Interesting Links for 02-10-2024

[andrewducker]

1. "We're all a bit autistic" says woman who doesn't realise she's a lot autistic

(tags:autism funny )

2. SFGATE Drew Magary begs you not to see Francis Ford Coppola's new film

(tags:movies review epicfail )

3. The Netherlands Has Returned 288 Stolen Artifacts to Indonesia

(tags:history museums netherlands Indonesia )

4. Scottish government: Assisted dying bill not in Holyrood's powers

(tags:scotland uk euthanasia )

5. The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

(tags:reading education USA books )

6. The English language is the worst

(tags:language English funny video viaSwampers )

7. REVIEW: Math from Three to Seven, by Alexander Zvonkin (A Russian struggles to teach maths to little kids)

(tags:mathematics children Education )

Comments

[channelpenguin]

2. Fair warning!
6. is hilarious
5. Sad. But times change. Even old people may read less thaty used to. I read far less than I used to because with age, dry eyes and reading glasses, it is just a lot more effort. E-books are better because they are brighter.

[channelpenguin]

7. also wonderful!

'So it’s full of failure after failure, entries like, “today I had a cool idea for a puzzle but everybody just screamed instead and then one of the kids vomited.” ' Sounds like yet another typical day in the office...

[andrewducker]

Certainly a typical evening at my place!

4

[danieldwilliam]

I guess we'll find out who is right as and when that gets judicially reviewed - and someone should do that before anyone relies on the legislation.

2

[danieldwilliam]

I often amuse myself by turning pithy turns of phrases in to potential characters for an RPG.

I'm nicking Wow Platinum and, in honour of the apparant awfulness of the movie, renaming them Jings McCopper and Ahem Brass.

Re: 2

[andrewducker]

Jings McCopper was an early customer of Ea-nāṣir.

Re: 2

[danieldwilliam]

Nanni McCopper was his nan.

Re: 2

[melchar]

To quote xkcd #2758:

'Raindrops on roses & whiskers on kittens,
bright copper kettles leave flakes on my mittens?!
Hey these are stone with a copper veneer!
I've been bamboozled by EA Nasir!'

Re: 2

[andrewducker]

Hah!

[nancylebov]

5. Free link: https://archive.ph/adxSf

What's wrong isn't lack of discipline, or lack of higher demands for reading in earlier grades.

THESE KIDS WERE NEVER TAUGHT HOW TO READ!

For some 30 years, "whole language" was a major method for teaching reading in the Anglosphere. It's teaching children to look at the first letter and *guess* at the rest of the word.

I'm going to make this political in the hope that anger will make it more memorable. I'm probably kidding myself.

This debacle is specifically about some flaws in a left-wing approach to the world. It happened partly because a charismatic teacher promoted it, and partly because it was novel, and partly because it seemed to required less discipline, and partly because it meant that first and second grade teachers would do a lot of emotionally satisfying helping.

I believe that helping is a passion like any other passion-- that is, it's good within it's limits, but you still need to pay attention to whether what you're doing actually makes sense.

Oh, and there's another factor which isn't partisan-- people are very vulnerable to long feedback loops. Whole language doesn't look that bad until 3rd grade (fewer pictures, less help from the teacher), which means that first grade teachers don't know whether they're actually teaching reading.

https://www.abc.net.au/.../grattan-institute.../103446606

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language

I can't find the article which put me on to this. It starts with the story of a father who was monitoring his kid's zoom classes, which is when he found out how bad the teaching of reading had become.

[andrewducker]

I remember reading about that. So glad that everyone seems to have moved back to phonics. Sophia is definitely learning that way.

[nancylebov]

Phonics was great for me. Whole word (flashcards) works for some people. Whole language is a disaster.

[bens_dad]

7. Amusingly, when I was a post-doc at Bath Uni. in the early 90s, there were (so I was told) more native Russian speakers in the Maths dept. than the Russian dept.

6. This is indeed vey funny.

5. I've read several novels on my phone in the last couple of months; technology can't be the only issue here.

1. Sorry, I don't get this piece; I find it neither funny or informative - but then I am a diagnosed 'aspie'.

[hairyears]

Your answer to 7) might explain my experience of working with Quants (mathematicians employed by banks and trading houses) inthe first two decades of this century: it seems that Russian was more commonly spoken than English on the Quant Desk in about half the trading floors in London.