Everything is nuance in human language. This is especially true of the written word. Certain words and phrases contain more than their naked meanings. There is an emotional weight to our word choices. By the way someone uses "Truth" implies a lie. If Justice Samuel Alito had mouthed "Not accurate!" would the storm of protest have occurred? We can assume from his education and achievements that he meant to imply the assumptions inherent in "Not true!" We can distort what others do, making any statement, any error or misstatement into a "Lie." It all comes down to intention, but when the comprehension of the nuance is missing, is it really intention?
If this is not part of your experience on a regular basis, it slips the mind. I was once in a work environment where these considerations were always present. The weird thing is, I forgot about it once the job was done. This valuable knowledge fled my mind. Thanks in part to a contentious exchange here at Daily Kos, the memories of that time descended into my head in an instantaneous epiphany of remembrance.
I was a college instructor for ten years. Why I purged my conscious mind of this important period in my life, I have no idea - the demands of the present, the inapplicability of past experience, who knows. I forgot it. I worked mostly at community colleges and votech schools, and the first and most important thing on my mind, on the mind of every other teacher I worked with was very simple: do my students even understand me? Ten years of teaching and there were at least thirty students a year who had reading comprehension problems so severe, their academic careers were threatened by it. Most of these 300 students came with the same package of emotional responses, which on occasion made helping them an impossibility.
About three hundred students and their stories. Only four of the stories ended well.
A certain irreducible number of my students seemed to have stopped learning in the fourth grade. I didn't give up on them, though some of them could be real assholes. One semester, a basketball player had been sent down from university because of academic failings. The community college was his last chance. If he couldn't get his GPA up, he was going to lose his athletic scholarship at the university. He was one of my students. That semester I was teaching Western Civilization and geography. He couldn't keep up. I talked to him and realized he was functionally illiterate. His reading skills were stuck in the fifth grade. He wasn't stupid, his athletic ability had crippled him academically. He had been passed upwards starting in middle school because of his athletic skills without regard to his actual intellectual development. My schedule that semester gave me a free hour three times a week. He came in and I tutored him. This guy was bright, no one had bothered to help him before. Because everyone on the faculty considered him a lost cause, no one cut him a lick of slack. He came out with a B average at the end of the semester, all his own effort. I was teaching in the Kansas City area at the time. You know what his mother did, when he told her about the tiny bit of help I gave him? She got on a bus, rode all the way from Alabama to Kansas City, came out to the campus, and shook my hand. She told me that I had been the first person who had ever shown even the slightest concern about her son's education. All that effect from a meager effort of just a few hours a week.
He was exceptional for another reason, he didn't exhibit the emotional responses that seem to characterize difficulties in reading comprehension. This second story is more typical. A young woman in my class was confrontational every time she came to class, almost to the point of disruption. At times she was defensive, angry, passive aggressive, fixated on one idea for the entire class, and evasive when I asked her direct questions. But I kept up pushing at her. That's my job. It is a teacher's duty to hammer at his students. I told her this. She didn't drop the class, which is strange, most students who exhibit these behaviors usually drop and look for a more accommodating teacher. I recommended she take remedial classes. This set her off. She even complained to my boss. Where does this story go? She passed the geography course I was teaching with a C. About a semester later, I got a letter from her, delivered to my box at the college. I woke her up. She was enrolling at a four-year school in a nursing program and wanted to thank me for helping her see what she needed to do to improve her ability to learn.
Her behavior was a form of coping for her anxiety and anger at not being able to read well, to comprehend what she read, and to use what she read.
Another time, I canceled a class early and walked an adult student down to the counseling center, where between the guidance counselor and myself, we talked her into remedial reading classes. She graduated a year later.
I recall a couple other successful instances, but the failures far outnumbered the successes. I wonder about those I couldn't reach. Their coping behaviors and emotional issues were so dense, so powerful, it was unpleasant to deal with them. I tried, but college is a choice. They'd drop out or switch to an easier path. Did they ever overcome their difficulties with reading comprehension? My late dad overcame his without any instructors or remedial courses. He always had a small dictionary by his elbow or in his pocket. I remember watching him patiently read and re-read a newspaper article. So there is hope they were able to deal with their reading problems on their own.
The short answers on Daily Kos, the occasional inarticulate response, the inappropriate emotion, the boneheadedness of a few respondents, they take on a sinister overtone now that the these old memories are whirling around in the back of my head. Are they merely statements made in haste or in anger? Or are they something more fundamental? Kinda scares me, to be frank about it, to think that a significant proportion of the adult population walk through life in a haze of misunderstanding.
Here are a few links to remedial reading programs and comprehension tests.
LINKS
http://www.testyourenglish.net/...
http://www.testyourenglish.net/...
http://www.testprepreview.com/...
http://education.newarchaeology.com/...
http://www.accuplacer-test.com/...
FREE READING TESTS
http://www.testyourenglish.net/...
http://www.testyourenglish.net/...
http://www.testprepreview.com/...
http://education.newarchaeology.com/...
http://www.accuplacer-test.com/...