Non-Britons! Instead of being distracted by the pomp and fanfare of the coronation, here’s a reminder that:
The coronation was funded by tax-payer money. This same tax could have gone towards the cost of living crisis. People are starving and freezing to death as this is going on.
Protests (peaceful or otherwise) are illegal now. A lot of anti-monarchists are being arrested for simply holding signs.
Our government is currently trying to push through a revision to the Equality Act that will exclude trans and non-binary individuals.
Oil companies have made a record profit in the past couple of years. Oil and gas prices aren’t rising because of an inflation issue.
Our NHS is crumbling because funding is going to stupid projects like this coronation.
When we’re new to adulthood, it doesn’t immediately occur to all of us that you’re almost always allowed to leave a situation, because growing up we’re forced to stay in situations until someone dismisses us and/or takes us home, or if we do leave on our own accord there’s someone waiting at home to say “we don’t quit in this family!” Boring party? You can leave. You don’t like the lecture? You can walk out. New doctor not working out? You can end the appointment, you don’t need to wait for them to dismiss you. Bad date? You can just go home. Leaving a situation prematurely might have consequences, but unless you’re under arrest or serving prison time, it’s pretty much always allowed.
A while back, I called for a Lyft ride home from the airport. The lyft pulled up, he called my name, and I opened the door and climbed in. While I was climbing in he was getting out, which I didn’t realize until he opened the back door on the other side.
Him: I’ll put your bag in the trunk. Me: Oh, there’s no need. Him: I’ll just put it back there. Me: I prefer to keep my bag with me.
I was also still holding onto it so he couldn’t just grab it, and when I said “I prefer to keep it with me” this cloud of rage crossed his face.
Him: Then get out. Me: Excuse me? Him: Get out, I don’t want your bag fucking up my upholstery.
Now, this was a weekender – essentially an upscale duffle bag. Small, almost brand new, easily fitting on the middle-seat beside me. I don’t know if he was just really intense about his upholstery or if he was running some kind of scam, but either way I now DEFINITELY was not going to let him separate me from my bag.
So I said “Okay,” and I picked up my bag and got out, took out my phone, and cancelled him as my driver.
He looked at me like I’d grown a second head. There was this moment of total disconnect in his face, and then he started ranting about how someone had damaged his upholstery and they needed to put their bags in the back and he wasn’t going to have me getting his upholstery dirty.
I said, “I’m out of your car. Drive on, I’ll get another,” and held up my phone.
This had clearly never happened before – it looked like plenty of people had thought “This guy is crazy” but went the “so I’d better let him do what he wants” route instead of “so I’m getting out of his car”. Which is totally normal! We’re socialized to prioritize “not making a scene” over personal safety. But when you do call that bluff, when you defy the social convention that the other person is counting on to make you do what they want you to do, they don’t know how to react, which gives you time for a clean getaway. And maybe he thought I was a dickhead but what do I care what an asshole thinks of me?
Anyway the moral of the story is yes, you should know that you can almost always leave a situation and often it’s in your best interest to do so.
(Right after I called for another car he picked up a fare using Quick Match or whatever it’s called, peeled out of the Lyft lane, and hit another car well nigh immediately.)
[ID: The Benefits of walking away. (Illustration of the back of a person walking away. ) 1. Makes bad things disappear quickly. 2. Gives everyone optimal view of your back. 3. Answers question, “I wonder what would happen if I just walked away”]
From what I understand from the article, it’s even rougher than normal content moderation: a lot of these workers were hired to train AIs like ChatGPT away from, well, all the worst that the web could provide, to detoxify it for the end users. They are specifically given the worst stuff that can be dredged up from the depths of the internet, and asked to label it - so that the AI can use that data to identify hatespeech, suicide ideation, racism, CSA, etc etc.
It’s an awful job, and some are paid less than $2 an hour. Workers have PTSD. Are they being offered counselling, support, compensation? Fuck no, they get punished for speaking up.
Good luck to the African Content Moderators Union, I hope they get the protections and compensation that their workers need.
my dad and I just finished listening to a fascinating (and really pretty alarming) podcast about American literacy education recently—Sold a Story by Emily Hanford—and it got me wondering what my peers’ experience was, so here’s my first poll! This pertains to people who learned to read in the U.S. specifically, so even if one of the other options matches your experience, I’d politely ask you to refrain from picking one (presumably you guys have better school districts than we do anyway).
(the most horrifying part out of the entire thing was the fact that dubbya was the one to realize something was wrong. even a broken clock, I guess…?)
My parents did not teach me to read so much as read to me a lot, and then assume I’d memorized the first few books they found me reading on my own. They figured out it wasn’t memorization when I started reading them a book they hadn’t read to me before. I was three. This tells us absolutely nothing about US education, as I hadn’t started that yet.
hey, same hat!
my parents found out I could read when we were on a road trip, and I asked them for gum. They told me there wasn’t any. I pointed out the window at a sign saying PHARMACY and said “can we get some at the pharmacy?”
I was also three. they had not taught me to read yet, as far as they knew.
They did stop and get me some gum.
My first grade teacher realized I was memorizing the books we read aloud in class by matching the pictures to what other students read aloud, which is when we figured out that I was dyslexic and then I was put in an intensive program worked out by my teacher and my parents to memorize word shapes and was then expected to read 2-4 hours a day until I knew enough words by sight to “fix” my dyslexia. I still have a lot of trouble with unfamiliar words because I’ll often learn the word shape for a new concept before I learn what the actual word is so I usually won’t know how to say or spell words that I’ve learned through context instead of through specific memorization, i just know what the word looks like and what it means but i don’t know how it’s spelled or pronounced. (This is why I know almost none of my mutuals’ actual usernames and don’t often tag people, I’m sorry ilu but your name is most likely [unique shape] in my head. This is also why i can barely name any Tolkien characters in spite of reading LotR about three dozen times and why i don’t know the generic names of my meds)
So most of the people in the US get taught how to read by their parents? The thing that m everywhere else the schools emphatically demand you to not do, ever?
Great! A new fact to add to my “WTF US education system” mental folder!
Ok, I’m stepping way out of my area of knowledge here, but .. yes? The idea is that science says kids brains are not developed enough to learn how to read until they are around 6. Also, parents teaching them in advance can mess up badly with the methodology used in school, which may end doing more harm than good. So yeah, here, teachers insist A LOT in you don’t trying on your own before it’s time.
Also, well, recognizing some words is not reading. That happens to every kid. If we are talking about things like “teaching them about how their name or a few words look like”, I don’t think that counts as “teaching how to read” and we may be talking about different things
I don’t know, Finns, who has what it has been considered the best education system in the world for decades, don’t teach kids how to read until they are 7. And with anything related to education, it’s always a great idea to copy Finland.
That’s absurd. Completely insane. Learning is not like lifting weights or something where you might harm yourself if you don’t built up to it properly. If you *can* learn to read at 3 there is no reason at all that you shouldn’t, though you also should have to/be forced to.
Kelly, I’m afraid this is one of those things that are like “the US does a thing in a little special way that’s different to how the rest of the world does it and the data is massively screaming at the US they are doing it wrong”.
Like, again, this is not my field, so I just defer to what scientists and pedagogues say. And it’s not a debate, they are pretty clear about it, and that’s the principle other countries education systems try to follow. And, well, looking at adult literacy rates by country it’s clear what works and what doesn’t.
Hi, op here! I’m a linguistic anthropologist currently working in my university’s language acquisition lab; this ispreciselymy field!
(not every word—U.S. literacy education is failing, and spectacularly (that’s why I made this poll). But it’s not because we’re starting too early. In fact, I suspect the reason the “parents” option is winning among USians is specifically because our schools are doing such a garbage job. If you really want a “WTF U.S. education system” moment, listen to the podcast, it’s appalling.)
it’s 3am for me right now so if you’d like a full suite of academic citations you’ll have to wait, but the tl;dr is that spoken language acquisition starts pre-birth, literacy acquisition (which is a totally different animal, neurologically speaking) starts as early as infancy, and preschool education in literacy has statistically significant, measurable long-term effects. If you’re concerned about my 5 minutes of citation grabbing being too U.S.-centric, here's an Italian study and a Czech study to the same ends—they were some of the first results. I’ll be happy to get back to you tomorrow if you want more: trust me, I know exactly what I’m talking about.
Ok, I need to read in deep the links you just gave us, but I’ve quickly skimmed throw the English ones and … Nothing there contradicts what I said? Actually, they… Actually confirm what I was saying?
The second one talks about the importance of start teaching writing skills in pre-school settings. Which, yeah, everyone agrees that’s important, because they need to develop the psychomotor habilities to be able to write once they start learning to read later on, but… That’s not reading.
And the first one … It kinds of confirm everything I said? It talks about the importance of being read for the child development (that’s not teaching how to read)
And how the introduction to reading on their own happens between 6 and 7:
So… I guess we agree that experts say teaching how to read shouldn’t happen until 6?
Right above in awareness and exploration stage it says:
Their introduction to reading is typically through listening to and discussing storybooks, participating in rhyming activities, and beginning to identify letters.
That is literally learning to read is it not? The next section is titled “novice reading” ok so now they are reading on their own as you said. But prior to that they’re still learning.
I live in Canada and most people around me started learning to read by identifying letters and sounds, with their parents.
I would also say I “learned to read early” because when my parents read books aloud with me they taught me simple strategies to sound out words as I read along with them. It wasn’t like comprehensive homeschooling or hardcore phonics, just like pointing at words and sounding them out the way I suspect many parents do with their kids by default naturally and I happened to pick it up quickly. I also suspect that kind of experience is why people who were early readers are quick to say they learned to read with their parents. Again I am in Canada.
It seems strange to me that you would arrive at kindergarten without ever being “taught” some awareness of letters and sounds and reading. And it seems weird to me that if you show an interest and aptitude to pick up reading early as many kids do, you would defacto prevent it just because they’re not X age.
I’m curious to understand if your parents then refused to teach you letters, sounds, sounding out simple words like cat or short sentences as a kid and told you to wait? Until you got to school? You never practiced reading at home with your parents either? If you wanted to start reading early do they stop you or refuse to tell you how to do it? Like literally “no I won’t tell you how to read this word, wait for the teacher”?
Oh, ok, yeah, no. Learning letters, learning how to write your name by “drawing” the shape, even learning to recognize some words? No, that’s not what I mean when I say “learn how to read”. Yeah, the kids learn those things by their own, or with the help of their parents, or in the first years of school … But they can’t read a simple sentence of simple words they haven’t seen before after that, right? Those are pre-requisites to learn how to read, as learning how to count and recognize numbers is a prerequisite to learn algebra, but it’s not learning algebra on itself.
With “learning how to read” what I mean is learning how different letters interact with each other, so they can get any text (simple at first of course) and read it. You know, the part of the movies when they are teaching someone how to read and they get a kids book and start fumbling throw the words until they get it right? That’s what I mean.
I guess that maybe the difference is not so clear in English? Because there are not much rules to learn… (In my head I can’t even understand how you people learn how to read without having some clear vowel pronunciation rules), so maybe for English speakers it doesn’t make sense what I’m talking about.
I do think there’s got to be some miscommunication here because I’m both American and European and my parents taught me to read in two languages (English and German) without any concern that it would affect my education. Admittedly I’ve lived in the US and gone to school here since I started, but even my European parent has no idea what you’re talking about.
Children who are taught to read before coming to school in the US aren’t considered to have done something bad, they’re actually considered to have a head start. Being able to sound out words and even recognize some by sight are basic skills in English that parents are able to teach as well as teachers for the most part, I have a hard time thinking of how you’d even do it “wrong” as long as you yourself know how to read.
In fact, the main recommendation that our teachers give for learning to read and to improve your reading skills is simply to read more, asking questions, of course, if you encounter something you don’t understand. There’s actually not a ton of direct instruction apart from the basic sounds of the letters at all.
Honestly, I haven’t been in the German school system, but I feel like the same is true in that language as well; the basic rules are straightforward enough that anyone who knows how to read should be able to teach a child.
I’m curious, though, about your reference to “not much rules to learn”, though. Is Spanish so complex that a person who knows how to read would struggle to properly impart them, at least enough to read simple children’s books? My main exposure to Spanish is Mexican Spanish (I live in California) but I didn’t think that was the case.
It’s, indeed, a miscommunication. Some people in the notes who speak polish and German seem to know what I’m talking about, but all the English speakers seem to have some reading comprehension issues (hehehe ok this is a bad pun, sorry folks, it was too easy to make the pun, you don’t have such issues).
Let me try to explain it. For what I’m understanding, what people in the US do to “learn how to read” is kind of memorize words. Entire words. Not syllables, nor phonems, but entire words. In a way, for them, words work similar to Japanese kanjis, instead of working as a bunch of letters together than can be read into a word. That sounds totally alien to me. I can’t even start to comprehend the idea. Before this conversation, I wouldn’t even call that “reading”, but it looks like a lot of anglo speakers learn to read like that?
See, in other languages, when you learn how to read, you learn not by learning words, but learning, first, all the letters and how they sound. Once you know how they sound, you learn how they sound when combined.
A kid don’t learn to recognize the word “papa” (dad) or “mama” (mom). They learn that when you put an “A” behind a “P”, that sounds “pa”. And with an “M”, that sounds “ma”.
Once they know that, they can “build” the words “mama” and “papa”. They can go through a text and see p-a-p-a and go “ok, this is pa-pa, oh, papa”. But… Once they have those two building piece, they also can understand “mapa” (map), even if they haven’t seen the word in writing before. Once they learn how two or three letters sound together, they can understand every time that syllable appears on a text. Once they learn all the possible combinations of vowels and consonants, they know how to read every single word in the entire language.
In the Spanish education system, this happens usually at 6 years old. By the time they are 7 (maybe 8), any kid will be able to read even the most complex words in the language, even if they don’t understand the meaning (ok, maybe slowly and taking their time, but they will). And this is what we call “knowing how to read”. To be able to take any combination of letters and know which words, or sounds, they form. Even if they don’t know the word. Even if it’s not really a word.
If you take a bunch of 8 year old Spanish speaking kids with an age-relevant reading level, write a completely made-up word and ask them to read it, all of them will read it in the same way, no matter which country they are from. My understanding is that this is also how a lot of other languages work.
And that’s what I consider “knowing how to read”. So “learning how to read” is the process of learning the explicit rules about how different letters can combine to form phonems, not learning about this or that particular word on it’s own. That’s what you are asked to not do on your own as a parent, not things like teaching them words or how to read simple phrases.
Okay, so here’s the thing about English, at least in America, we actually learn to read through a hybrid system. Think about the word “and”. English phonics teaches that the letter “a” has the “ah” sound. If you try to sound it out, you’ll get it wrong, so children are taught to recognize the word by sight so they can say it correctly.
But for the most part, we do teach children to read phonetically. If that gives the wrong pronunciation then we correct them on a case by case basis, but many children’s books (Dr. Seuss books, for example) are designed to include words that are easy to sound out so that kids can practice that method of reading.
So yeah, we do have sight words, but most of how we teach reading is sounding out words and we encourage parents to do this with their kids as soon as the kids shows an interest in it.
Honestly, our problems with literacy tend to be related to issues of class and culture rather than how we teach it. Poorer parents have less time to teach their kids to read and conservatives, in particular, often disparage learning and education in general.
There’s a big push here to get people to spend more time reading with their young children and to encourage their older children to read more on their own. Waiting for your child to learn how to read in school isn’t quite considered a failure in America, but it’s close. Even our educational children’s programs and books focus on reading from an early age.
It may be related to the language itself, though. I haven’t seen any Brits or Australians weigh in yet and they’re usually pretty quick to jump in when they think Americans are doing something crazy. Maybe English really is just different. Or maybe this is something cultural that goes way back to the English.
Okay, interesting. You know what: I did that American Thing™ again, it didn’t occur to me that you guys have a fundamentally different definition of when reading starts and what it is. So you know what? I do agree that kids aren’t learning to read by your definition until they get to Kindergarten (and that they shouldn’t be—preschool should include some basic “reading” by this American’s definition, which we’ll get to, but should definitely be much more about play and socialization).
as learning how to count and recognize numbers is a prerequisite to learn algebra, but it’s not learning algebra on itself.
This is an excellent analogy, actually. I think you’re looking at reading as being like algebra—a specific application of a larger field—and I and other U.S.ians in this thread are looking at reading as being like math, i.e., a larger field encompassing lots of different skills.
A kid don’t learn to recognize the word “papa” (dad) or “mama” (mom). They learn that when you put an “A” behind a “P”, that sounds “pa”. And with an “M”, that sounds “ma”.
These processes—phonics and relatives—are fundamental building blocks of literacy that can begin as soon as a child starts forming whole words (usually around 2 but can come significantly earlier or later). I’m including these early building blocks as part of learning to read, because they’re essential foundations that true literacy can be built on. A parent holding a baby on their lap, reading a board book to them, and encouraging them to repeat the sounds is helping the child learn to read, but it’s not true reading and it’s not what you would define as “being taught to read”. Therein lies the miscommunication, and I’m sorry for my part in that!
The next steps—
Once they learn how two or three letters sound together, they can understand every time that syllable appears on a text. Once they learn all the possible combinations of vowels and consonants, they know how to read every single word in the entire language.
—are what you define as true reading, and there’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that, in schools that teach it, this also doesn’t begin for Americans before around age 5-6. The bad news (and it’s bad) is that a lot of schools aren’t teaching phonics at all, ever, and actively recommend against it—So when you talk about the U.S.’s abysmal literacy rate, that’s a huge reason why! (ETA: as pointed out previously, systemic racism and classism are absolutely another massive reason, to the point that even our studies about the effects of socioeconomic inequality on language and literacy are flawed at a ground level. I won’t get into that on this post, but I’m happy to give the short version if people are curious.)
For what I’m understanding, what people in the US do to “learn how to read” is kind of memorize words. Entire words. Not syllables, nor phonems, but entire words.
Yes. This is a huge problem, because this isn’t how English-language literacy works either! That’s the gist of the original podcast, and it made me realize how phenomenally lucky I was to get the early education that I did before it all went completely tits-up.
So you’re correct in that I do agree that formal reading/writing education doesn’t need to start before a Kindergarten level and probably shouldn’t. I don’t, however, agree that parents teaching their 2-3yo children very basic phonics and letter recognition, which does fall under the broader spectrum of early literacy training, is harmful or something to be discouraged. In fact, with the state of our school districts, I would argue that it is essential—whether it counts as “reading” or not!
Isn’t Spanish written purely phonetically? Like, regional variants gonna vary, but every a in the same accent sounds the same, yes? Every e, every c, every r? Aren’t most languages sensible like this?
English doesn’t do that. How English pronunciation relates to English orthography can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.
Of those five similarly spelled words, the only letters that make the same sound across multiple words are T (by itself, so just in ‘tough’ and 'thought’), TH (but not in 'though’), technically GH (but only because that’s silent everywhere but 'tough’, where the GH sounds like F), and R.
Like. Obviously taking phonics out of US schools was a bad move. But the people pushing pure sight reading do have a valid point, related to how, by the definition above of “true reading”, English speakers cannot. It’s not possible.
So yeah orthography is a huge part of this. I’ve talked about it on other posts, but in the US it has sometimes been a joke that using phonics are for people who don’t understand how to read, this is typically presented with a t-shirt that says “hukt on fonix werked fur me” or something similar. To make that clearer, let’s directly compare:
hukt on fonix werked fur me hooked on phonics worked for me
^ both of those could very reasonably be pronounced exactly the same in English.
That “joke” wouldn’t work in German or Spanish or a lot of other languages, because “oo” doesn’t sound like “u” in any context, and “ics” doesn’t sound like “ix” and “e” doesn’t sound like “o.”
The “joke” is that only stupid people who don’t know how to spell would sound things out with phonics.
Learning phonics and phonemes is good! It’s really good! It’s also difficult to teach in a language that has rules like “'i’ before 'e’ except after 'c’ and words like 'neighbor’ or 'their’” and words like “read/read” which are composed of different phonemes depending on context *and* in the US specifically, in classrooms where you’ve got 20-30 students to a teacher for early elementary education. I absolutely understand why sight words are a common part of early reading education in English; I also understand why that is probably a bad thing.
I also don’t think the way that I was taught to read was particularly good, but it was the early 90s so *shrug emoji*
The reason I say that this is related to orthography is because while English and Danish (and other Germanic languages) DO have a lot of vowel sounds (depending on how you’re defining it and who you’re reading, English has between 13 and 44; 20-25 is the range that came up the most in a quick glance around the web), English spells these vowel sounds like it flipped a coin for what letters to put down.
So let’s take these English words:
fate fat father
How do you sound these words out? In English, you kind of don’t. You just need to know that the fa- preceding a t is pronounced differently for each of these words.
the “a” in each of these words is pronounced differently. IPA for the first vowel in each per wiktionary is:
eɪ æ ɑ
I’m not very familiar with Danish, but as near as I can tell those sounds correspond to the Danish letters:
e (or possibly i) æ a
possibly with the last two sounds overlapping as “a.”
Most Germanic and Romance languages are known for having pretty straightforward spelling; the letters on the page correspond to how a word sounds, for the most part.
English, which is a Germanic language with heavy French influence that didn’t go through the same vowel shifts as the languages around it and also adopted every Greek and Latin word it thought looked nice, is very much not that, and “he was fated to be a fat father” is a sentence that would be very frustrating to approach phonetically if you were trying to sound it out based on a single pronunciation of “a.”
Here are some fun bits from the English orthography wikipedia:
From the section “Phonetic Irregularities”
English spelling, compared to many other languages, is quite irregular and complex. Although French, among other languages, presents a similar degree of difficulty when encoding (writing), English is more difficult when decoding (reading), as there are clearly many more possible pronunciations of a group of letters. For example, in French, /u/ (as in “true”, but short), can be spelled ⟨ou, ous, out, oux ⟩ (ou, nous, tout, choux), but the pronunciation of each of those sequences is always the same. In English, /uː/ can be spelled in up to 24 different ways, including ⟨oo, u, ui, ue, o, oe, ou, ough, ew⟩ (spook, truth, suit, blues, to, shoe, group, through, few) (see Sound-to-spelling correspondences below), but all of these have other pronunciations as well (e.g., as in foot, us, build, bluest, so, toe, grout, plough, sew) (See the Spelling-to-sound correspondences below). Thus, in unfamiliar words and proper nouns, the pronunciation of some sequences, ⟨ough⟩ being the prime example, is unpredictable to even educated native English speakers.
and from “Spelling Irregularities”
It is, however, not (solely) the shortage of letters which makes English spelling irregular. Its irregularities are caused mainly by the use of many different spellings for some of its sounds, such as /uː/, /iː/ and /oʊ/ (too, true, shoe, flew, through; sleeve, leave, even, seize, siege; stole, coal, bowl, roll, old, mould), and the use of identical sequences for spelling different sounds (over, oven, move).
As an example of the irregular nature of English spelling, ⟨ou⟩ can be pronounced at least nine different ways: /aʊ/ in out, /oʊ/ in soul, /uː/ in soup, /ʌ/ in touch, /ʊ/ in could, /ɔː/ in four, /ɜː/ in journal, /ɒ/ in cough, and /ə/ in famous (See Spelling-to-sound correspondences). In the other direction, /iː/ can be spelled in at least 18~21 different ways: be (cede), ski (machine), bologna (GA), algae, quay, beach, bee, deceit, people, key, keyed, field (hygiene), amoeba, chamois (GA), dengue (GA), beguine, guyot, and ynambu
So, teaching phonics in terms of what sounds make up words? English isn’t too bad. Teaching how those sounds are spelled?
Well. There’s a reason that competitive spelling contests are most common in English-speaking countries.
People in the old days were clipping everything to everything… clipping cardigans into capes, shoes into different shoes. clipping through the roof. Clipping through the floor.
Mark the electrician has been here for five minutes and he’s already said “well that’s…weird” twice from the other room and frankly I’m afraid to ask.
It’s not good when skilled tradesman are standing in the middle of your room pinching the bridge if their nose, is it?
Mark just referred to the wiring in our bedroom as “creative” and “interesting”.
This is fine.
And now he’s taking apart the ceiling. I’m not worried, are any of you worried? I’m not, haha, it’s not like this house was previously owned by someone who would do something stupid like try to wire their house themselves…or store tins of varnish under the furnace behind a secret alcove…
Ha ha…
Ha.
Hm.
Fuck.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO NEUTRAL WIRES??!?
WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S GROUNDED INTO THE SCREWS HOLDING UP THE CEILING LIGHT???!?!!
This post crosses my dashboard every so often and every time, I’m reminded of when I discovered that my whole house was grounded to a gas line.
ALT
