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i started learning a new language! this time it's japanese. we've covered 30 hirigana and started writing then yesterday. i'm excited to learn this and it's totally not because i like anime

#dark academia #chaotic academia #studyblr #light academia #japanese #japanese studyblr

vergess

Quick question, genuine question:

Why on earth does "more than half of US adults under 30 cannot read above an elementary school level" not strike horror into the heart of everyone who hears it?

Are the implications of it unclear????

I'm serious, people keep reacting with a sort of vague dismissal when I point this out, and I want to know why!

If adults in the US cannot read, then the only information they have access to is TV and video, the spaces with the most egregious and horrific misinformation!

If they cannot read, they cannot escape that misinformation.

This obscene lack of literacy should strike fear into every heart! US TV is notoriously horrific propaganda!

Is that???? Not??? Obvious???????

I know this sounds sarcastic, I know it does, but I'm completely serious here. I do not understand where the disconnect is.

vergess

Literacy can be broadly categorized into 3 groups. The ability to read words, the ability to read sentences or paragraphs, and the ability to texts a page or longer.

55% of US adults cannot read long texts.

The process of reading the individual sentences is so taxing due to this low literacy that actually synthesizing the total information presented becomes nearly impossible. It requires both holding onto the meaning of each sentence so that you can contextualize it with the next one, AND consciously going through the decode process of interpreting letter and word forms in that next sentence.

In general, children are expected to begin reading long texts for meaning around age 8-10, in elementary school. This is when kids normally swap from short stories to chaptered books.

55% of American adults under 30 cannot read at that level.

We know this not from some short term study or another, but from the collected data of the US Department of Education going back decades.

Reliable estimates of adult literacy and numeracy skills in all 50 states and 3,141 counties, and the District of Columbia using PIAAC surve

This is the same literacy data used internationally to determine literacy rates around the world, not some kind of shock study.

55% of American adults under 30 can't read, and it's explicitly, specifically because our schools refuse to teach them, and effectively haven't been doing so for over a decade nationally and as much as 30 years in some states.

When some children are learning to read, they catch on so quickly that it appears effortless. It does not seem to matter what reading curric

The knock on effects and implications of this are horrific.

I understand that this sounds like some fuckery bullshit because it's such an unfathomably massive problem, but holy shit.

It's very, VERY real.

@firecoloredwater I can't see your replies while I write on mobile so I'm trying to just remember everything you mentioned. I hope this covered most of it?

But, basically, the reading skills to navigate an app menu or read a single sentence are not what's being discussed. The skills to read a newspaper or book, however, are.

palominocorn

I saw this a few days ago and it's been on my mind since.

I don't even need to leave Tumblr to see failed literacy.

I've seen many people, just in the last couple of days, completely misunderstand something and read it in a hostile way based on their own biases rather than in anything the author said.

It's weird and unpleasant when I go to fandom spaces and see someone completely misread a chapter. But when it comes to discussions on bigotry, politics, social justice? That ruins lives.

On a different note, I've started asking myself "am I sure I understand this" when reading dense texts, and taking a few extra seconds per paragraph to mentally summarize what I read to make sure I get it. So, thanks for making me a more conscientious reader, Vees.

zharvolk

I have a lot of friends and family who are teachers. Believe me, they’re trying to teach and encourage reading. But, as a whole, our society is very anti-education. It has been for a very long time. Especially in the last decade, they’ve doubled down on anti-education. It’s not a coincidence that the most conservative groups have pushed the idea that being educated = snobbery. They love the stereotype of simple, down-to-earth ideals that, to them and the specific manipulation they peddle, equal not being “told how to think by college professors and book-learning.” This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that knowledge through experience is somehow more and the only thing one needs than knowledge through education and reading. It’s a classic maneuver that has been done countless times in countless countries, all for very specific outcomes.

vergess

As this post escapes containment, that's something I want to emphasize too:

TEACHERS ARE TRYING SO HARD

Teachers, librarians and early childcare workers have been BEGGING people to pay attention to this for over a decade.

And this problem is COMPLETELY solvable. Not in the way that climate change is solvable but requires government intervention, either.

Almost anyone can learn to read, and almost anyone can teach reading.

But, learning to teach is harder stuff, so! In the mean time, support teachers and libraries.

Support evidence based teaching like

Singing the alphabet

Sound out letters to turn writing into speech they understand

Reading out loud

Having the student read out loud

Having the student recite vocabulary

Teaching spelling

That said, there are actually government programs to assist in teaching reading.

This program is run by the US Department of Education, and is intended for teachers and parents of young children. However, the literacy techniques that this FREE! PUBLIC! COURSE! offers can be used to teach literacy at ANY age.

Our brains are hard-wired to master spoken language, but learning to read is another story. Learning to read is a very complex skill — one o

That in mind, "teaching to the test" is a common and dangerous problem in the US especially. No child should be getting pass/fail tests until probably age 10 or older. Before that, the focus should be on building basic skills like letters and numbers.

The requirement that young children have pass/fail tests emphatically worsens this issue. (Testing for placement/comprehension/growth is normal and reasonable; testing to punish a child or worse a school is deranged.)

imathers

This video (“The Adults Who Can’t Read” by Zoe Bee) is where I first really found out about this, honestly.

lierdumoa

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have

vergess

#some schools restrict what books a child can access based on their assessed reading level#like elementary schools have done this#mine did#it was very effective at preventing children from accessing reading#what the school did was assess reading#then say you have an x reading level#then they put stickers on all the books in the library with the reading level on it#which had two effects and neither of them were good#it prevented kids with low testing levels from checking out books they would have otherwise read because they were daunted by the number#and it prevented kids with high levels from reading any books because the school didn’t stock anything above the grade levels served#which meant someone who read at a 4 won’t read a 7 because scary#and someone at an 8 isn’t allowed to participate in library time with the rest of the class#and no one gets to find joy in the books because they are now category locked

Tags by @monsterfrost

HEY WHAT THE FUCK ACTUALLY??????

I've heard of reading levels before, we had them when I was a kid too. But NEVER have I heard of REFUSING to give a child a book because of them, holy SHIT.

That's. That's fucking. That's beyond the goddamn pale, what the shit????

At least with stuff like DeSantis's crusade against reading in Florida, it's obviously and laughably evil. But this??

I cannot think of a more effective way to get kids to hate reading, while getting parents to think "ah yes, this is a good system that will nurture my child kindly."

What the actual goddamn fuck

draconicsplendor

From what I remember of elementary school, Canadian schools were fairly similar. The only reason they didn’t stop me from reading the books is because I had a super high reading level and liked to read already, but I can’t imagine how daunting it must have been for everyone else.

vergess

Yes, my understanding is that this "style" of not teaching kids to read and letting them self-teach is increasingly common in other English speaking countries in the global west.

I've seen reports of it being used in districts in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. I've also heard but not confirmed that it is used in parts of England (notably NOT in the rest of the UK, which is of course bilingual). So far, no reports of it occurring in English-speaking nations in Africa or South America, but I'm sure colonialism will cause its usual problems soon enough.

Which is why it is imperative that people who can read learn how to compassionately assist people who can't. Whether by just being helpful if someone comes to you with a reading related problem like filling out paperwork. Or, by learning the teaching skills necessary to assist others in learning to read.

#to add on to the teachers trying too hard #i saw so many peers give up reading for enjoyment entirely because of the competitive part of reading levels #they were good at math and science but because they didn't automatically come first in reading they just stopped #and then saw reading as 'lame' because it has no application to the things they excelled in #it was too easy to lie on reading logs and look up spark notes #and by the time we had assigned reading in high school they hated the process of reading and discussing what happened #because literacy had no place in their minds for enjoyment #so when you're told you're bad at reading and then you're told reading is a massive chore with socratic seminars and tests and annotations #you're not going to do it for fun #reading is a skill and the less you use a skill the worse it becomes #i fell into that trap too (despite having an early love for reading and always having a high reading level by whatever scale we were using)#im just now THIS SUMMER starting to get back into reading not only for a grade #literacy #reading resources

somewhere in the world there's a collision of 2000's emo fashion and dark academia looks and by god i'm going to find it

#dark academia #chaotic academia #studyblr #light academia #my aestetic #emo kid #emo fashion #what would this be called #emo academia? where you spend hours researching your favorite bands?

boymiffy

summer is for loneliness and eating fruit and warm rain at night

kippdipp

wtf gay little angel.😳

thinking about this story i heard from my dad. it's his senior year of high school, and he has a math teacher who used to be a college professor. it's the second semester and it's the 1980's- you can only imagine what these kids were like. at the end of the semester, he (somehow) quiets his class and says:

"i will never teach high school again. the maturity difference between a high school senior and a college freshman is astounding. i don't know what you do in those three months- but i never want to be on this side of it again."

#WHY IS A SENIOR TRYING TO START BEEF WITH ME #dark academia #chaotic academia #studyblr #light academia #chaotic aesthetic #quotes #professor stories

I Like America and America Likes Me

My English professor asked me to write about one of two things, what I like about America or what I don’t like about America, like I’m Langston Hughes. Maybe I could’ve stolen his lines, and “...let the page come out of [me]--/ then, it will be true.” (Levine et. al., Hughes 844). Maybe I could’ve talked about all the stuff I don’t like about America. My professor said we couldn’t choose any middle grounds, that we either had to like America or we had to dislike America. I thought about all the things I could say about America that I don’t like, and if I mentioned them here I’d fail this class and not graduate high school (183 days left!) so I’ll leave them out because I decided to write about what I like about this place. Because there’s so much wrong with America and so much of it affects me and the people I know and so much of it doesn’t apply to us at all or if it does it’s indirectly but I’ve had a really busy semester and I had two concerts this week and this is the second paper I’ve written for this class this week. So I decided I’m writing about the small, insignificant things that I like about America, and this is my page for English 232 (Levine et. al., Hughes 844).

I like America because I have a phone and AirPods and Spotify Premium that one of my friends pays for all the way in Minnesota. He works at a pizza place and they probably overwork him because he’s seventeen and chronically ill and the doctors don’t know what’s wrong with him but he hasn’t given up yet. And he makes art, he makes so much art, in all forms and while he’s drawing he listens to music and he understands the need for Premium so he pays an extra two dollars a month so a girl he’s never met in person can listen to music without ads on her phone and we’re friends because we watched the same TV show over quarantine and then joined a Discord server together to talk about the show and we don’t talk about that show anymore but that’s okay because now we talk about our lives and other shows we’ve seen. And when I’m having a bad day I can put in my AirPods and play any song I want to and maybe I can wallow in my sadness and feel bad for myself or I can try to pull myself out of it. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but according to Spotify I listened to 50,715 minutes of music this year and I’m even listening to Spotify while I write this. Because music is a crutch for me and someone in Minnesota cares about me enough to spend eight extra quarters a month so I can be happy and cope through my senior year of high school and I swear one day I’ll pay for it myself and pay him back for the money he’s spent on me, but when I get déjà vu when I listen to certain songs like I did before I started this paragraph so it’s okay that someone else is paying for this right now.

I like America because I’m a drum major in my school’s marching band and I get to help and serve the others kids in marching band. Because the concept of marching band is derived form the military, and while the military isn’t perfect because I knew what E. E. Cummings meant when he said “why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-/ iful than these heroic happy dead” (Levine et. al., Cummings 612). Because I’ve lived in this town my whole life and sometimes people don’t come home, but I got to talk to military musicians from the base last week and they said their nine-to-five is just rehearsing music and while I’d never make it through boot camp, I’d love to get paid to do what I love. Because the government spends a lot of cash on our military but at least we got marching band out of it, and marching band helped me find myself and it’s helped so many kids across the country discover music and make friends and fall in love and high school relationships don’t usually last, but the moment is what matters. And when I’m helping a younger marcher and I explain how to play a note or how to keep their legs straight or how to make their playing more musical, their faces light up and I feel like I’m finally doing something right. Because in the off season they’re starting to realize I’m not the serious drum major they’re used to I’m a student musician just like them and I mess up a lot and they see I’m human. And I can be both the hard drum major and the relaxed clarinet player and fun pianist I am because I’m human and I live in America, and I can be a human with depth in America.

I like America because my mom is a teacher. She teaches fifth grade and when she comes home and talks about how much their kids loved an old classroom game I played in fifth grade, or how they’re struggling with fractions so she’s going to use baking to demonstrate what three-fourths means, I’m reminded that even in this year, the year where I turned 18 and I’m an adult now with a driver’s license and a car that I’m responsible for putting gas in and I wake myself up for school every morning at 6 AM, there are still kids who are eleven years old and experiencing what it means to be eleven. They’re still discovering YouTube and Netflix and anime and books and they’re learning how to draw their favorite characters and original characters with mismatched eyes and wings and fangs and armor that they’ll look back at in seven years and think, “Why did I think that was cool?” (And I know this because I’ve been there). And maybe they make the rubber band bracelets that I used to make back then, or maybe there’s a new fifth-grade trend I’m way too old to know about and much too old to participate in. I like America because not everyone is an adult with cars and licenses and favorite gas stations, sometimes they’re fifth graders learning how to draw.

I like America because when we have nothing to do after school, my best friend and I go to the McDonalds down the street from our high school and we listen to classic rock and my best friend calls it a “Life is Strange” moment. Life is Strange is a video game that I like because the music is good and the art is cool and it’s set in the Pacific Northwest which is a place I’ve always wanted to go to and none of our stories were set there but that’s okay. But my best friend likes the game because she’s bisexual and she sees herself in the main character, who chooses her girlfriend over her hometown at the end of the game. And the smile on my best friend’s face when she talks about those fictional characters makes living in America a little better, because she can be happy and love who she wants to. We won’t end up like Max and Chloe did, in the ruins of a small pass-through town in each other’s arms, but we’ll still ditch school together and stop at every gas station in town looking for seasonal sodas.

I like America because as a people, we are so self-centered that we can do whatever we want to, and no one can tell us any differently. I like America because we’re too wrapped up in ourselves to think about anyone else, which makes finding people who care about you special, and it makes us value those around us more. We are not perfect. We are not the same country we were in 1776. And we have freedoms to do what we want, like go 400 words over the word count but hope your professor forgives you because this is, without exaggeration, the most personal essay you’ve ever written and it’s full of run on sentences but that was a choice because this is supposed to sound like you’re saying it out loud and it would be better spoken out loud but I’m turning in a PDF the day this is due. We are a country with an economy and a culture made of the rest of the world and we have job opportunities and elections, and people go to college and we’re a mess but we fight for what we think is right and we make things work. And this isn’t written to minimize the problems we face, but this is about what I like about America, and these are the things that makes living, living in this country, not so bad. I make it work and my friends make it work and my parents make it work and everyone I see driving in my car or walking their dog makes it work. And we’ll continue to make things work until the day out country succumbs to the fate of existing on Earth and dies. But to put things simply in the words of The 1975, “I like America and America likes me.” (Bedford)

#word vomit #essay #english essay #the 1975 #personal essay #words #also this is a personal essay like #this is 100% my opinion on these small insignificant moments where im trying to find the best in the worst #so #dark academia #light academia #chaotic academic #ramblings

prokopetz

Participating in Dracula Daily has reminded me of how throughout the initial portions of the novel the Count repeatedly makes back-handed references to the fact that he’s a vampire, seemingly for absolutely no reason other than to fuck with Jonathan, and it’s strengthened my conviction that you can’t have a faithful modern adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula unless Dracula is just constantly spouting shitty vampire puns – which everyone around him unaccountably fails to pick up on – like a gaunt, bemoustached Hannibal Lecter.

#hannibal? on my dead dark academia blog?#more likely than you think #hannibal #dracula #dracula daily

yeah ill read a classic via email

#dark academia #chaotic academia #dracula #dracula daily #i want this for like frankestein too

kgymz

Lovely scent of tulips in spring

aestheteinreverie

You know what's a love language that gets me everytime I see it between two people? Gaze. Even though one is looking at the other with heart eyes in front of everyone, it seems like such a private moment that we just happened to witness, but weren't meant to. Most of the times, even the one they are looking at is not meant to see they are being looked at with so much love and admiration. The loving gaze doesn't have a purpose. More than being a conversation with one's lover, it's a conversation with oneself - one where you smile and admit to yourself: "I am gone for this person, aren't I?"

#hhhnnnngggg scubgly and blorbo

ocdnatural-deactivated20220809

oh you KNOW ur post is absolute dogshit when it gets reblogged by gayarsonist

dazesanddoodles

every so often i rediscover the count of monte cristo musical and it takes over my spotify for a week or two

#oh my god my last reblog made me sound like an asshole #nonono the count of monte christo is like a revival #its there for me when i need it and im glad someone else gets it #even if the story is in different mediums #anyways op ily

dazesanddoodles

every so often i rediscover the count of monte cristo musical and it takes over my spotify for a week or two

#sometimes i rediscover the book

allo-frouto

do you want to explore museums, old bookshops and libraries with me, yes or no?

#yes

i love spring. i hate spring. the sunsets are to die for. the mornings and nights are colder than winter. i found myself in spring. you left me in the middle of it. im surrounded by love. the ladybugs are still hibernating in my room and i think theyre dead. my future is waiting for me past spring. i wasted winter dying in my room and now i’ll amount to nothing. i rearranged my room but its still a mess. im so lonely. im surrounded by life. this season is lucky and in like a lion out like a lamb. this season is lonely and tragic and full of rainy windy days. i hate the green outside my window. im so connected to nature.