Not IT support directly but I’ve had that same experience with plenty of boomer men in machine shops. They’re fucking proud that they suck at computer yet CNC has been around since the '80s in a big way.

Ran a shop for a while and still have the terminating document from when I fired one of those fuckers.

Fucking hell, so much this. They’re so goddamn proud of their ignorance. This is why I enforce a very strict “we’re mechanics, not chauffeurs” policy in my team. We’ve got no duty - either literal or moral - to make up for incompetence.

If I was as bad at reading and responding to emails as the folks I support…

And many of them never grow out of it and become President.

Unlike books for advanced readers, chapter books contain plentiful illustrations.

I thought the poster just didn’t know the words, but that’s an actual expression? Eugh.

What counts as “plentiful”? Would some highly illustrated versions of classical books become “chapter books”? Or does it need to be intended for 7-10 year olds.

Yes, some people enjoy poop. Why don’t you?

There are regular books that don’t have any chapters. Most of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Books are an example of this.

Anon could be a kid. On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog. Actually, a lot of content on 4chan looks like a giggling 8 year old posted it; especially the posts about poop.

With multiple chapters.

Some of them remind me of the old-timey radio shows from before TV. There was one I used to listen to when we had satellite radio that was about some private investigator for an insurance firm that would go around investigating fraud and, with the way they produced it, it felt like a full on murder mystery. Good stuff.

Also a lot of the more big name manga are shonen which can run the range of of “questionable” which makes it harder for westerners to get into. While seinen for example generally doesn’t have as much fan service overall but its often times not as much or it is recontextualized as bad, for example that horse in Bezerk.

There was a “program” that had been gaining popularity for years, put out by what are effectively scammers that denounced phonics for “sight reading” where kids were basically asked to guess what words were when next to pictures. This has largely been rejected and phonics reimplemented as it was a disaster

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Eng Learning TLDR: I was raised with both sight words and phonetics, and realize that my gen was fucked over.

I’ve heard about the reading wars, but this was the first time I actually thought about it with my education, and I realize why I probably wouldn’t read as well if I didn’t have parents who actively read with me as a child.

I’m a 2006 baby, so I guess my elementary years were at the perfect time for this little debate to occur. I definitely remember doing sight words and their flashcards, but I swear we still did phonetics (thank god). But like, how would anyone expect a kid to magically learn words by just looking at it 50 times and hearing a teacher say that word? I get that according to this article, a large portion of Eng words can’t be read properly first try, but still, I see the value in having a kid connect the sounds of “cat, bat, hat, that,” etc. Yes, some homonyms like “to, too, two” are gonna have to be “sight words” but that’s unavoidable.

I hated Eng class, not because of sucking at it, but how we never really got free reading time after elementary, and that we were doing lame ass journals and reports on books I didn’t want to read. And there were high levels books I did want to read, which is why I loved a banned books project that gave us the freedom to pick a book to do a creative, in any format you want, presentation of the knowledge from the book.

So if I, a person who actually wanted to read and can read well hated Eng class, then people who have learning disabilities, are simply bored, didn’t have parents who cared, etc were cooked. I guess that’s why my college classmates are so incompetent rn…

Also side note about Chinese (or well, Japanese in my case):

Yeah, CN and JP use hanzi/kanji respectively, which are logograms, but both CN/JP have “alphabets” that can be used to tell you the reading of a word. Chinese uses pinyin (which is actually what most of their keyboards are based on I think), and JP has hiragana/katakana. It’s still however more useful to learn the readings for these characters in the context of what you’re reading (esp. Japanese, they got their writing system from China but used their own bastardized readings for words, so 生 has like 10+ readings depending on the word it’s paired with).

But they still have a neat trick in which kanji have two parts, the phonetic component, and the meaning component. Kanji are made of radicals, which is like using lego blocks to make a single character (i.e. 米 + 青 = 精). The neat part is that you can potentially guess the reading of a word if you already know that phonetic components reading. 青 can be read as “sei”, and these kanji 精, 清, 圊, 睛, etc. all have “sei” or a similar version as a potential reading. Now sometimes the radicals don’t always make sense meaning wise when added together. 青 is “blue/youth” and 米 is “rice”, but 精 means “spirit/ghost”, “energy”, and uh… “semen” (mostly in the word 精液 “spirit fluid”). Why rice + youth = spirit or ghost, is beyond me, but these kanji usually have interesting stories behind them that could potentially explain their reasoning.

JP Kanji Learning TLDR: JP is fun to learn and kanji have reading patterns based on their components.

Measuring two different things. Your number: can read the words, mostly understand the words they read.

6th graders are generally literate. However, they’re not necessarily picking up on nuance, or subtleties. And they will often not take into account how the sentence they just read fits into the overall context of the piece, and they likely won’t question the narrator, assuming they’re reliable.

You can imagine how half of adults being that bad at these things has colored political discourse.

Schools in the US stopped teaching phonics.

Up until the mid-60s, the US did not have a standard high school educational system. Some cities had high schools, some capped out at elementary or “middle” school. A few people went to college, but the overwhelming majority didn’t.

Early journalistic standards of the era sought to produce written works that could be marketed enjoyed by the largest appreciable volume of people. So the standard for writing was set at the 6th grade level. Everyone from the NYT to Random House targeted articles and books to the 6th grade level, because this was where the maximal market share of reading consumers lived.

Consequently we’ve produced a super-abundance of written material at the 6th grade level. If you’re no longer in school and you’re doing recreational reading, you’re most likely consuming something designed to be read by middle-schoolers. And because this is the de facto standard, and has been for over half a century, we have this enormous backlog of material - classical novels, famous newspaper clips, screenplays, speeches, encyclopedias, commercials - all geared to this level.

People maintain their skills with practice and this is no less true of reading than any other occupation. So when you survey people - many of whom haven’t touched a scientific paper or “advanced” novel in decades - as to their reading level, they consistently reproduce the skills for which the bulk of English written works are produced.

The way they get that grade level reading comprehension is dubious. If you read the news, non-academic magazines, and most of the NYTs best seller list, you likely have been reading primarily around that level according to these tests.

There’s different levels of literacy as well. If we take things like math literacy and functional literacy into account (things like doing your taxes or filling out government forms), something like 60% of the adult population is functionally illiterate (below a third grade level) in at least one area.

Brains gravitate to the quickest easiest dopamine responses, and will ignore things that give rewards slower. ADHD brains are particularly bad for this.

I have the exact same issue. If I was able to give up scrolling social media, I’m sure I’d be back on the books again inside of a few weeks. We’ll just have to wait for the great collapse.