cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/1006130
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/aboringdystopia by /u/Last_Salad_5080 on 2023-10-03 14:21:04.
Ironic that there’s a grammatical error in the headline… 6th-grade levels, surely
77% of Americans write below 9th grade-levels, and hyphens are taught as an elective.
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND!!!
You’re right, this is a glass-half-full situation.
The tables, they turn
This is all just a simulation.
That’s what the lizard people want you to think!
If it were a simulation or real what would be the difference? I mean if you could replicate the titanic down to the atom you effectively have the original. Same philosophical “problem” with teleportation of a human being.
The great journalism of “Homeless Romantic” has really been in decline.
The hyphen goes between grade and levels. Confidently incorrect.
All that does is make it extremely poorly written because of “sixth” followed by a compound noun instead of the misplaced hyphenation for a compound adjective.
What you basically just said is “it’s not grammatically incorrect in that way, it’s even more grammatically incorrect to the point of being nonsensical in this other, more abstruse way.”
6th-grade levels
It’s not that hard
No shit. I was explaining to the person that thinks it should be “6th grade-levels” that would be even more nonsensical and grammatically incorrect.
For someone that seems to be critical of writing errors, you’re shockingly bad at reading comprehension. All you are doing is quite literally repeating the sentiment of the initial comment in this thread.
It’s not that hard.
You hyphenate the words acting as an adjective, I e. Two-gun kid, not two gun-kid
One might also hyphenate compound nouns. Depending on context, “two gun-kids” could be correct–though it seems unlikely.
Also, in this case you should use e.g. (not i.e.). No big deal though, I knew what you meant.
It’s really important for folks to understand what is being talked about here, because I run into folks even here that are like “that’s a wall of text, I’m not reading that”. And that’s kind of the behavior that’s being talked about. Like, if you find yourself in “read the headline, not the story” you might be in this group they are talking about in this article that is linked. And do not let me come off high and mighty here, I absolutely have issues with this some times because I get all kinds of caught up with life and do not have enough time to maintain my reading habits. It is a complex issue on why there is this deterioration of reading skills. And I will likely say something to the effect of “Internet BAD!” but do know it is more than just that, it is just that is the easiest go-to for a “short” comment.
So that said. Nice little sample question one would see on a test that would test this is:
In Lions of Little Rock, two girls form a dangerous and clandestine friendship, that is challenged by racial segregation. Name, in chronological order, the multiple episodes of racist threats and violence and how they increased the tension of the relationship between the two girls.
It’s not a question of “Can you read the book?” It is a question of, “Did you extract information from the book? Can you connect the dots asked in the question based on the information that you read?” Lots of people who identify themselves as literate have a lot of difficulty doing these kinds of things. So we have to understand that, this is not testing if a kid can read the word “onomatopoeia”, it is testing if a person can extract useful information from written words.
All of that is different from the “eighth grade reading level” where you are typically asked things like “extrapolate what you think the underlying theme the author is trying to present.” Sixth grade reading is mostly being able to put things back in the order that you read them, picking out the descriptive terms that were in the text, and identifying what the entire point was for this particular piece of work, among other things. One does not have to really get creative here, sixth grade reading is just “in slightly finer detail” being able to regurgitate what was just read. Now to get kids ready for higher reading, there is usually questions about “do you think this person at this point was feeling happy?” That kind of stuff that relies of extrapolating meaning which is usually above the “sixth grade level reading”.
And it is indeed shocking how many people cannot do this. But in order to be shocked, I think people need to understand what is being tested here. A lot of social media does indeed condition folks to allow this level of reading to atrophy. The number of people who toss around TL;DR is really high and some of that is because it does not interest them. That of course is fine, but some of it is because 50% of the way through their brain is tired of reading text. AND THAT, is problematic. And really I can only touch on so much of the issue in this comment without it feeling like it is going on forever.
There are all kinds of assessment tests online that folks can review and see exactly the kind of questions that are being asked. The whence and wherefores on this matter and the causes for it happening are indeed complex and obviously I cannot cover them all here. But one big one, in my opinion, is education and its intersection with technology. Technology does indeed make lots of things easier for us, but some of those things that technology unburdens us from we should probably reexamine that relationship. Perhaps we need better education with technology or maybe we need less technology with that education, they both have pros and cons to them. There are not easy answers in this for the kind of background American education presents, which that is also an addressable matter in all of this.
that’s a wall of text, I’m not reading that
Low-hanging fruit
A strawberry? watermelon? cucumber?
I’m not good at this game /s
can someone recap it using an emoji?
🤷♂️
🐱🏍
two emojis? im not here to read a novel.
It’s actually one, “stunt cat”, but it’s shown as two on non-supported platforms.
LOL
Dumb it down for me doc?
It’s not a question of “Can you read the book?” It is a question of, “Did you extract information from the book? Can you connect the dots asked in the question based on the information that you read?” Lots of people who identify themselves as literate have a lot of difficulty doing these kinds of things.
I’m really sorry if this comes across as a TL;DR, but there’s a name for that. I’m positive you already know, but for the benefit of those interested, it’s called “functional illiteracy.” And it’s wild, still blows my mind to this day. Like, if you’re functionally illiterate, that doesn’t mean you don’t know how to read…it means you can read but can’t understand language written beyond the basic level. There are a lot of variables involved and I’m oversimplying a lot, but that’s it in a nutshell. It’s fucking terrifying, to be honest, especially because it’s so widespread.
Read to your kids, folks! And talk to them about it afterwards!
I feel like I encounter this alot at work. Write an email describing the problem, asking for clarification or a decision, and get a response back that seemingly ignores what is being asked with a question that was already answered in the previous email.
And the other classic: Ask 2 questions, eg in an email or even one post here. Clearly marked, with 1. and 2.
You can only ever expect to get back one answer. Comprehension and attention span of a…
“SQUIRREL!!”
To be fair, on here I will sometimes intentionally cherry pick a single asked question out of several asked, because I’m not at work, and nobody is going to question my performance if I don’t answer the question I don’t give a fuck about.
Username checks out 😆
So many people like this where I have to repeat myself 3 or 4 times before they understand what I said
Even more wild that a functional illiterate was elected president of the most powerful country in the world!
Been that way since bush
Read to my kids? Why would I want to turn my kids gay with WOKE READIN BOOKS?!
/s
You’ve indirectly highlighted the biggest issue I have with referring to literacy as “x-grade reading levels”. Literacy skills stack on top of each other and, sometimes, in slightly different orders. Calling them by a grade level makes people associate these skills with certain educational levels in school when, in reality, you only learn these skills from repetition and growth. I wish there were (and maybe there are and I’m just not familiar with them) clearer distinctions for these types of skills that meant more than “x-grade” which is practically meaningless to most people and harmful for those struggling with reading and comprehension.
You’ve indirectly highlighted the biggest issue I have with referring to literacy as “x-grade reading levels”.
There are standards of complexity that are set by grade level.
Here’s a resource with a great breakdown
Combines these with reading standards for various grades, and the metric makes a lot of sense. To say someone reads at a 5th grade level means they are technically literate but struggle to find true meaning, subtle concepts, and likely have a limited vocabulary.
Well that sounds like semantics that you take exception with, on how particular educational groups define things. Your frustration is well founded but misplaced on me. Indeed all things build and in different orders for different people no doubt. However, in the context of educational reporting at the government level, these are the labels that are applied in the various reports. And as all things, those things roll down hill.
clearer distinctions for these types of skills that meant more than “x-grade”
There are, but politics being what they are, those labels are less meaningful labels to folks that arguably have the most power to change the course of things (that last part is strictly my opinion, sorry/not really sorry I injected it here). In short, I concur with your observation.
However, in the context of educational reporting at the government level, these are the labels that are applied in the various reports
Yes, but this is exactly my issue. And I don’t think it’s about semantics, per se, but rather more about usefulness. Educational reporting using these terms is great for that demographic but is entirely useless for the people upon which it’s reporting.
wall of text
I’d just like to note for the record that your post wasn’t a wall of text. Not only does it have paragraphs, it is also well-structured in its information delivery and you use connectives well, constantly answering “why am I reading this sentence (or subordinate clause)” in the first couple of words. This is not only easy to do (if you’re used to it), it also takes enormous load off the reader by not having them divine erm “train of thought context”, and actually follows natural speech patterns. But it does require that your thoughts are organised, that you can write the whole thing in one go, or you will have to go back and massage everything down to size. Which brings me to
TL;DR
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”.
Or, differently put: Writing skills are actually just as if not even more atrocious across the board. Another reason for tl;drs are people who are paid by word count.
The amount of people on this very site who cannot parse comments they have an emotional reaction to is staggering.
Lots of people are going to laugh at this and not realize it is describing them.
Lots of people are going to laugh at this and not realize it is describing them.
Why not both lmao
“This”
I read your first paragraph then skipped the rest of whatever you’re going on about. It’s about saving your time in a world where there’s near infinite amount of content to be able to read, it’s a skill to know what’s worth reading.
Right. I find myself doing this, yet I’m still able to read and consume whole chapters at a time in university textbooks
I agree to some extent, but honestly the time spent on reading lemmy/reddit/Twitter/etc could almost certainly be spent on more important literature. I’m not going to pretend that a few minutes in a sea of wasted hours really makes a difference.
My reading skills tell me this author has a profound sense of sorrow about the state of the world.
This author is now also aware that there is no comfortable place in your mouth to rest your tongue.
This author is reminding you that you are suddenly aware of your breathing.
Based and discomfort-pilled
And you can feel your toes.
Ugh I just toe pilled myself, fucking karma. I’m going to put some socks on.
but some of it is because 50% of the way through their brain is tired of reading text. AND THAT, is problematic.
Yep.
This reminds me of how often people mistake skill for “natural talent”.
“Natural talent” exists, but someone without any particular natural talent who still has spent thousands of hours doing a thing is going to run circles around someone with “natural talent” who never put time and effort into practicing.
And I think when that skill is “reading”, people don’t power through the moments when their brain rebels, gets frustrated, or gets tired. So they hit that block, and don’t push through to overcome it. They go do something else…but they go do something else every single time. So a block that would be frustrating but minor in the big scheme of things gets codified in one’s mental image of themselves.
And once you have this idea that you are or are not something–that conception can turn into a huge mountain to overcome.
(As an aside, our parents have huge influence on if we think we “are” or “are not” something. It’s very worth it when you think you “can’t” do something to go back and look at your life and check if that voice in your head is yours, or if it’s the internalized voice of a parent who didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about!)
(Both people who were belittled as “stupid” and those who were constantly called “smart” can end up kinda “malfunctioning” later on, thinking they can’t do something. The ones called stupid think they can’t do something because “they’re dumb”, while the one called smart has been conditioned to fear not being 100% perfect, so they don’t even start because minor, genuinely trivial failures loom as large as the destruction of the entire earth in their minds!)
I definitely feel that, especially when you see people define themselves as “readers” or “not readers”. There’s no way that there isn’t a book out there for every person, but we aren’t always great at connecting kids with what actually motivates them to read and reflect. The Grapes of Wrath is an incredible and ever-relevant book, but there’s no way I could’ve appreciated it as such in high school. I know the same is true for many others because it was notorious for being a drag at my school. It just takes time to develop the critical reading skills and life experience that make you appreciate something like that, and not everyone has that by 6th grade or even graduation. I just don’t know how you go about continuing that education.
Me: oh man, adults can’t read??
Also me: let me find a comment that sums up this article for me.
On a serious note, great summary, cleared a lot of things up.
I read all of this. I am definitely guilty of looking for a TL;DR. I absolutely believe my overuse of technology has caused my reading and writing skills to deteriorate significantly and my memory as well. I struggle with remembering and analyzing. I have never been a good book learner though. I suspect I have a learning disability that wasn’t quite bad enough for intervention when I was in school aside from special reading training in grade two or three.
I am definitely guilty of looking for a TL;DR
In the context of social media, this isn’t really the same problem of not wanting to or being able to read longer stuff in general. There are countless screeds from any number of sources that you wouldn’t want to waste your time going through (not saying the above poster is one of them), so getting a general sense of a longer post is an important skill.
Being able to work through edited prose in detail is also important, but remember that it’s very different from what we all encounter online. In the immortal words of someone who probably wasn’t Twain or Pascal, “I did not have time to write a shorter letter.”
A long time ago I reasoned that the poorest least educated of us would be functional illiterates for whom a separate glyph based language would be created. A smiley face does not require reading comprehension or analysis, nor does it produce a populace that asks questions.
I don’t think the landholders who run this shit want more than fifty percent literacy from the serfs who will be beholden to their grandchildren. Too many smart serfs would endanger their legacies, and too few would render the industrial collective serviced by their human capital uncompetitive.
The next few decades will be about them figuring out just how many smart motherfuckers they need, and how to keep those firecrackers too frightened to start a revolution. They’ll be minmaxing the hell out of us.
Bruh, I ain’t reading all that. You crazy?
I’m not convinced that social media causes a loss of reading skills. I suppose it is possible but I would want to see some studies on the topic. Anecdotally, I do find myself reading less than I used to. I took a number of English lit classes as electives purely for fun and enjoyed reading a number of fun works that I think would hopefully qualify me as reading above a 6th grade level. But that was many years ago. I haven’t done a lot of reading in the last decade except for news articles about everything going to hell. Of the few books I have read, I read them for pleasure and each was lightweight, not too much analysis and explication required, one rather challenging history book about the lead up to the first world war notwithstanding, though it’s difficulty is due more to more complex sentence structure and arcane vocabulary, and less to its erudite discussion of an already complex topic. Nevertheless, I don’t believe I have had any difficulties demonstrating far beyond mere functional literacy you described despite my infrequent reading of anything longer than a news article or Reddit post. Still, this is anecdotal and so I would be interested to see if any scientific evidence exists to connect a loss of reading skills with disuse and to what degree those skills are diminished.
I think you make some valid points. I like to imagine most of us have other interests and projects we are engaged with and my be less motivated in some areas when we engage with other things. This is almost always the cause if my headline hot take behavior or unwillingness to read a text wall. I’m primarily here for the inadequate dopamine hit of social media; not as much for the personal growth potential.
I think the primary issue is an education system that makes reading and learning a nuisance and chore. This is a problem that can be solved in the coming decade with the use of technology, but it will take a serious overhaul of the entire system. There is no room for proprietary software and exploitation in education. The entire system should be standardised on open source software, funding should be allocated to run a small independent and offline AI server and the teacher’s role should be divided between the AI system and a traditional group oriented role. This will allow individualized education without exploitation. An AI agent that is specifically designed for this task and paired with the teacher’s supervision makes it possible for each child to follow the path that best suits them. They can read any book they want that meets certain requirements. They can progress at their own pace. Issues can be identified long before any current teacher is capable of spotting. Most importantly, this is not about AI as a product or replacing the teacher in any way. This is making use of a tool, and doing so ethically. This kind of thing can not be done for profit or by contractors. The privacy of such a system should be of paramount importance that is not possible long term with any company focused on profitability. The only people with access to the AI should be the students, parents, and teachers. Even IT staff at the school should not have access to the AI logs and data, and there should be no persistent storage long term. It has to be a tool that is used by the teacher only.
To be clear, I am a hobbyist working on such a tool for my own self education with the computer science curriculum. This is about AI agents. This is not about a raw AI LLM. An agent is a collection of LLMs connected through a code base, and connected to databases. This does not rely on the model training alone for answers. This is a system where the final answer is checked and reviewed multiple times and verified against accurate sources before a final reply is made. Most people here are likely unfamiliar with this and what it is capable of doing.
This is the inevitable future, it is only a question of how long it takes people to adapt to the new potential. This level of individualized education has only been available to the ultra rich, but it is now possible for everyone at scale.
Hard tl;dr from me, dawg
Hey go easy. Some of us have ADHD.
It’s not that I don’t want to read a wall of text, but simply that I’m incapable of doing so.
Read to your kids. Use big words around them.
Yeah, say things like “Oh how droll, your lexicon and command of the English language is quite lamentable. Perchance your parents taught you little and never thought to embiggen your vernacular?”
Also lmao iPhones don’t recognize that embiggen is an actual dictionary word 😂
That’s because it’s from the simpsons.
Actually, no! The Simpsons used the word and was the reason it was actually put into the dictionary, but originally the word was used in a book from some dude in 1884 by the name of C.A. Ward.
Ok, but if the Simpsons didn’t get the word from that book and came up with the concept independently, and then popularized it, it’s still valid to say that it came from the Simpsons.
Either way, it’s a perfectly cromulent word.
Of course
I use giga huge word sounds hella
Your unenlightened vernacular is apparent scoundrel. Face the folly of your simplistic lexicon.
My girlfriend accused me of being a pedophile. I said, “Hey, that’s a pretty big word for a 10-yr old.”
Bob Saget was funny
As much as I’d love to jump on the “stupid Americans” bandwagon, this seems to be a big problem not only in America. After the reddit exodus and before I had a good setup for lemmy, I used Facebook for a short period. Most of my stuff there is from US, UK and Norway, and the number of people in the comments who can barely put together a coherent sentance is astonishing. Far below 6th grade level by any standard.
A sentance? I wanna believe you did that on purpose.
I plead autocorrect, and that English is my second language 🤣
Sentance isn’t a word, so autocorrect is not to blame!
sentance isn’t a word, therefore autocorrect is to blame since it didn’t work
You’re right!
damn autocucumber
It looks like there’s at least some bias as they only counted English literacy.
This is basically a map of how many Mexican immigrants each state has. I agree the English bias is not great because not speaking English doesn’t make you dumb.
It would be interesting to see the same data, restricted to participants whose first language is English.
Not being able to read also doesn’t auromatically equate dumb though. It just highlights a systemic failure of the educations system. And arguably a country experiencing a language divide to this degree is a systemic failure of some kind as well.
Many countries have myriad languages in them, often because they contain myriad cultures. That’s not a failing at any level, it’s just diversity.
Yeah, but I’d argue those countries either have people being decently fluent in multiple languages (which is not what this graph implies) or they have evolved their institutions and society in a way where meaningful societal and political participation is possible regardless of what language you speak. I don’t think the US is at that level, and I think it being that way if this is lived reality for a lot of Americans IS a systemic failure.
The failure is not necessarily having multiple languages spoken, but the institutions not reflecting this reality. So you can either invest in people being fluent in a common language in addition to whatever languages they may speak OR redesign institutions and reshape society. Not doing any of the two is a systemic failure imo.
are you soft blaming this on the immigrants? Immigrants are more likely to speak, read, and write 2 or more languages fluently than it is that the average american can do any of that for 1
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Its an incredibly large thing to leap to on literally no evidence. Its pure fact that immigrants have far better language skills than the average american, as I said above. They may not know of the racism, but that doesn’t mean its there.
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Pinning the entire problem immediately on immigrants is racist. Immigrants are not a problem, they’re a scapegoat.
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To be clear I wasn’t trying to leap on, “haha Mexican immigrants can’t speak English”. I was pointing out proximity to a primarily Spanish speaking country is going to lead to a greater population whose native language is not English, and therefore less fluent English speakers.
I grew up in an area of the US with tons of immigrants, most of whom learned Spanish before English. Going the other way I learned Spanish after learning English, and as such I probably have a less than 6th grade reading level in Spanish because it’s not the language I learned from birth, nor the one I speak at home.
I also specifically mentioned Mexican immigrants because the other country we border also has a primary language of English, which is why our northern border has better English literacy rates.
It’s a pretty easy correlation to make, and doesn’t require a whole study to identify the trend. Spanish is also the second most spoken language in the country so naturally areas with low English literacy rates are likely to have higher populations speaking the second most spoken language in the country. Hell, if you look at a map of latinos in the US it’s almost identical to the above map.
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I want to look at the eyes of a person who set a white colour on the scale to 12% value.
well since america’s literacy is so bad it seems they had to put 12% as the baseline
It’s basically Americas official language, let’s not pretend it isn’t.
That doesn’t mean Spanish speakers are illiterate. They just read Spanish.
True, I totally agree.
However, if one is evaluating “functional literacy” that means determining if one reads well enough to function in society.
So to truly evaluate functional literacy for native Spanish speakers, it seems like one would have to somehow factor in two things.
First, English is the de facto language in the US. Second, Spanish language translations are provided for a number of written things (for example, our school district letters to parents).
One would be more functional being fluent only in English than only in Spanish, sure (and it depends on which part of the country even which part of a city). But one would surely be more function having some knowledge of English and fluency in Spanish.
If you go to school in America, you’re obviously going to learn and be taught in English. There’s a lot of immigrants that don’t know any English. I interact with a lot of them, and they’ll even have their 6 year olds translate for them. It actually impresses me, because the little kids act very mature when they have to translate, since I’m sure they are used to having to navigate their family around at a very young age.
Maybe if we actually paid teachers and gave funding to education this wouldn’t be a problem. Education in the US is god awful.
You know what Education in the US craves? Electrolytes…
It’s not just the teachers, it’s also the teachers of the teachers and the whole American system of teaching reading that’s also in need of dire improvement. A good resource on how bad reading education is in America I can recommend Sold a story, a podcast.
And many adults choose not to read. It is almost as if they are connected
This is the reason the GOP exists as it does. It is the fucking idiots party.
Which is exactly the goal. They want a large number of poorly educated people who are easy to manipulate. This is why they defund schools and ban reproductive health education as their very first steps when they come to power.
Large number of poorly educated, easily manipulated people? You mean like the illegal immigrants the left is letting in in droves?
Fuck off.
My ancestors and maybe yours too for that matter, were poorly educated, not by choice. They migrated here bc they were desperate and it offered hope. And now many generations later, my parents’ and all subsequent generations in the family have been college educated with many success stories.
You just don’t like brown people. Fuck off.
Our ancestors didn’t drag their children through barbed wire and didn’t demote US citizens to 2nd class by receiving free healthcare and benefits over them. They also didn’t steal to such a degree that the police gave up on enforcing the law.
I’ve never understood this conspiracy. Illegal immigrants can’t vote. How exactly is the left supposed to benefit?
Yeah, the argument makes literally zero sense, but if you bring it up to them, it opens the door for them to talk about other batshit crazy conspiracies. Like needing tighter controls on who can vote. Which are thinly veiled attempts to limit the opposition from voting.
One time someone made an argument that semi made sense.
“It’s their children! These immigrants come in here and liberals give them jobs and welfare and put their kids in schools and give them scholarships and then the kids grow up to vote for Democrats!”
And I’m like…that’s incredible! You’re really making the Dems sound like good guys here!
None of it makes sense unless you start from a baseline of racism.
The issue is those benefits like free healthcare, scholarships, and such is that they aren’t also given to actual US citizens, we treat illegals better than our own.
It might be, but I guarantee you that there’s a not insignificant number of people who align with the left who are dumb as rocks and just happened to fall into that party instead.
If there’s some study proving that uneducated or unintelligent people are only ever exclusively on the right and the left is just full of geniuses, I haven’t seen it.
Yes, in general those who have attained college degrees are more likely to vote Democratic and those who have attained just a high school diploma are more likely to vote Republican. There is a clear divide where the more educated cohort of society leans Democratic.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10659129221079862
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Nuance.
Conciseness.
Here’s an article with more details about the study: https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy#:~:text=by EMILY SCHMIDT | March 16%2C 2022&text=This means more than half,of a sixth-grade level.
Dr. Iris Feinberg, associate director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University, points to under-served communities with “print deserts,” poorly funded schools, and little internet access as being the places where the people with poor reading skills live. She also called it an inter-generational cycle of low literacy, so it’s not just a recent problem with people not wanting to read.
wait yall can read?
American’s have been going down the dumbass road for a long time. And you rarely meet someone who is well rounded like you meet in Europe. Not to say there aren’t dumbasses in Europe. There are many. But Americans don’t even seem to try. Not anymore.
I’m American and have lived in Europe for 15 years. I assure you there is every level of educated/not educated (crystalized intelligence) and every level of very bright and pretty slow (fluid intelligence) over here, just as there is in every country in the world. Being educated and being intelligent are not the same thing.
Europe is not one place either, take a random Dane and a random person from Italy or Portugal or Croatia or Scotland and put them side by side and tell me thats one culture, ya know?
To your point, though, I will say that the quality of the foundational education in the US does pale pretty quickly when compared to the majority of public education systems that I’d be aware of here. I’ve been pretty embarassed about how limited my knowledge of geography and history has been at times while talking to some of my Italian, Irish and German friends.
I am friends with a primary (elementary) school teacher (teaching outside of Hamburg) and she expressed that she’s seeing a rapid decline in the students’ interest, work ethic and thus their proficiency in the past few years. She’s genuinely alarmed. We might start seeing articles like this about mainland Europe in a few years.
Explains a lot
It feels like a low-blow but… Yeah.
I wonder that the standard used for 6th-grade reading level is. I know that the 6th grade reading level at the beginning of the century is higher than the 6th grade reading level now.
I remember being extremely disappointed when I was in 6th grade and they had arbitrarily moved a lot of books up a reading level. There were a few in particular that I was looking forward to reading while in 5th grade that were at a 6th grade level. Then in 6th grade, I grabbed one of those books to check out but was told that I could t read it because it was now considered 7th grade and that I had to choose from the 6th grade level (which was largely the previous year’s 5th grade level).
This is infuriating. No one should be denied borrowing a book because they’re not at their “grade level”. That’s the kind of shit that contributes to people losing interest in reading from a young age.
Lol as long as its not porn, we could rent any book
Never heard about age limitation
It wasn’t age locked per se. If you were in Honors English, they assumed you were reading at a higher level and could check out books one grade level higher than you and if you were in on-level English you were not allowed to read above “grade level”.
I can understand keeping a 6th grader from checking out a bunch of 1st grade level books, but discouraging kids from pushing themselves was weird
This honestly blows my mind.
I didn’t have a single teacher or librarian who would discourage a kid from reading a book, unless a 6th grader tried checking out a clearly adult intended book like a harlequin novel or something.
I’m glad you had teachers like that. Not sure why mine were so dead-set on only reading in your grade level. Limiting lower level makes more sense, to encourage students to push themselves more. 6th grade was the last grade in the school, so the only people allowed to read the 7th grade level books were in the 6th grade Honors English class. It’s not like the library would run out of books if all 6th graders were allowed to pick out of that section of the library
I hope you got yourself a library card. The idea of limiting kids who are reading above the average level is insane to me. Why restrict everyone to the mean?
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Yeah that seems so unfortunate. I loved my elementary school librarian; she would flip to a random page and make sure you could read and understand it. As long as you could do that, you could check it out.
And then this links to a picture of a headline, because who’s actually gonna read the article.
Not 54% of adults in the us, apparently.
This is such a huge percentage that it has to be incorrect, right? Over half of American adults can’t really read? Or am I just vastly underestimating a ‘6th grade level’.
I had to look this up because I was thinking the same thing.
Sixth grade reading entails understanding plot structures, narrative voices, character developments, and the use of language. Students also compare and contrast themes in articles and stories. In the process, your child’s vocabulary should grow by leaps and bounds.
From https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/sixth-grade-reading
I can’t find any definition for 8, 9, or 10th grade reading.
I found this, where the definition comes from, it the definition is based on a score on a test and doesn’t always seem to have a set of criteria we can look at. https://www.justrightreads.com/reading-levels-explained
I can’t find any definition for 8, 9, or 10th grade reading.
Check common core standards. For example, grades 9-10 should be able to
Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme.
and also
Analyze how an author draws on and transforms source material in a specific work (e.g., how Shakespeare treats a theme or topic from Ovid or the Bible or how a later author draws on a play by Shakespeare).
It makes sense. It makes so much sense.
How can you follow an evolving political situation if you struggle to understand and track how stories develop over time?
If Fauci says one thing about COVID and then, 1 year’s worth of research later, he said something different that is going to completely confuse these people. They are literally incapable of understanding how stories evolve.
That’s hard for me to empathize with because that seems like something fundamental to the human mind. It seems like something that everyone should be able to do. But apparently that’s not true.
I even see it a lot here in comment threads. People can’t connect ideas and context in things that they’re responding to, and totally miss the entire point. I used to think they were just trolls but now I think it’s truly poor reading comprehension.
6th grade is what? 10 years old.
I wouldn’t expect them to be reading War and Peace, but they should be able to easily read The Hobbit or Harry Potter.
They’re not on Spot the Dog, or putting their fingers under the words as they go.
6th grade in the states is 12-13. 10 years old is about 4th grade.
6th grade is 11. Unless you have a weird birthday or got held back High School starts around 13-14 years. Maybe you started late? That benefits a lot of kids but most kids graduate highschool at 17/18 not 20.
Don’t think so, I have a 9 year old who turns 10 in February in the 4th grade in the US. They’ve never been held back, started at the right time etc. That puts us 8 years from graduation, at 18.
edit: I’m tired and didn’t read your comment correctly. You are right. We’ll start 6th grade at 11. Leaving so everyone can point and laugh. Sorry!
Or I misremembered. Sometimes your fellow commenters on Lemmy make mistakes.
Definitely happens.
Oh, I was thinking it would be the same as the UK system.
Even better then. I was reading Lord of the Rings by that age.
Looking up the lexile scores, LOTR is written at a 5th or 6th grade level. Same with most of the Harry Potter series.
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No shade at putting fingers under the words as they go, sometimes with some fonts and especially fine print it can be easy for your eye to jump up or down a line.
6th grade level is not too bad. A lot of people graduate school and don’t continue reading a lot, or just aren’t inclined to be good at reading.
6th grade isn’t bad at all. It is about the same level of reading as a TV sitcom. A person with a 6th grade reading level may be limited in regards to higher education, but reading won’t be an issue in their day to day life or even most career paths. If you aren’t challenging yourself by seeking good media and active reading, it is pretty likely that you will fall to around that level.
I’d wager it’s a solid mix of both. A 6th grade level is probably marginally higher than you’re expecting it to be. However, it gets much, much worse than you’d expect in a large portion of the US.
3 min read
lol
You joke, but I went back to college for a bit a few years back. We’d read an article in class. I’d have read the thing in a minute or two. The rest of the class would take 10 minutes or more.
And these were educated people in a college class. I really think phone use has ruined a lot an entire generation’s ability to read and grasp the essence of a text quickly.
