People are probably hostile because you're going against scientific consensus and saying a range of disabilities that affects millions of people doesn't exist.
That is absolutely a massively distributed pedagogical failure of outstanding degree. Unless the average adult is so mentally disabled that acceptable-or-above teaching should result in this outcome.
Except now we don't even have the latter. We've just accepted that the least qualified individuals in our society are charged with doing what is arguably the most important work outside of governing, and with a laughable wrong headed course of training.
When I was teaching programming I realised that by best students were going to become excellent programmers regardless of what I did. Like, if I literally didn’t teach them anything and left them to just goof around quietly on their computer on their own, they’ll still end up great. Teaching still matters. (Maybe more). But the difference is 10/10 meets expectations and 20/10 exceeds them.
Weaker students essentially could not learn the material without both of us working really hard to get them over the line. For the weaker students, the default is failure unless a lot of things go right.
And so as a classroom teacher you have the devil’s choice - who do you pay attention to? In a large classroom some people inevitably get ignored or fall through the cracks. And in school the problem compounds year on year. Learning issues tend to take a lot longer to fix than they do to create. Didn’t learn calculus last year with everyone else because your home life is a mess? Now the only way you’ll learn it is with 1-on-1 time with an overworked teacher. That didn’t happen? Now you have panic attacks when you think about it. And home life is probably still a mess.
I’m not apologising or excusing anything. But it is a hard problem. I don’t believe the same philosophy of teaching which created this problem is equal to the task of solving it.
I probably worded it very vaguely.
The lack of ability to benefit from this farce in millions of students isn't surprising; and it can be absolutely address with better instruction and individual approach.
I say this as a former instructor, math PhD[1], and also a person with ADHD[2] who persevered through a fair amount of failing grades on the way there.
The #1 reason[3] I ran away from academia was that the system simply doesn't allow one to teach the right way. It's a conveyor-belt manufacturing process with the model 9-5 worker as the intended results, and if you don't fit the mold — tough luck.
One has more leeway in teaching topics courses, but even world-class professors don't get away with not teaching intro/foundation courses, which are as rigid as they're atrocious.
And K12 is where souls go to die. An enthusiastic teacher will burn out in just a few years, and come back with PTSD and a 1000-yard stare.
Anyway. The OP's statement should be seen as "learning durabilities are not an obstacle to a good instructor" — which, in the vast majority of cases, is true.
[1] https://romankogan.net/math
[2] https://romankogan.net/adhd
[3] The #2 reason is that the industry pays 4x as much; #3 is the 2-body problem; #4 is ..., oh wait, I'll be here for a long time if I keep going.
Tell that to my Dyslexia, I had many mentors growing up, and was taught by many people using many different approaches. I still can’t spell for shit, and my phonic processing is still garbage.
No about of different teaching methods is going to change the fundamentals fact that my brain struggles to turn sounds into words, resulting in me hearing noise rather than speech, and turning ideas into written words.
I’m perfectly articulate, indeed I’ve been accused of being “too articulate”, whatever that means, by my written prose is poor because I struggle translating phonic sounds into letters and words. Even simple words like “because”, “through”, “thought” etc which I’ve written and read correctly millions of times, I still struggle with, and need help from a spellchecker to get correct.
If that isn’t a learning disability, then I have no idea what it is. But it sure as shit isn’t a teaching failure.
The biggest problem for me has been noticing spelling mistakes in variable names. I can't find the bug yet it's just two letters swapped.
Oh and the frustration some people have when they spot an error.
As in, ditching names like loc/iloc and adopting getValueByKey/getValueByIndex (hello, Pandas API!).
The bugs of that sort bite even the most experienced programmers. And by using verbose names, the typo would be much more likely caught by the compiler. (And you can wrap ungodly APIs with less typo-friendly names too).
That's one of the reasons verbose names are a coding standard e.g. in Google.
The people who get frustrated by either verbose names or small spelling errors are welcome to go and frustrate themselves, preferably in solitude and far from either of us. I'm sorry that you run into them.
I was first introduced to verbose syntax when I first used objective c. I loved it.
To give an analogy: someone who can't walk has a disability, but it would be a failure of the instructor to make 5K running the only way to get a passing grade in physical education, while simultaneously not making barbells available.
And looking at your very well-written and perfectly structured comment, I struggle to accept its conclusion. If all you need to write this well is spell-checker — a tool more common than a ballpoint pen at this point, and one that's been around for decades — then the instructors that didn't teach you to use it were failing at teaching.
If you can speak well, and they never even suggested dictation software (again, something that's been around for a long time), it's a teaching failure.
Writing is not about spelling words the same way dictionary spells them. Writing is about communicating ideas clearly, and your written prose is great.
You can't write without a spell-checker; your tutors can't write with a quill, most likely. There's no difference.
That you think that your prose is poor — there's the teaching failure.
Do you see what I mean now?
And that individualized education would have no effect whatsoever on their place in the eventual statistic that x% of Americans cannot run 5k.
Also, imagine running 5K being a requirement for admission to college.
Because by that metric, the commenter I was responding to would be deemed "illiterate" and not worthy of being admitted to college (in spite of being able to express their thoughts more clearly than most).
Again, I have a PhD in mathematics, and have taught college-level math 2010-2017.
I have taught hundreds of students (if not thousands), and have seen many of them hindered by bullshit stats like that in mathematics.
Mathematics in particular is an incredibly diverse field; yet people with dyscalculia feel that they "can't do math" — even though so much math has nothing to do with numbers or calculation, and would be accessible to them (had we only been allowed to teach it).
As it stands, we are judging fish by their ability to climb trees.
Now, you are free to have your own opinion (knock yourself out), but please have some respect for my experience in the field, if nothing else. I'm speaking as an educator.
And the above is something that many, many educators are well aware of, but feel powerless to change.
If you have qualified objections (i.e. based on something more than you just thinking that way), I'm all ears.
Your focus on your own 'experience' appears to be blinding you to the topic at hand, which does not involve spell checkers. Perhaps does not cover the area of literacy and how it is assessed?
You joined the thread well after its topic was set in place, and, frankly, I don't know what you think the topic is.
The comment I was responding to did specifically involve spell checkers; did you miss it?
Your last sentence seems to be missing a subject.
And if you thoroughly read the originally submitted Wikipedia article, you'll find out that:
* The notion of literacy (in the language sense) includes reading as well as writing (particularly, as assessed by NAEP). In fact, any notion of literacy mentions the ability to read and write.
* The notion of literacy, as assesed by NAAL, also includes quantitative literacy (something I have expertise in)
* The issue of (lack of) equity in literacy assessment has been particularly highlighted in the Wiki article
* Spell-checker is a way to achieve equity in writing assessments for people suffering from dyslexia
The commentor I was responding to would be deemed "illiterate" by these assessments for not remembering how to spell words like "through". Yet that person has very clearly demonstrated that they don't struggle with either understanding other people's points, nor clearly expressing their own.
Something that can't be said of most (ostensibly literate) people even on this forum, sadly.
>Perhaps does not cover the area of literacy and how it is assessed?
Would you mind rephrasing?
Solid reading comprehension should allow you to make a reasonable guess at the intended value of the missing noun; it was "experience". I am not enjoying the experience of discussing literacy assessment with someone who has vastly overestimated their knowledge of the topic, so I will not continue.
I didn't say I didn't understand your point; just that clarity wasn't there (due to the sentence being ungrammatical). Quite ironic in a thread discussing literacy.
>No, he would not be called illiterate by these assessments.
This is a claim. For the benefit of the people reading this thread, would you please provide the basis for such a claim?
To be more specific, the claim implies that ability to spell is not measured by "these assessments" (which ones, specifically?).
The Wikipedia article indicates otherwise (as described in my previous comment), so everyone would benefit from learning about what your words are based on.
>I am not enjoying the experience [...], so I will not continue.
On the note of clarity in writing, that point could have been expressed in 0 words, by way of not leaving a comment.
In any case, if you're an educator, this is a chance for you to educate people who overestimate their knowledge of the subject.
And if not — well, I'm very sorry.
"Look, even though someone was at fault through all of my early years i still managed to learn these rudimentary tasks on my own as an adult, not everyone is as good as i am".
We should be very careful with scientific consensus of a social science. Maybe we should say if you lead a horse to water, it doesn't drink, and you need that horse to work on the farm to grow food to feed your family, you are going to have a very bad time instead of what teachers told me time and time again, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." What type of person gives up on a horse that doesn't drink instead of figuring out what is wrong with the horse or understanding animal behavior to train the horse to drink and pull plows and stuff?
Ones who aren't good at what they're doing. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with school.
I think some of the aversion to the "doesn't exist" claim is it seems to leave a hole. There are two ways of saying something doesn't exist / isn't real. You can say the cause isn't there or the effect isn't there. Take malaria. As you might know, the name means "bad air". People used to think bad air from swamps and jungles made you sick. If I didn't believe this I could say "swamp air can't make you sick, malaria doesn't exist". Which, sure, the disease doesn't come from the gas. But people do seem to get sick in a similar way at swamps that they don't get sick in dry areas. Isn't that real?
Another reason people will react to you with hostility is you're pattern matching people who have been hostile to them. People with depression get told "it's all in your head". Sure, that's where the brain is. "No, it's just the way you look at things". Sure, yeah, bad at looking at things. Still depressed. I don't think that "gently scolding" people has show up as effective treatment. But the point isn't to help. It's to dismiss and degrade.
You're also still only half way to looking at things holistically. You want to zoom out (based on what you've said about yourself and the horse example). But instead of looking at the system all together, you're pulling the blame from 100% on the student (something you got as a painful message) and putting it 100% on the teachers. Neither is representative of reality.
Is someone disabled if they can't see well enough to drive? What if they don't want to drive? What if they can drive with glasses? What if there aren't glasses good enough for them, is it that optometrists are disabled? What if they can't afford them? These are all really interesting social questions and there are no perfect answers. But if I get the sense that someone is trying to ignore the reality that some people can see fine and some people see poorly and suffer for it, and that any of this suffering is at all localized on the person who can't see, I'm going to think they're trying to pull one over on me.