For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age
So I went back to school in my 30s and this is my first semester, which means I'm in classes with a bunch of 18-year-old kids. I also have some older classmates that went back to school later in life, like I did.
So far the main difference I see is that the teenagers can't read. Not "can't understand complex texts" or "have no nuance" or "miss more subtle themes or rhetorical tricks." I really mean "can't effectively decode the words on the page." Even the ones that are super into the schoolwork and eagerly participating in class!
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English class, students confused about the linear chronology of the text. As in, thinking that things happened in a different order or inverting cause and effect. This is a very straightforward text, but the narrator does reflect on things after the fact sometimes. I'm thinking some of the students are identifying some of the words that describe the events and not the words that make it clear this is someone remembering it.
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Student reading a text out loud and skipping words or "reading" different words that the ones on the text, that start with the same letter and kind of make sense but not really. Think substituting "horse" for "house" in the sentence "I love my parents' house." Yeah, it makes sense but nobody mentioned a horse anywhere else in the text and the rest of the paragraph is describing a house.
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Online class, assignment is a written questionnaire that we had to post on our little forum. Half the students straight up answered different questions than the ones asked. Not even complicated, trick questions, I'm talking extremely straightforward. Like "How big is Lake Michigan?" "Lake Michigan is blue" kind of thing. Maybe they are identifying a couple of words and then guessing at what the question may be?
I was second-guessing myself, thinking that maybe I'm being a Cranky Old Lady and complaining about The Youths, but I showed the online assignment to some friends and they agreed the questions were clear and that the students were not actually answering them in a way that went beyond normal "students half-assing their homework."
This article kind of confirmed it's an actual trend and not me being an asshole. And then reading about the absolute dogshit reading pedagogy that doesn't actually teach kids to decode words and sound them out? Fuck, I also would stop reading every two paragraphs and go do something else if most of my reading was guessing at what's on the page.
Is this why 'kids these days' don't give a shit that LLMs and other GPT-adjacent garbage are abject nonsense? They just... can't see it's gibberish?
I was thinking the "Lake Michigan is blue" answer is very LLM style missing-context. But what made me perk up is no longer sounding out words.
That's something I had been taught to do, but even while I was still in gradeschool there was talk of how "sounding out words is harming kids because it makes them read everything with their internal voice and therefore makes them slower readers!" But regardless of if it's true for 1 or all children, the effects of not teaching it are apparently way more harmful.
I can empathize with them too, as despite being "ahead of my grade" in reading comprehension I mess up parsing words sometimes, and have all my life. A less critical example: taking until book 3 of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to realize it's Ford Prefect and not Ford Perfect. I can't imagine how much it must suck to read if it happens often and not just rarely.
Edit: Another thing the article mentions is standardized tests, and hoo boy, fuck the New York State Regents Exams
Edit 2: Maybe reading "ahead of my grade" wasn't as impressive as they made it out to be: https://cohost.org/shel/post/4468877-something-interestin

