I was a teacher for 17 years, but couldn't read or write
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
He was the kind of guy that can take a dollar on Monday and give you back $100 on Friday. He owns, I believe at this point, 8 properties including his own home.
I always regret not staying back home for a bit to try and help him, but I think by the time I would have been in a place to do it he would have told me he had just accepted the fact he would never learn to read. I can't imagine going through life like he did, how much I would hav missed.
But it also was always an inspiration to me. Every time I would feel my motivation for something academic or professional start to wane, I remind myself that this man who gave me and my siblings anything to help us succeed didn't get to do 90% of the things I take for granted.
It's really sad to see some folks on this thread call this man an idiot. From first hand experience, that's not necessarily the case and often people like him become far more clever than I'll ever be as a means of survival.
This is also a good moment to meditate on "right of repair". As recently as approx. 1970, most of the machinery in daily use could be repaired by a skillful, even though illiterate, person. The advent of semiconductors did away with that and nowadays even highly qualified people struggle to update a firmware against the vendor's wishes.
I know my grandfather, growing up as poor as he did, NEVER threw anything broken away until he was absolutely convinced that it could not be repaired. I wouldn't be suprised if most of his gardening equipment was from the 60's and 70's.
I'm talking self made guys, and not guys from wealthy sympathetic families whom fund their kids until something turns a profit. Jonny at Dentek--you don't count, but daddy was a wiz.
If I had a child, buying real-estate, and learning the stock market, would be right up there with the three R's.
Typically the limitation for real estate ownership is lack of access to credit, or a stable job enabling you to stay in one place.
Rent seeking REQUIRES manipulation of public policy to benefit you.
Being a landlord at the 5 building scale gives you no leverage in public policy. It makes you a capitalist.
But yes, your main point is valid: it is entirely possible to (e.g.) be a landlord without being abusive. Heck, you can even give your tenants a better deal than they could've got otherwise, if the circumstances are right. The issue is that this behaviour (in many places) is actively disincentivised, so unethical people can push out the ethical ones.
Eventually he dropped out of university and got a job. This was the 90s and he started playing with computers and something just clicked inside. Sudenly he could read normally and became quite proficient with computers back then. I suppose it was some kind of learning disability that went away with time and persistence on his part.
It also shows that schools are not equiped to deal with learning disabilities and push those pupils forward in the hope the problem goes away. BTW, this was in Europe, so it is not a US specific problem.
I ready the article with a strong dislike for the guy since I knew he was a teacher. I was pissed off for the pupils.
But it was not that bad, he was a teacher of PE where beside a limited technical knowledge (at the level he was in) the important part are social skills. So maybe it was for the better after all.
I'm all for supporting people with disability, and there is no doubt that it requires courage to admit to being a fraud after so many years — but being dyslexic shouldn't be an excuse for anyone to commit crimes and get away with it (please read what he actually did if you haven't — it wasn't a simple case of cheating).
I have personally seen a lot of academic misconducts that went unpunished that makes cheating in exams seem seem mundane. Fake results that academics don't own up to/just blame their students when proven wrong; made-up results so that a thesis would look better; lying about publications to get scholarships, etc. Nobody ever gets punished and some would eventually go on to hold important positions.
Reading the "supportive" comments in this thread is pretty demoralising for me.
Maybe the moral of the story is that people can change and become positive contributors to society. Think of all the people who have been locked up for decades for crimes they committed as teenagers. They were just thrown away by society without a chance for redemption. This is part of what Black Lives Matter means to me—there’s a primitive impulse in people’s brains to say they’re criminals and they won’t amount to anything and just cause harm. This guy got a chance that was denied to millions of black youths.
It seems that he had only one big true con: where he conned a woman's family into taking care of him and stealing money from them while he essentially stalked her, was found out and then sent to prison.
The lengths he went to in college, however, seem so incredible that I am skeptical. Stories like Richard Montainez's claims of inventing flaming hot cheetos and Frank Abagnale's claims of impersonating have been found out to be false so I need actual proof before I believe these kinds of stories are true.
I don't understand why some people feel the need to be so damn judgemental and moralistic about things.
I don't consider cheating in exams a crime so I'll assume you mean breaking and entering.
I doubt the story, but I saw many people do similar breaking and entering for pranks at uni so have no real problem with that.
I also had access to a library of exams. Once I went to an exam to steal? a copy for next year, but I couldn't work out how to get it out of the room. This is what hackers do, test limits on conventional systems. I also did a lot of work.
You seem to be confusing a job (academia) with his life as an undergrad student, they are not the same.
He worked hard at Uni the way he/BBC tells it, that's good enough for me. I don't believe his story, I am sure it's not as clean as he says, but unless you have the info I'm commenting on the BBC tale.
From someone familiar with the trenches of teaching: claims of 100% success need to be met with skepticism. There could be other classes where the lower performing children go (and fail).
There is actually a lot of research on how to teach reading. I'm not saying every school district uses research-supported materials, but I am saying nostalgia for decades-gone-by methods of teaching should be looked at with a (very) critical eye. Who is successful? Who is not? Are there alternative approaches for students for whom the main approach does not work?
On this specific claim: VPK = voluntary pre-kindergarten. Presumably this teacher is not claiming that 100% of children are learning to read before kindergarten? To critically evaluate this claim, one would have to know the grade level being taught. If they were teaching introductory reading to 7-8 year olds (instead of typical US kindergarten ~5 years old), then success rates would be higher... And in fact one of the trends in education has been pushing the skills to lower grade levels, where they (of course?) become more difficult to master - which makes these claims plausible but again, you need to know if you are comparing the performance of 2nd graders from decades ago with kindergarteners now.
Also, I wonder what's the share of the pronounciations "t", "th" and "θ" in the word "theremin".
(You can download a list of word forms encountered in some selected written texts here: https://kaino.kotus.fi/sanat/taajuuslista/parole.php)
triathlon, smoothie, maybe also apartheid
Also the dictionary finds huithapeli, häthätää, rustholli, but I don't think these have 'th' as a phoneme.
https://www.kielitoimistonsanakirja.fi/#/*th*?searchMode=onl...
What do you mean by having 'th' as a phoneme? If you mean the sound "θ", I don't think any of the words are pronounced with one in Finnish, typically. Rather, they have a "t" sound followed by a "h", or just a "t".
It would be easy to organize meeting of all Anglos and accept this as an alternate spelling. Polish have some weird sibilants, so that it could be the starting point.
You must be surelly joking there. :)
I find IPA fairly inaccessible for the casual user. There's a reason other systems exist.
I learned to read in one month like any other Finnish child ever. But it took a month longer to understand what I was reading. Like my small brain was using all its capacity in pronunciation and I forgot what I just said.
English is like Chinese, you have to learn all pictorials and their meanings. Learning the pronunciation is different process. That is why English takes years and years to learn.
For those interested he has a non profit focused on teaching reading and writing: https://www.johncorcoranfoundation.org/
How these people managed to stay employed as programmers is doing non-programming tasks and such, and copy/paste from Stack Overflow.
Funny enough -as in the article- they are usually attracted to teaching (medium posts, best practice talks, youtube videos...) and mentoring/managing positions. Maybe as a way to escape from coding. Or maybe they want to safe others of struggling with the same problem they have. I don't know.
It took them 5 years to figure out that I couldn''t see anything other than what was immediately in front of me. I was a smart kid, and never had problems in the classroom as I sat in the front row and listened very carefully to what was going in.
I would memorize the eye test sheet while standing in line at the nurses office, waiting to be tested. They never suspected anything was amiss, and routinely reported to my parents that I had perfect vision.
I was finally discovered when my father, trying to be clever while we were out shopping, asked me about an ice cream parlor in the distance. Despite the name of the shop being written clearly above the shopfront, I bombed the question and my father realized that I couldn''t see what he was talking about.
There were so many of us...
The result was that I spent a few years not being able to see what was written on the blackboard. I had to mostly figure it out by myself. The worst were the tests that teachers only wrote on the blackboard. I'd inevitably have to quietly ask someone around me to tell me what the questions were. I don't think I failed a single test because of it even though talking was forbidden.
The funny part was that when my parents eventually took me to an optometrist they tried to convince me that wearing glasses won't be that bad. I distinctly remember that situation because I kept thinking "I asked for them years ago!"
Eventually my eyesight became bad enough again that the glasses I had didn't cut it anymore. I fell a little bit back into my old habits, but it wasn't as bad as before. Sitting closer and all of that helped immensely.
I'm actually really confused by your story to be honest, I think there's some part that I'm missing somehow.
I’ve heard many similar stories from nearsighted friends.
And to be fair: Some of this was the time period. We catch a few more learning disabilities now (not enough, though) and have more tools to help. We just didn't screen so much in the 50s.
As for him, he was apparently resourceful and charismatic, good at sports, had adequate innate math skills and was dedicated to gaming the system.
"So I was going to be a teacher's pet and do everything necessary to pass that system. I wanted to be an athlete - I had athletic skills, and I had maths skills"
"I ran around with college kids, I dated the valedictorian - the student with the highest grades who gives a speech at the graduation ceremony, I was the homecoming king"
On his eightieth birthday some of his students, now in their 50s, told how they had always felt stupid until he showed them they were not. Now they had businesses and successful careers.
"I passed my blue book out the window to him and he answered the questions for me."
But the Reader's Digest version mentioned that he was dyslexic (which I don't think the BBC article mentions) and that he taught almost exclusively using audio/visual presentations, activity based learning and guest speakers.
Similiar to in mathematics where it's a very different process reasoning with symbols v.s. trying to visualize the mathematical construct through communication. Maybe it's difficult to aquire the writing form of graph theory when you are 19. But when you try to do that again at 25 suddenly you can read all of Paul Erdos' papers less daunthingly.
That sounds like what I was wondering. Perhaps something "snaps" into or out of place "catastrophically" (in the sense of almost discontinuously, in the context of the usual timescale of psychological changes). For example, it sounds like his loss of fear occurred pretty suddenly.
I feel a bit awkward speculating about the mind of someone who I know of from just a single essay. That said, he's published a scathingly-honest record of his fascinating history with writing, and presumably he wants it read and discussed. And it's about him, so we discuss him, I guess.
We're all in our own little specula (watchtower) seeing the world from our vantage points. Thus we can do nothing but speculari, or speculate so to speak.
This is why psychedlic experiences are so meaningful. They help us to experience the meta-ness of the experience per se.
So many of us parents put the burden of our children's learning on teachers when the responsibility is squarely ours.
If my son is in 5th grade and can't read, it's my responsibility to teach him or get him the help he needs to be able to learn.
In reality, teaching them to read first, would be best.
But going by the last line, this article was written by a certain Sarah McDermott and not by John Corcoran
Written by Sarah McDermott.
Noticing an obvious deficiency in your life and doing nothing about it is in fact idiotic.
So, how many people are overweight and fat these days?
Maybe some things aren't easy to solve. If someone told me to learn writing in Chinese, I would be very creative in finding ways how to do without. It is just too hard for me at 43 years of age.
People with certain disabilities may find English spelling (a notoriously tricky terrain full of illogical exceptions) similarly overwhelming.
Used this tactic many times myself. You pull it once, they call 911. You pull it twice, they usually do it again. You pull it three times...an awkward silence fills the room...after the sixth time, my boss just carried on with the meeting, and I stopped getting invited. I think they call this life hacking.
I now do it everywhere...in the line at the DMV clutches heart, wife nagging clutches heart, kid wants new shoes clutches heart. People say you can't outrun your problems...in reality, all you need to do is stay calm, pretend to have a heart attack, and your problems just melt away. I think I am going to write a self-help book.
This poor guy has felt bad his entire life when he could've been an excellent coal miner instead.
Every place I've worked is filled with people like this guy to one extent or another - fearful parents pushing their kids to go to school and pretend to be something they're not. Then people who have an affinity for thinking have to navigate these insecure idiots (sorry, medical term) their entire careers.
It makes workplaces hell for everyone involved, both the idiots and the capable.
People ought to do what they are capable of doing. People ought to be treated with dignity and respect. If we get that far this century, boy, that'd really be something.
I think your attitude is what makes the hell tbh.
We should definitely teach everyone to be literate, and not just decide they should be "excellent coal miner"s instead.
I think the answer is probably that we don't want parents pulling kids out of school early just to earn money for the family? So legally requiring they stay at school longer protects.
Just a thought
Unless your claim is that with sufficient support everyone can leave school at 16 with good grades, which is simply not a school of thought I ascribe to.
He wasn't unhappy in life, or the way his career as a factory worker turned out. At least, as near as I can determine those kind of things: he was an old-fashioned kind of man who didn't have a heart to heart with his grandchildren. He never ate pizza in his life, and refused to eat it when I offered to take him out to try it.
But at the same time I've always felt he could have achieved much more if he continued school. The reason he didn't was because his family was poor and another child working was needed to put bread on the table. A big reason this mandatory schooling exists is for these kind of reasons.
That being said, I do think there's too much emphasis on degrees; not having a college degree is almost something you're embarrassed of. My brother did basically a useless "animal care" study because he felt like he had to do A study (note: it's not a useless education, but there are tons of people doing it and very few jobs, almost no-one who graduates gets a job in that field and the impression I had from his friends is that it's mostly the kind of thing people do when they don't know what else to do).
Note that in Europe, mandatory schooling ends in 15-16 in most states.
In other words, the problem is not stupid people (or people with learning disabilities, which I happen to have btw), who undoubtedly exist. The problem is foolish people who think they can cheat their way through life.
My contention is that we're sinking under the weight of foolish people cheating their way into positions they have no business being in.
Foolish as in lacking wisdom. Not foolish as in lacking ability to do calculus. We have plenty of calculus, we severely lack wisdom :)