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Entry tags:
Breadcrumbs placeholder: standardized testing word lists, military recruitment, teaching reading
I’ll be back later, but I just realized that I’ve had a ton of interactions with people over the last couple of days on this topic and I haven’t left any evidence of it here for me to revisit later.
So: as a little reminder for me. Mulct.
Ok! Let’s see what we can do here.
A friend sent me a reddit post by a teacher in NJ and the comments thread associated with it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1av4y2y/comment/krcjeve/
The poster has a significant cluster of posts, all recent, all very much the same, and the account is comparatively new. The mention of Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terabithia was striking to me. I am Old, but when I was a youngster in school Charlotte’s Web was old. Bridge to Terabithia is about as old as the Original Star Wars. Which is Old. I made some remarks to my friend along these lines, and advocating for picking books for the kiddos to read that are Not So Old — more like the kind of Old Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terabithia were when we were kids, vs. 40-50 years further down the path. I specifically name checked Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which would bear roughly (very roughly) the same relationship in time to Kids These Days as Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terabithia would have to us.
In the ensuing discussion, my friend asked, “ But how exactly does not getting the cultural references keep kids from learning how to read? As opposed to enjoying or understanding a given book?“
I don’t know that I gave a great answer to that question, because it’s one of those questions that strikes so completely to the heart of the matter. I mean, how can you read, if you don’t understand? You _can_ read what you don’t enjoy — it’s hard, and it’s marginally easier if you at least have some emotional energy. Like, it’s easier to hate read than it is to words-on-a-page-read. I didn’t really fully grasp that until the whole thing happened with Reflections on the Revolution in France (recap: the only book that reliably put me to sleep until one night it didn’t and I’ve been mad at Edmund Burke — like, _hot_ mad, heart rate speeds up, voice gets loud, shaky finger, red in the face want to hurt people who argue with me about it mad — ever since. When it was boring, it was unreadable; when I was mad at it, it went fast.).
But if you don’t understand what is being referred to, you can decode, you can read aloud, but you won’t understand it, even if you memorize it and can recall and repeat phrases in response to triggers. I’m not sure what the point of education is if you are having kids read what they don’t understand and then not devoting adequate instructional time to explain all of it to them in a way that they _can_ understand. It _seems_ like it would be easier to just pick a book that is material they _can understand_.
[Kid homework interruptions have peaked; I’ll be back.
They’re making the kids pick between Sherman Alexie part time indian, Coelho’s alchemist, and John Knowles A Separate Peace. *sigh*]
After trying (and probably failing) to explain the importance of relatability / comprehensibility to readers who are still learning to read and advancing in their development as readers (as opposed to most of us adults who are coasting), I then pointed to a reddit thread about using audiobooks to help kids with reading. I had noticed that at least at some points, the school provided access to audiobooks for the kids through Sora (sp?), and it really seemed to help my daughter a lot. I know plenty of adults — many through my book group — who primarily engage with books through audiobooks for a variety of reasons, and they get different things from the experience than many who read the words on the page and do not listen to it out loud. The sound qualities of written language are important.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/140e8x/english_teachers_what_do_you_think_about_students/
“In my honors class, I realized that some of my students had been looking for audiobook version of their books. I do not read to them because I expect them to read outside of class so we can discuss during class. I never really minded but I'm starting to think whether it's a good idea. I mean, eventually, they should read on their own because they won't have read aloud in tests/real life, etc. However, since they're reading outside of class...I can't really enforce the no audiobooks rule...”
This is clearly a good english teacher, meeting the students where they are. But despite that, this is an english teacher lacking an organized way of thinking about the sonic qualities of written language, and instead defaulting to some super fucked up Must Consume Without Subvocalizing perspective on written language.
I mean, just fucking think about _that_ for a minute.
There’s a comment in the thread:
“I started my school year with Huck Finn, which my juniors found impossible at first. Eventually one confessed that she was listening to audiobooks on YouTube to pass quizzes. At first I was upset then I realized that the the essentials of the lessons were still there. I do discussion questions that require them to cite quotations from the text so they still have to read the actual novel in class or at home.” (And a reply to this comment that made me go, and this is why you shouldn’t be assigning Huck Finn any more, but never mind that now.)
Huck Finn is _really_ astonishing to want to suppress listening to, given that the typical way to consume Huck Finn when it first came out would have been in a family read aloud circle. You know, the way all 19th century novels were meant to be consumed.
All right. Next.
Back to that original reddit. Comments about military recruitment and the ASVAB / PiCAT. I went looking to find out what was currently on the ASVAB, since I haven’t engaged with that test since I took it in the mid-1980s. There is a word knowledge component. There are quizlets to help people study for the word knowledge component. And there are just crazy words in there — veracious (not voracious, veracious), limpid, dulcet, inamorata, mulct.
Yes, mulct.
I’m a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. Mulct is in the dictionary with a primary definition (fine or tax or some weird hybrid of the two if you are in Iowa) and a secondary definition (swindle or defraud). However, outside of Chapter 99 of Iowa’s legal code, and a few weirdo jurists in Ohio and similar, nobody uses this word. I have _one_ friend who knew the word, and she _only_ knew the “secondary” definition. The “secondary” definition is not in my copy of the 2 vol plus supplement of the OED (yes, both definitions are in the current OED). To me, this says this isn’t a word anyone is using, and google ngrams agrees. Is fleshment a word? No, no it is not. Same reasons. It’s in Shakespeare, but no one is using it any more, and no one really has for over a hundred years.
So, why would you put mulct on a word knowledge test for military recruits? I get that part of what you are sorting for in the military is someone who will put up with your arbitrary bullshit, but shouldn’t it be _the arbitrary bullshit you want them to put up with_? Isn’t this a waste of everyone’s time and energy? In the meantime, the economy is booming, and a lot of the people who have the choice of memorizing a word list that includes dulcet, limpid and inamorata or getting a job at Amazon are going to choose door number two.
I used to just be mad about still teaching cursive (and when I was a kid, not letting me type my homework), and not letting kids use calculators. This round of listening to a friend worrying about whether Kids These Days are Learning Enough, combined with the teachers pissing and moaning about how everyone is on their phone all the time, and the military recruiters saying nobody knows any words any more is just making me feel total despair. Not at the kids. The kids are fine.
But the current crop of adults — you know, my peers, plus or minus — I’m kinda worried about us. We are terrible.
In the end tho, the correct target is standardized curricula and testing. If you standardize, it’s a fucking PITA to do updates. So you don’t. Because it’s easier not to. And the next thing you know, you’ve got tenth graders that can’t make any sense out of Charlotte’s Web, and their teachers who haven’t stopped to ask themselves the most basic questions like,
Why is the Arable family setting the table for breakfast?
How does the Arable family have time to start to kill a runty pig, decide not to, find a bottle and a nipple and feed the pig, in the half hour between breakfast and the arrival of the school bus? How is there a _half hour_ between breakfast and the school bus_?
Why are there so many weapons before breakfast (ax, air rifle, wooden dagger, at a minimum, in the first three pages)?
How come I never noticed the pun in the family’s last name?
I’ve been asking around, and remember, I’m Old. No one I know knows anyone who ever set any table ever for breakfast, even on those rare occasions when more than one person was eating the same breakfast at the same time. Whatever is going on in this book might as well be happening on Mars, with a bunch of visitors from Venus, because it’s completely unrelatable.
TL;DR If a teacher posting on reddit won’t shut up about how her husband is homeschooling their kid, and whining about how awful their school district is, they are probably Doing It Wrong, whatever Doing, It and Wrong might mean.
Also, read whatever you want, and don’t make other people read stuff they don’t want to. Life is short, and learning is too important to waste valuable curiosity and cognitive energy on useless garbage.
ETA: For reference purposes, that chat I was having with a friend about the standardized tests and so forth? That was a _chat between two national merit scholars_. Not fucking honorable mentions. _Scholars_. It’s not like we’re bad at the standardized test taking.
ETAYA: The friend who knew a definition of mulct reads 19th century novels by preference — that’s actually how we originally got to know each other, was reviews of obscure 19th century novelists and their work. I was not especially surprised that she knew the word.
So: as a little reminder for me. Mulct.
Ok! Let’s see what we can do here.
A friend sent me a reddit post by a teacher in NJ and the comments thread associated with it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1av4y2y/comment/krcjeve/
The poster has a significant cluster of posts, all recent, all very much the same, and the account is comparatively new. The mention of Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terabithia was striking to me. I am Old, but when I was a youngster in school Charlotte’s Web was old. Bridge to Terabithia is about as old as the Original Star Wars. Which is Old. I made some remarks to my friend along these lines, and advocating for picking books for the kiddos to read that are Not So Old — more like the kind of Old Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terabithia were when we were kids, vs. 40-50 years further down the path. I specifically name checked Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which would bear roughly (very roughly) the same relationship in time to Kids These Days as Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terabithia would have to us.
In the ensuing discussion, my friend asked, “ But how exactly does not getting the cultural references keep kids from learning how to read? As opposed to enjoying or understanding a given book?“
I don’t know that I gave a great answer to that question, because it’s one of those questions that strikes so completely to the heart of the matter. I mean, how can you read, if you don’t understand? You _can_ read what you don’t enjoy — it’s hard, and it’s marginally easier if you at least have some emotional energy. Like, it’s easier to hate read than it is to words-on-a-page-read. I didn’t really fully grasp that until the whole thing happened with Reflections on the Revolution in France (recap: the only book that reliably put me to sleep until one night it didn’t and I’ve been mad at Edmund Burke — like, _hot_ mad, heart rate speeds up, voice gets loud, shaky finger, red in the face want to hurt people who argue with me about it mad — ever since. When it was boring, it was unreadable; when I was mad at it, it went fast.).
But if you don’t understand what is being referred to, you can decode, you can read aloud, but you won’t understand it, even if you memorize it and can recall and repeat phrases in response to triggers. I’m not sure what the point of education is if you are having kids read what they don’t understand and then not devoting adequate instructional time to explain all of it to them in a way that they _can_ understand. It _seems_ like it would be easier to just pick a book that is material they _can understand_.
[Kid homework interruptions have peaked; I’ll be back.
They’re making the kids pick between Sherman Alexie part time indian, Coelho’s alchemist, and John Knowles A Separate Peace. *sigh*]
After trying (and probably failing) to explain the importance of relatability / comprehensibility to readers who are still learning to read and advancing in their development as readers (as opposed to most of us adults who are coasting), I then pointed to a reddit thread about using audiobooks to help kids with reading. I had noticed that at least at some points, the school provided access to audiobooks for the kids through Sora (sp?), and it really seemed to help my daughter a lot. I know plenty of adults — many through my book group — who primarily engage with books through audiobooks for a variety of reasons, and they get different things from the experience than many who read the words on the page and do not listen to it out loud. The sound qualities of written language are important.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/140e8x/english_teachers_what_do_you_think_about_students/
“In my honors class, I realized that some of my students had been looking for audiobook version of their books. I do not read to them because I expect them to read outside of class so we can discuss during class. I never really minded but I'm starting to think whether it's a good idea. I mean, eventually, they should read on their own because they won't have read aloud in tests/real life, etc. However, since they're reading outside of class...I can't really enforce the no audiobooks rule...”
This is clearly a good english teacher, meeting the students where they are. But despite that, this is an english teacher lacking an organized way of thinking about the sonic qualities of written language, and instead defaulting to some super fucked up Must Consume Without Subvocalizing perspective on written language.
I mean, just fucking think about _that_ for a minute.
There’s a comment in the thread:
“I started my school year with Huck Finn, which my juniors found impossible at first. Eventually one confessed that she was listening to audiobooks on YouTube to pass quizzes. At first I was upset then I realized that the the essentials of the lessons were still there. I do discussion questions that require them to cite quotations from the text so they still have to read the actual novel in class or at home.” (And a reply to this comment that made me go, and this is why you shouldn’t be assigning Huck Finn any more, but never mind that now.)
Huck Finn is _really_ astonishing to want to suppress listening to, given that the typical way to consume Huck Finn when it first came out would have been in a family read aloud circle. You know, the way all 19th century novels were meant to be consumed.
All right. Next.
Back to that original reddit. Comments about military recruitment and the ASVAB / PiCAT. I went looking to find out what was currently on the ASVAB, since I haven’t engaged with that test since I took it in the mid-1980s. There is a word knowledge component. There are quizlets to help people study for the word knowledge component. And there are just crazy words in there — veracious (not voracious, veracious), limpid, dulcet, inamorata, mulct.
Yes, mulct.
I’m a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. Mulct is in the dictionary with a primary definition (fine or tax or some weird hybrid of the two if you are in Iowa) and a secondary definition (swindle or defraud). However, outside of Chapter 99 of Iowa’s legal code, and a few weirdo jurists in Ohio and similar, nobody uses this word. I have _one_ friend who knew the word, and she _only_ knew the “secondary” definition. The “secondary” definition is not in my copy of the 2 vol plus supplement of the OED (yes, both definitions are in the current OED). To me, this says this isn’t a word anyone is using, and google ngrams agrees. Is fleshment a word? No, no it is not. Same reasons. It’s in Shakespeare, but no one is using it any more, and no one really has for over a hundred years.
So, why would you put mulct on a word knowledge test for military recruits? I get that part of what you are sorting for in the military is someone who will put up with your arbitrary bullshit, but shouldn’t it be _the arbitrary bullshit you want them to put up with_? Isn’t this a waste of everyone’s time and energy? In the meantime, the economy is booming, and a lot of the people who have the choice of memorizing a word list that includes dulcet, limpid and inamorata or getting a job at Amazon are going to choose door number two.
I used to just be mad about still teaching cursive (and when I was a kid, not letting me type my homework), and not letting kids use calculators. This round of listening to a friend worrying about whether Kids These Days are Learning Enough, combined with the teachers pissing and moaning about how everyone is on their phone all the time, and the military recruiters saying nobody knows any words any more is just making me feel total despair. Not at the kids. The kids are fine.
But the current crop of adults — you know, my peers, plus or minus — I’m kinda worried about us. We are terrible.
In the end tho, the correct target is standardized curricula and testing. If you standardize, it’s a fucking PITA to do updates. So you don’t. Because it’s easier not to. And the next thing you know, you’ve got tenth graders that can’t make any sense out of Charlotte’s Web, and their teachers who haven’t stopped to ask themselves the most basic questions like,
Why is the Arable family setting the table for breakfast?
How does the Arable family have time to start to kill a runty pig, decide not to, find a bottle and a nipple and feed the pig, in the half hour between breakfast and the arrival of the school bus? How is there a _half hour_ between breakfast and the school bus_?
Why are there so many weapons before breakfast (ax, air rifle, wooden dagger, at a minimum, in the first three pages)?
How come I never noticed the pun in the family’s last name?
I’ve been asking around, and remember, I’m Old. No one I know knows anyone who ever set any table ever for breakfast, even on those rare occasions when more than one person was eating the same breakfast at the same time. Whatever is going on in this book might as well be happening on Mars, with a bunch of visitors from Venus, because it’s completely unrelatable.
TL;DR If a teacher posting on reddit won’t shut up about how her husband is homeschooling their kid, and whining about how awful their school district is, they are probably Doing It Wrong, whatever Doing, It and Wrong might mean.
Also, read whatever you want, and don’t make other people read stuff they don’t want to. Life is short, and learning is too important to waste valuable curiosity and cognitive energy on useless garbage.
ETA: For reference purposes, that chat I was having with a friend about the standardized tests and so forth? That was a _chat between two national merit scholars_. Not fucking honorable mentions. _Scholars_. It’s not like we’re bad at the standardized test taking.
ETAYA: The friend who knew a definition of mulct reads 19th century novels by preference — that’s actually how we originally got to know each other, was reviews of obscure 19th century novelists and their work. I was not especially surprised that she knew the word.