Like, in a practical sense? Do you have any stories or examples from your life?
The way it has manifested most clearly in the situations I’ve encountered it is a basic difference in approach to writing and reading as concepts. They don’t see writing or reading as a way to communicate, they see it as a puzzle they have to solve by following rules, so that they can return to communicating once the puzzle is out of the way. Unless they’re in very casual/online settings, or very motivated to find specific information, they avoid the puzzle because it’s annoying.
It means they are easily propagandized to and won’t have the critical reading skills to realize it
I had a roommate who grew up in a poor farming community. He has dyslexia but the school had no special education funding to address that. As a result he grew up completely illiterate and stayed that way into his 30s. He passively absorbed libertarian ideas from the media he consumed, but lacked the ability to cross-check any of it. I remember him giving me a history lesson from a Call of Duty game.
I can talk humanities and social sciences at a graduate level and am comfortable with the physical side of trauma medicine, but STEM subjects are really difficult for me for more or less the same reason. Shitty public/Catholic schooling meant I effectively lost out on a meaningful primary and secondary science and mathematics education. Now I’m a scientific horticulturist because I thought horticulture was a fake science that I could sneak my way into because I’m decent with plants. It isn’t though. Outside of ecology, it’s the ultimate interdisciplinary physical science. I’ve had to learn mathematics through analytical trigonometry and calculus but even basic algebra barely makes sense to me. Chemistry and physics are totally lost on me. I spent those preteen/teenage years building an intuitive knowledge base for the subjects that interest me but I feel the effects of an underfunded public school with any kind of super technical field that I never had childhood exposure to. It fundamentally doesn’t click.
That clip of that Kik Streamer fascist Aiden Ross trying to whole-word-read “fascist” and then googling the meaning and then still being puzzled why someone would call Trump that.
Once, Andrew Tate asked him questions about World War II. I could maybe forgive someone for not knowing that de Gaulle was the leader of France, but the only leader of the major Allies/Axis Powers he knew was Hitler. When asked who the leader of Russia was, he said “I’m guessing Putin’s father or grandfather”.
Putin’s grandpa, Spiridon Ivanovich Putin, was Lenin’s and Stalin’s cook for some time, an we all know cooks really rule the world.
When asked who the leader of Russia was, he said “I’m guessing Putin’s father or grandfather”.
That sounds like a bit.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I have dyslexia and legitimately didn’t learn how to read until I was about 13 years old. I mean, I got by on memorizing clusters of familiar looking phrases. Vibes-based reading. Oh and lots of cheating and lying about homework.
Two decades later, I still struggle compared to my peers. But I have had the privilege and luck to learn strategies to make up the difference.
I’m also an elementary school teacher. There’s only so hours I can try to teach my students to read. One of the biggest determining factors for reading ability/comprehension is how much vocabulary children are exposed to at an early age (0-4 years old). Reading to young children is crucial for language development, reading ability, and a slue of related skills. I don’t know enough about linguistics to know this for sure, but I’m assuming most of my students have parents with restricted vocabulary. And probably just not talked to enough as babies. Something just has to have affected their kids cognition in pernicious ways. Them getting COVID 8 or 9 times in their lives probably hasn’t helped either.
So the other week with my fifth graders we’re doing intro geometry stuff. I said something like, “A cylinder is just like the rectangular prism. It’s just that its base is a circle.” And like okay, I’ve been trying for half an hour trying to distill the absolute cluster fuck this caused in my students brains.
“It’s similar to this coffee mug. See? It has a circular base and it’s a prism. I know you’re thinking a prism has to look like the rectangular prism. It might be helpful to think of the cylinder as a circular prism.” I said, exasperated.
“What are you even saying?” a child asks rhetorically.
I eventually have to say something like, “Listen, if you can’t understand this it’s a skill issue and kinda cringe.” There’s a million little things that are hard to put into words how utterly dysfunctional some of these kids brains are and will be later in life.
Oh and I have to speak to these children’s parents on the reg, which is its own sort of hell.
To be fair, at least personally, I learned the word ‘cylinder’ long before I learned ‘rectangular prism’. Maybe because the latter is usually called a cuboid or box, while there is no simpler word for a cylinder.
Tbh you also about lost me when you started taking about rectangular prisms, too, and I’m a 30-year-old former voracious reader. So. Maybe take it a lil easier on them, and come up with simpler verbiage when introducing new concepts?
I think there is a significant difference in two skill affinities at play here. Vocabulary and spatial visualization are both important to solidifying geometry skills but some people just tend to have a lot of difficulty projecting 3-dimensional shapes in their minds, whether or not the words to describe the concepts are in their lexicon.
I personally feel like my Nintendo 64 helped me form the wild geometry and visualisation skills that I have. There’s some studies that show a strong correlation. I can visualize a running petrol engine in my mind, create structures and understand the engineering/physics of it’s supports. I don’t do it for a living anymore, but I’m really good at building things without a blueprint. ADHD probably helps with this too.
Maybe show them how you can project a line segment perpendicular to its direction to make a rectangle, then show how you can project a square into a rectangular prism. A visual could help.
Can you use the Microsoft Office graph function? I think they can show bar graphs as a 3D cylinder/rectangular prism.
