this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Someone posted a lengthy podcast about how many kids are taught to read badly. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
There was another article a couple weeks ago that said less than half of us adults can read at a 6th grade level. 6th grade is before you really get into metaphor and subtext. That's just reading for plot.
Some people legitimately might be bad at reading.
The people on text based sites are probably better than a whole chunk of people that don't even post.
It’s not about reading comprehension, it’s about the reader not understanding the unwritten parameters of the question. That the possibility that neither have greater value exists.
I recall one occasion where something similar happened to me back in middle school. We were learning about probability using dice rolls. One of the questions on the worksheet was (something like) “What is the best way to influence the probability of the dice roll outcome?”
When the question was posed to me I fully understood that there was no way to influence the probability, assuming no influence by external factors, the probability of a given outcome will always be equal. But the fact that the question was posed to me in this way led me to believe that this was not the answer the question was looking for. It implied that in fact there was a way to influence the result, so I got very frustrated in trying to come up with an answer which made sense. In this situation I felt that actually the question was wrong, and got upset that the task I had been set to answer it was impossible to complete correctly. When I realised that the true intent was just to get me to acknowledge that there was no way to influence the result, I felt betrayed by the framing of the question. I knew the answer the whole time, it was obvious, but the framing of the question misled me to believe that was not the intended answer.
The question in my case wasn’t actually an earnest question about probability, the pretext for is was deliberately false. There was no way for me to figure it out using better reading comprehension. The intent of the question can only be realised via comprehension of non-written concepts, essentially being able to recognise when someone is trying to throw you a curveball. It isn't quite the same as just recognising the path of the ball being thrown to you, because in that case it appears to be being thrown away from you.
If you examine the person replying person's responses, that's pretty much where they're at. The whole 'dude is expecting the answer to be their own views' thing is conjecture, what they're expecting is a view given an existing proposition that there is a view to take.
On the other hand life is full of those kinds of "bad questions": poorly framed questions, leading ones, arguments in bad faith, etc. You're going to encounter them on future tests and in real life, and often the stakes are higher.
That question might have been shit at teaching about probability but it was a far more important lesson in disguise.
For sure, I'm more pushing back on using this example as a basis to go on to make a point about reading comprehension. It's quite ironic that the issue isn't really about reading comprehension, don't you think?