It’s very selective. They know Bible stories from Sunday school and have been told a few passages.

It’s a really complicated anthology of books written across 1000ish years (earliest being fragmentary bits of poetry preserved in altered context, most of it being 400 BCE on). Tons of it is related to distant political struggles or cultural norms, stuff so hopelessly distant from us and written in hard to understand language (especially with this KJV only-ists.)

Then, you add 2000 years of history, pop culture, and interpretation. It’s a really difficult text and it’s difficult for anyone to understand without getting a lot of support and context. The context is often presented in a misleading way, pick your denomination and flavor of distortion

The absolute best strategy for most reading comprehension struggles is read aloud. Active discussion is good too.

Or I also like to tell my high schoolers to be contrarian with the text. To argue against it, to try to prove it wrong, even to the point of bad faith. “You’re saying the book sucks - I want receipts. Tell me about it.” I don’t really have training in teaching english but I will happily pressure high schoolers into reading the books in English class.

Random question -what’s your favorite book? I’m really vibing with your interpretation here.

Not just historian, but a specific type of political historian. “Historian” is a broad umbrella - Snyder is the only one I’ve read, but he’s very much focused specifically on authoritarianism, fascism and genocide. His Bloodlands is kinda the book on mass killings by Nazis and the USSR.

With regard to social issues, they certainly appear to be stuck there.

The point being it’s obnoxious that discussions of any female politician at some point have to bring up their attractiveness. It’s completely irrelevant to the work they do. I can’t think of male politicians getting the same treatment.

Woman: exists

Gooner: is for me?

For some reason you reminded me of this.

because it was mandatory to do some

Usually understood to be a violation of ethics if they didn’t provide you the opportunity for an alternative assignment btw.

Thanks for the explanation. It’s very interesting to learn about how others perceive the world.

What does understanding mean for you in this sense?

I don’t mean to come across as ignorant or disrespectful - just curious. A big part of my understanding of that passage is the process of visualization. When I read that passage, I feel it. It’s wet, it’s filthy, everyone is upset and I imagine faces scowling. That’s what “understanding” means to me as a process.

It’s probably some ASD-ish adjacent, but it just breaks my brain every time. It seems like there’s a large proportion of people who don’t seem to actually care whether they have an accurate understanding of the world or not? The amount of times online I’ve been able to show someone evidence that they demanded, and then they double down. At best they’ll go silent, but then you’ll see them making the exact same claim later.

In general right now it seems like there are a lot willing to call evil good, and good evil. Everything is backwards. The Moral Majority voted in a pedophile rapist.

I got a BS in a STEM field and a BA in the humanities. I think I was substantially benefited by both.

Even when I teach STEM - being able to draw on knowledge of Greek history and philosophy makes my lessons on the Pythagorean theorem more effective. When I talk about chemical equilibrium, I talk about the impact of climate changes on communities. When I talk about Newton’s laws, I talk about Newton context in scientific publishing of the time and some of his weird ideas about alchemy.

I make lots of angry phone calls, because I was tortured in a troubled teen facility which is still open.

My family has thoroughly rejected me, because I can be angry and reactive. It is hard not to be angry and reactive, because the torture changed the way that my body reacts to stress, and part of why I am so goddamned angry is that no one intervened.

There are sights, smells, sounds, thoughts, that put me on edge. I am normally an articulate person I think - normally calm. There’s a lot that I can handle. I can deal with a lot of difficult and sensitive issues.

But it’s those triggers. Part of it is that I choose to fight, that I call state agencies, that I call law makers, when I could just try to let the trauma “heal.” But there will still always be triggers I couldn’t avoid, even if I gave up fighting.

“Trauma brain” is difficult for people to understand. It is difficult to advocate and take care of myself when encountering a specific thing makes it impossible for me to sleep for weeks. It is my responsibility to try to treat my trauma - but at the same time, it makes it much harder to get the resources to access that kind of treatment. The biggest triggers are also directly related to mental healthcare, which makes it extremely difficult to make progress with providers. Something that “looks like” the kind of office I was sitting in as a teenager is not a place I will ever feel comfortable.

My dad basically told me I should take meds and read Viktor Frankl, and then cut me off from my family. The problem of being traumatized is that it makes you too hard to support, which means that you end up trapped in a worse and worse situation. You lose all support, and get further traumatized.

I was desperate enough to go inpatient after the election, and was physically assaulted. I don’t know where I am supposed to make my trauma better. Where I get help such that driving down a certain street doesn’t instantly wrench my body into flight or fight mode.

Violet Gibson tried to put Mussolini down like the dog he was, and was diagnosed as insane/spent the rest of her life in a mental institution, ignored by family.

Flex Loans offer borrowers up to $4,000 at 279.5% interest, trapping thousands of people in debt that can land them in court.

Payday loans in the states are horrifying. It got so bad that the US government stepped in to limit the interest rates they could charge military members.

Certain tribes are exploiting regulatory loopholes and charging 600%.

Kellyanne Conway: “I have two friends, who both — well, one is Ann Coulter. She started dating her security guard probably ten years ago because she couldn’t see anybody else.”

She’s a sad loser.

Oklahoma prefers DUI hires.

Hey - don’t stand so close to me.

Nabokov is fun, because he had an opinion on basically every author ever. If you feel frustrated about something you read in an English class, you can probably find an essay by Nabokov reading that author to filth.

“Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre- Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human English words expressing several, although by no means all, aspects of poshlost are, for instance,” cheap," “sham,” “smutty,” “highfalutin,”“in bad taste.” dignity - all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of “sinning their way to Jesus" or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, "spilling Jesus all over the place.”

Like c’mon man - if you don’t feel something reading the Grand Inquisitor passage in Karamazov - are you human?

How’d that work out last time?

How hard would it be to piss on Reagan’s grave?

You say in another comment that this is indicative of a failed American education experiment, and that there’s a generation of illiteracy.

Yes, I’m alluding to a larger context outside of that study. In addition to the obvious harms of COVID/virtual school, many US schools switched to a model of teaching reading that omitted phonics entirely. This simply does not work for the vast majority of students, and this had already been demonstrated in the 1970’s.

The authors refer to that larger context here -

My remarks on generalizing the study to Kansas undergrads was to point out that is an entirely acceptable sample size. In statistics, when you think about sample size, you have to think about the population you are studying. This study was specifically studying the literacy of Kansas English undergrads, which I imagine is a small enough population that you can generalize that study to. This would indicate that many future English teachers in Kansas are struggling readers.

We can put that as a data point next to several other studies about the US’s current literacy crisis.

As far as why they chose Bleak House: