studying it.
The arts and humanities are just terribly taught. People notice it more with regard to English than art or music class, because you have to take English every year pretty much anywhere, while usually you stop taking art or music before you realize how bad it is.
I had a lot of great science and math teachers and a few great history teachers. I had some good English teachers but none who were really great. I think that's because people with math and science degrees have plenty of job opportunities, so only the ones who really want to teach high school even consider it. Probably the best English teachers I had were baby-boomer or older women who would have done something else if not for workplace misogyny. As they retired they were generally replaced by ignorant young women.
I love reading and I can write lucidly, but I knew people in college who had had really strong English instruction and can analyze a novel on first reading in ways that wouldn't even occur to me after a month of full-time study.
I think part of the issue here is the nature of the beast--for most English teachers, teaching is less about showing their students how to successfully parse the symbolism and subtext, and more about clubbing them over the head with the teacher's own interpretation. I imagine it's easy to fall into that trap. If you give a student the tools to find the answer instead of just giving the answer, you risk the possibility of the student coming back with something you deem "incorrect". In quantitative subjects, it's easy to say, "Nope, that's wrong. The answer is this..." In the arts and humanities however, one can almost always argue for the validity of his/her interpretation. So, an English teacher has a difficult job. On the one hand, you can give your students methods to come up with their own interpretations of the readings (which will inevitably result in "incorrect" interpretations and conflict as the students fight with you over the validity of their ideas). On the other hand, you can teach your own answers, and encourage your students to lightly reinterpret and regurgitate them. In keeping with that old saying about teaching a man to fish, many (if not most) English teachers simply give their students the fish. So, when the pupils come upon a teacher that assumes they already know how to fish, they starve. Disclaimer: I was an English major in college, so this is based on my own experience.
This is perhaps why I went to grad school for Software Engineering instead of Computer Science: the mix of objective and subjective interpretation in the same course. e.g., one of the reasons I enjoyed my Patterns and Architectures course was the discussion around popular, useful patterns and when they fail, or when doing something generally considered the "right way" is a really bad idea. I hate being told "X" is the right answer in all situations.
Tolkien is a strange exception to that rule. You can get into endless debates about symbolism or about the influences that Tolkien built on, and end up enjoying his work more than you ever did before. I can't think of any other author who's like that.
That is because, unlike most authors, Tolkien was actually trying to put symbolism into his work--he wasn't trying to just write a novel; he was telling an epic. Being a linguist, he recognized that, in the many retellings of an epic, small embellishments are added in order to provide side stories and submorals.
Tolkien certainly isn't the only author who has ever deliberately inserted symbolism, though. He is, however, one of the few among them who isn't painful to read. There's certainly plenty of symbolism in D.H. Lawrence, but it was put there for the express purpose of being dissected by literary critics.
I'd argue that the subjectiveness of a paper isn't as totally devoid of a good method. If you, once you were out of the woods from writing you paper, read it you could probably tell the teacher what grade it should receive. If you couldn't, if she gave you a great paper, (say an A paper) and you could easily compare the relative merits of each paper. You'd know immediately if your paper was worthy of an A or not.
Its probably all the more difficult for the teacher to grade the lower end of the scale. Giving a B grade is probably pretty easy. The paper was pretty good, but not an A. From there on down it gets difficult to wade through the errors and bad constructions to figure out if perhaps the ideas were of B quality but everything else was a C or D. I'll bet that the lower end of the scale is the most difficult and gives the most grief.
Its like judging climbing routes. They have this whole rating system (5.8, 5.9, 5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d...) that is wholly subjective, much like an english paper. However, if you were told that something was a 5.10a, and you could climb it, you could surely judge climbs around it. "oh, well that climb was pretty hard, I just barely made it after several tries at the crux (the hardest move). It must be a 5.10b or c."
On a side note, grading "quantitative" tests isn't easy or grief free either. Math tests with lots of mistakes are frustrating. You want to give as much credit as possible for correctness, but for a multi-step problem, how does one assign points for correct ideas but incorrect implementation. What if they screw up the first step, that didn't allow them to do any of the other steps, but they had the right idea for those? Its quite challenging.
"America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns."
We tend to never look at the underbelly of academia, particularly those who are well served post-college in a world of newly minted bonus checks and corporate perks. Discussion exists as to where the process went wrong, a process that favors the inevitable elite and rich, but I have yet to see one solid and compelling reason why education (on average) fails compared to our European counterparts.
Coal miners make more than an adjunct English lecturer because there is something "wrong" with being a coal miner: it's a dangerous and exhausting job.
The solution is to stop showing college as a pinnacle. While "everyone has a special gift" is a bit simplistic, the theory of comparative advantage still holds, and more people need to realize that.
I can almost hear his supervisor at his "night job"
"Old Professor X seems like a nice enough sort," they'd say, whispering among themselves, "but he'll never be ready for a job a at a major university. Sure -- he might get published in some rag like The Atlantic, but serious work? Not likely. He's just not cut out for it."
It's all in your perspective. You could take a guy with the same students and the same success ratio and he could write a story about how rewarding it was to help people at night school!
I think that's why I liked it so much: it was so artfully done that I couldn't help but think that the same experiences could be written to drive home a completely opposite conclusion.
You are right, but then one would have to focus on your success stories, which might just a few percent of the students.
By the time people are college aged, they are pretty set in their ways. Educational miracles where whole classes are swept up into success generally happen with younger students.
This really was a great submission. I also am an adjunct instructor (albeit at a 4-year university), and I can attest to this guy's experiences.
The line that really lit me up was this:
Our dialogue had turned oblique, as though we now
inhabited a Pinter play.
This is golden. If anyone here has ever seen a Pinter play acted out, you know exactly what this means, and it is totally spot on. It's when you totally have begun to talk beyond each other, each sentence containing only enough of the subject continuum to keep you in the conversation, but apart enough to make it clear that nothing is being exchanged at all.
It is interesting how the author is so cautious about saying "College is not for everyone". Maybe we hear "It should be hard to get a college education - especially if you are poor". I'm a big believer in getting all the education you can. That is not the same thing as believing you should get as many college degrees as possible. There comes a point when it is time to get out and do something with your life. For some people that means a PhD. For others a B.S. For some an apprenticeship with a skilled craftsman. Don't confuse a degree with an education.
Colleges should do whatever they can to reverse the trend of declining academic standards, or they will lose the money and prestige they presently have and command. Those running the schools may feel otherwise, but the outside world is pretty objective (if you can't hack it at your job, you're fired.)
Yup. I just had a class in which 15 of 18 I caught cheating, with 6 of those committing blatant acts of plagiarism.
When you try to talk to those kids, it's totally like a Pinter play.
I also completely empathize with the high-lows he described. Teaching is a high, especially if you allow yourself to be deluded into thinking your students are interested and learning; that makes the lows of having your delusions shattered at grading time that much lower.
I can bet that woman must be good at something she has never been tested on and probably does not know about. Maybe if we start from the premise that most individuals have something they are really good at, we might be able to move beyond the educational system of As and Fs and take advantage of people's abilities to the fullest.
But what if that premise isn't true? What if some people just suck at everything?
I can't see any reason why everybody must be good at something. There's nothing about genetics which says that random genes will combine in such a way as to give them at least one useful skill.
Yes, thats true, some people might suck at everything. But that can be managed as long as thats a small enough minority. (we have government welfare for a reason, right? :))
The hypothesis I proposed is too broad to prove easily. Maybe, we can start with a narrower premise. We can disprove "if you suck in English class, you are no good for college". A friend of mine, a maths genius, got a D in History class in college (without deliberately trying to fail) He had straight A's in all technical courses (CS, maths etc).
That's most probably because he didn't care about his History class.
Not only that, in math (and programming, etc), you just "get it" and thereafter practice it to get the straight A's. In History, even if you understand everything, you'll always have to memorize dates, names, people, places, etc.
This why smart students do well in school without having to study too hard, but maybe get worse (or even better) grades than the not-so-smart students who study their ass off and memorize everything.
>I can bet that woman must be good at something she has never been tested on and probably does not know about.
Hah. That women may very well be average at a lot of things, and bad at the rest.
This idea that "everyone has a special gift!" is just pixie-dust dreaming. Most people simply aren't special, in any sense of the word.
Fight Club:
"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact."
The sooner people learn that, the sooner they can get on with their lives of mediocrity.
I would reply that almost everybody is capable of becoming very good at many things. Unfortunately, we are often taught the opposite. Of course, becoming very good at something requires persistent effort, extended over years of focussed practice.
Amen. It smacks of the 'Oprah-watching, feel-good-book-reading, "let's hold hands and sing kumbaya"' bullshit that pervades society.
The fact is that people have differing levels of ability. but with everybody screaming for 'equality,' everyone has to have some 'special gift.' I'm not saying that some lives are worth more than others (although there's an interesting philosophical argument against this), but the idea that 'you can do anything you set your mind to' is false.
I agree, but I don't think it's an issue of equality in the sense that we're all given trophies and told we're all winners. I think it stems from the fact that most people totally abhor the concept of being thought of as common. Not everyone can be a leader--hell, if that were the case nothing would get done. Really though, there is nothing wrong with being an ordinary working citizen. If you have a hobby, pursue it in your free time. Conversely, if you like watching TV and jerking off, by all means, indulge in it.
The mess they are in now isn't because of Ivyleague type dudes with good grades who are actually dumb. Its just ridiculous decisions all along the way. Who came up with the ridiculous idea that Fannie-Mae could buy its own securities? That still amazes me.
At my old school they tested incoming freshmen and sent many of them to a pass / fail English 050 class. It seems odd that most schools don't have such programs.
I, too, taught "literature" to people that could barely read. It sucked.
If you can't read, you should learn the mechanics of how to read before dealing with things like "foreshadowing" "theme" "denouement."
Just, basic stuff.Otherwise, it's just ridiculous.
That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money. Not raping them in their vulnerability, naivete, and ability to get a loan.
A vice president of a state university once said to me during an interview:
"I wonder when the state legislature is going to notice that they are giving us money to teach to students the same things they gave high schools money to teach to the same students?"
Unfortunately, at least where I live, it is almost entirely not allowed to fail students in primary or early high school. So, graduating effectively means "I didn't die before age N". And of course, it's a downward spiral: if you can't multiply and divide, you sure as hell can't factor an equation, and you're definitely not going to get anywhere trying to understand the graph of a parabola.
That's what these colleges should be doing, if they're taking student's money.
Oh, and also... if you're going to be claiming to be an English lecturer and complaining about illiteracy, you should probably master the rules of apostrophe placement first.
1) I was a high school teacher, not an english lecturer, and I did try to teach the basics how to write a complete sentence. However, the curiculum I was forced to teach was all this foreshadowing/theme/theory crap.
2) I quit to write software.
3) I would have been overjoyed had my students made the kind of grammar mistake (student's) I made in my off the cuff remark. In fact, my experience doing this has made me incredibly forgiving for this kind of thing, I guess in my own writing as well as that of others. Basically, if the meaning is clear and obvious I don't really consider it a mistake, just being a pedantic snob. The problem you get with people who really don't know how to write is the meaning isn't clear, I mean really not clear. You get, like, word salad, metaphors so brutally mixed that who knows what point was trying to be made, a level of incoherence that truly impedes what is trying to be communicated -- it can range from severe annoyance to total incomprehension. Grammar is for pedeants, get your point across and I'm your friend. Unfortunately many people can't.
Interesting. Entering college as a computer agnostic and hs dropout in the late 80's I was dismayed by my curriculum and it's focus on word processing, dos, floppy disks, etc..
It seemed that the computer medium was dross and doldrum.
Previously, in HS, I was terribly bored with most subject matter presentation and irritated by authority in general.
I had been an avid reader since 5 or 6 and had read science fiction/fantasy and classic literature during these formative years. I did not do well in the college environment. I dropped all my classes.
Years later, I returned to college: emphasis had once again turned to the printed word, symbolism, and other recognizable concepts rather than any ability to use a computer. 4.0 average for two semesters was the result.
At the third semester I found myself in honors courses which irritated me with opinions I was too immature to discard gracefully and once again dropped out.
It is utterly interesting how many people do not even bother nor desire to simply think for thoughts sake. I am starting to wonder whether people who value knowledge for its own sake is a counter evolution to the majority. A bit like right-handed people with left-handed people. The left-handed people are a minority hence have some advantages when say playing sports as most people are used to playing against other right handed people.
Maybe same can be said for those people who value knowledge for its own sake as most people (the majority) do not, hence the minority who does has an inherent maybe gentical advantage.
It is interesting to compare the experiences of Ms. L to various people in their 40s returning to school when I was in undergrad. They too had difficulty with very basic (to us youngsters, anyway) methods of computer use. Many viewed computers with either outright terror or blatant suspicion.
I have often thought of volunteering my time to a college or tech school locally to teach computer-illiterate people the basics of computer use. It would be such a simple thing for me and judging by Ms. L's plight, it could make all the difference in the world to some people.