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My Students Can't Read
- computerliker 4mo agohttps://archive.ph/WY1yk https://archive.ph/WY1yk
- arikrahman 4mo agoSays unable to connect
- A_D_E_P_T 4mo ago[flagged]
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo agoIs that irony? Or did the author just use a tool to help? It would be ironic if the author was unable to write about how the students can’t read.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoAI detectors are all garbage, with very high false positive rates.
- observationist 4mo agoThey use, unwittingly, proxies for "AI" stylometry, with no specific or explicable features they can point to and say "Look! That is evidence that the text is written by AI", as if there were such features in the first place. The best they can do is validate the very lazy one-shot patterns that humans should be able to highlight in the first place. Anything beyond that - even telling your AI to go use a "humanizer" skill in your prompt - creates a text distribution that is functionally indistinguishable from human generated writing. Throw in the fact that people who use AI will be influenced by the writing, often in positive, beneficial ways, and the software becomes a vicious, punitive tool. It's worse than waving a dowsing rod or pendulum, because the software comes with the implication of legitimacy and fairness.
- cindyllm 4mo ago[dead]
- jemmyw 4mo agoI ran pre AI articles through pangram last week and it gave similar kind of numbers so I think it's pretty bad at distinguishing.
- nostrademons 4mo agoSomeone ran the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution through an AI detector and apparently our country was founded by an AI.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoTo the degree that AIs are good at re-creating the style of the training data, you would expect there to be non-AI-generated text that would "look like" AI output.
- groby_b 4mo agoPangram is basically a made-up number. I've tried it on large docs I've written well before the AI times, and that are nowhere available on the Internet (so it can't be a corpus issue) - and it is happily classifying me as 60%-80% AI.
- observationist 4mo agoIf teachers could teach, students might be able to read. If students could read, maybe more of them would learn how to write. If more of them learned to write, maybe it'd be inspirational to their peers and future generations. It's too bad the teachers can't teach.
- onemoresoop 4mo agoIts unfair to dump all the blame on teachers. Yes, some teachers could make a difference (and some do), inspire students but that’s also a match made in haven, students need be receptive to learning something that is arduous at first. Id blame most of it on how technology is weaponized/ financialized to steal attention and fill it with junk.
- bdangubic 4mo agopangram is AI garbage spewing AI garbage
- chupchap 4mo agoAi was trained on news and journal articles and this is the reason we see so many em-dashes as well. The side effect is that good writing is now classified as AI generated, which makes it bad writing. What a messed up world we live in
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- TurdF3rguson 4mo agoI can't read either. I think the paywall might have to do with it.
- jjulius 4mo agoThis was shared about a half-hour prior to your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377930
- TurdF3rguson 4mo agoDifferent issue
- Avicebron 4mo agoHaven't we trained everyone to context switch between screens at all times? I suspect that has something to do with it.
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo agoI know formerly smart people, the same people are phone addicts. They’re not kids. It definitely has something to do with it. I’m not convinced the best way to discuss it is long form article. Nor do I know how to fix it, no majority group is going to give up their phones.
- jm4 4mo agoIt's an attention issue. We have these phones with constant dopamine hits. We were getting it a little bit on the web before the rise of smartphones, but it's just out of control now. We have 100 apps constantly vying for our attention and giving us endless things to scroll through. The only thing that fixes it is to put the phone down. Do something else. Play video games. Read books. Go outside. Anything to stay away from the phone (but not TV). These phones are as bad as drugs. I've been pushing to read a lot more books this year and it helps a lot.
- mc3301 4mo agoAgreed with all of the above, except the "100s of apps." Turning notifications off of most apps solves a bunch of little problems. The big problems need to be forcibly named at every chance. In no particular order, youtube, tiktok, insta, facebook (or meta?), are all guilty of making the world a worse place. Reddit and twitter's endless scroll is bad, too, but it seems their content got so bad the addiction is less strong there, like poop-flavored cigarettes.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- kevin_thibedeau 4mo agoI'm refreshing a language on Duolingo and I'm careful not to blast through the exercises without actively processing them. You can treat it as mindless puzzle solving without internalizing anything. I suspect many reading averse digital natives do something similar when they can't consume video or audio.
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago>And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. Well… yes. The loans are secured, so it is within the college’s interest to make 13th grade. >showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests Claim without data that I see, but ok… going on… >Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. Well, this makes sense. They didn’t write anything. This isn’t ground breaking, they let the students cheat. >districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding I remember this first hand. >The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. I’m certain I remember my parents complaining about the same with my generation… There are probably excellent points around these topics. But… this article doesn’t make the point as well as that kid getting his classmates failing to read a simple sentence on video.
- pclowes 4mo agoI think 13th grade is a stretch. It seems more like they are charging mid six figures to teach grades 6 through 10.
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo agoThat’s fair. When I was in school we joked about it being 13th grade, that was seeing all the kids as freshmen who CLEARLY didn’t belong there, but their guidance counselors told them for 12 years about how they need to go to college.
- mr-pink 4mo agowhat was the article?
- ngriffiths 4mo ago> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes. I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument Really? I have no legal training. I can follow a SCOTUS opinion and most local legislation.
- thefz 4mo agoA literate person is able to read an article in a newspaper and understand it has a bias or a certain angle, though. Or see an headline in social media and understand it's fake, or bullshit.
- jimbokun 4mo ago> nobody can read a bill Especially not our politicians.
- jhbadger 4mo agoExactly. Legal language is basically a programming language for lawyers. It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it any more than to expect a non-coder to understand source code. Even most politicians keep staff to do the actual reading of bills.
- stult 4mo agoThat's not true at all. Modern legal education has focused on plain English drafting and avoidance of arcane jargon precisely to make legal documents comprehensible to non-specialists. There are almost no situations where legal drafting requires use of jargon. Jargon is pretty much only necessary where the domain requires use of jargon. Contracts are meant to be followed by the parties, and if the parties can't understand the terms of the contract because of obscure drafting, they can't abide by the terms. Also legal language is in no way a programming language. And I would know, I'm a lawyer and a software engineer. It would actually be a dramatic improvement if lawyers were more consistent in their use of terms of art, but in practice there are very few terms of art that aren't either in general use or easily understood with a brief definition, and none are defined with anything like the precision or consistency of a programming language.
- altairprime 4mo agoI can confirm this from community colleges in both California and Oregon over the past two years; every non-science, non-math general education class (n=10+) has at least one student who cannot read or write at more than a couple sentences per minute. They’re perfectly able to keep up verbally but their education passed them through standardized tests without requiring reading and writing at a reasonable velocity.
- pclowes 4mo agoWe really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate. Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness. 90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest to actually go deep or learn anything. Socratic style seminars are silent. Deep critique or wrestling with a topic only if pandering or grade related. Humanities watered down to irrelevance compared to STEM which has to keep some rigor or the bridges collapse and lights dont turn on. Academia is inflated by, wasted on, and ruined by them. They would be much better served by a high school diploma that wasn’t meaningless
- cjbgkagh 4mo agoAnd what if the 35% failure rate had a disparate impact, would you still fail them?
- D-Machine 4mo agoRequiring years of schooling that is essentially worthless / provides credentials with no information also has disparate impacts, possibly worse than just properly failing people and letting them sort themselves / be sorted into positions that are actually suitable for them and allow real growth. Schooling is a huge percentage of a modern person's life now.
- cjbgkagh 4mo agoAre you willing to risk a lawsuit to stand on your principles? Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist?
- D-Machine 4mo ago> Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist? Can those in favor of grade inflation and meaningless credentials prove their decisions also don't have disparate impact and aren't racist? Based on some recent US Supreme Court decisions re: affirmative action, it would seem unlikely this case would be any different. The hard questions about long-term harms to students and society are simply not being asked seriously enough.
- phyzix5761 4mo agoMaybe they can't read because the article is behind a pay wall.
- youarenotyu 4mo agohahahaha exactly
- altairprime 4mo agoSee also: Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM (5 days ago, 866 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309233 If you can read cursive, the Newberry has a job for you (62 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607255 Kids rarely read books anymore, even in English class (5 months ago, 346 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259233 US high school students’ scores fail in reading and math (8 months ago, 1089 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182657 Ask HN: How to gain the ability to read with focus and learn? (11 months ago, 39 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346359 Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023) (41 days ago, 292 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867755 It sure looks like phones are making students dumber (2.5 years ago, 151 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695500 UK surgery students ‘losing dexterity to stitch patients’ (7.5 years ago, 172 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18339299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18339299 Several Baltimore schools have no students proficient in state tests (9 years ago, 101 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385703 Many McGill education students cannot calculate an average (11 years ago, 274 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9080665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9080665
- altairprime 4mo agoU.S. students from educated families lag in international tests (12 years ago, 59 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744918 Note: I could not find posts about US reading / writing educational failures prior to this in the archives, though they may still exist; but there are still many about math education and bad business writing. However, I believe this post was the bellwether warning of what would follow: A writing career becomes harder to scale (16 years ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109011
- andai 4mo agoYour readers also cannot read, due to paywall. https://archive.ph/XvPXE https://archive.ph/XvPXE
- jjulius 4mo agoThe irony of not reading the comments... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377930
- throw_m239339 4mo agoIt's not so much that they can't read, it's just that they have a short attention spam, which is an even bigger issue. And yes, I blame Tiktok and co. Your students couldn't sit through Ben-Hur.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- baggy_trough 4mo agoDo we have the courage to do what's necessary to fix education in the United States? That is: - abolish teachers unions - fail / keep back students who don't meet standards, in a completely objective fashion with no regard for racial / ethnic / gender sensitivities
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoWhy does every conversation in the USA always involve race?
- bmn__ 4mo agoBecause the country is full of people who always have race on their mind?
- manoDev 4mo agoMaybe read TFA. It has supporting evidence for the actual causes, not imaginary ones.
- baggy_trough 4mo agoThe fundamental cause is lack of accountability which my points address. Also, you are rude.
- analog31 4mo agoPerhaps we can take some guidance from college teaching, which has effectively abolished unions. Well over half of college level teaching is done by adjuncts, who are not on the tenure track and have no training or licensing requirements.
- sohrob 4mo agoSo eliminate their bargaining power and job and wage protections because parents aren't doing their part to ensure their kids are learning? Doesn't seem fair to me.
- 4mo ago
- andai 4mo ago>I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I recorded some tutorial videos for some kids a while back, to help them prepare for an exam. The feedback I got was very positive, but I suspected they weren't learning as much as they thought. So I made a practice exam for them, and they failed it. This was a wake-up call for them. They revisited the material, and got a good score on repeating the practice exam, and a good score on the actual exam. So, there needs to be a forcing function. The brain will generally be as lazy as it can get away with, in any situation. So if you want to develop some skill or faculty, you need to create a situation which demands its use. (Ditto for if you want to retain a skill or faculty!)
- sethammons 4mo ago> there needs to be a forcing function. The brain will generally be as lazy as it can get away with, in any situation. So if you want to develop some skill or faculty, you need to create a situation which demands its use Yes! The brain is optimized to be lazy. A forcing function to actually use/apply knowledge is required.
- Anthony-G 4mo agoI noticed that in myself. I’d read a chapter and be convinced that I’d absorbed the information. It wasn’t until I learned networking from a second-hand college text-book that I realised that wasn’t really the case. Each chapter concluded with questions to verify that the reader had understood the concepts. When I tested myself, I found that I could only answer around half of the questions and had to go back and re-read sections in order to answer the others. I had completely over-estimated how much I had learned while reading. On Stack Exchange sites, I used to see questions and think “Oh! I know the answer. It’ll only take a few minutes to answer”. Invariably, I discovered that I didn’t have all the knowledge to provide a complete answer. While typing, I’d realise that there were gaps in my knowledge (e.g., is what I’m writing true for BSDs as well as Linux OSs?) or there’d be edge cases that I hadn’t previously considered (differences between program versions, how software behaves in different locales, etc.). A good, comprehensive answer ended up taking around half an hour but I found the effort was worth it: writing Stack Overflow answers was a great way to learn. Speaking of “forcing functions”, I’m currently learning guitar and my goal for this year is to learn a song in full and record myself to objectively see how well I’m actually playing.
- manoDev 4mo ago"Idiocracy (2006)" wasn't supposed to be a documentary!
- nsainsbury 4mo agoYep. Smartphones and social media were the jab, jab, and now AI is the knockout punch. We're raising a generation of people who quite literally do not know how to think for themselves and completely lack the motivation (and attention span required) to even try.
- lordfrito 4mo agoI use the term "programmable people" for people like this, in that they believe what the screen tells them to believe and they do what the screen tells them to do. It bothers me that it won't be long before these programmable people represent the overwhelming majority of voters. Not sure what happens then but history tells me it won't be good.
- joegibbs 4mo agoThere was a study "They don’t read very well: A study of the reading comprehension skills of English majors at two midwestern universities" last year where they had university students try to read the opening of Bleak House by Dickens, they couldn't do it at all. Text: "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill." Respondent: "It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another that it is talking about encountering in the streets. And “wandering like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these, these characters have, have met in the street."
- jagged-chisel 4mo agoResponse looks cherry picked. I’d be curious to know the methodology here. I’ve seen intelligent students twisting in an attempt to satisfy the instructor that they (have been trained to) assume is trying to trick them with puzzles; the kind where “gotcha!” is the typical teaching method; where common sense is frowned upon.
- rahimnathwani 4mo agoIIRC the paper is behind a paywall. But this article has some good snippets from it: https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliewexler/p/struggles-with-bleak-house https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliewexler/p/struggles-with...
- jagged-chisel 4mo agoIn this specific case, I am left with questions: Why do these students need to read 19th century novels? And why do they need to understand the details of day-to-day life of over a century ago? These are mostly rhetorical because my point is that you will not get the same answers from instructors, teachers, professors, parents … If you want people, especially children, to read, it needs to be interesting to them. If you want them to learn by reading, they need to have had good experiences reading. “Here, read some Dickens and we’ll discuss it next week …” without any amount of preparation by the teacher to a) help students understand the times within which it was written, and b) prepare them for the meandering prose is indeed a recipe for disaster. Examples: “as here he is” - so he's already doing what he ought? Or is there an alternate reading of this phrase meaning "he's physically here, but the situation is not as it ought to be"? “… addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers…” - by the time we get here, is he saying the advocate is present, or that the advocate ought to be present but is not? The sentence ran on, against the education we’ve been so wearily handed over the years. If we are not permitted to craft such things, how can we be expected to ever understand them? The most productive way to invite a student to begin parsing this, in spite of their education, is to have someone - one who understands the passage, and can render the correct inflections and emphasis - read this to the class. Barring that, if students are expected to parse, understand, and discuss prose and topics so many generations removed from their own lives, Education® needs to get off its butt and educate.
- nelox 4mo agoHome schooling will boom as a result
- nhhvhy 4mo agohttps://archive.is/XvPXE https://archive.is/XvPXE
- jimmydddd 4mo agoI think it's just the culture. I'm old. I used to regularly read long books. Now I can't even get through a 20 minute video unless I'm walking or driving. I mean I could if I had to, but I wouldn't do it for fun.
- MarcelinoGMX3C 4mo ago[flagged]
- charlie90 4mo agoMy teachers can't use a computer.
- nazgulnarsil 4mo agoI can't read this article because it's pay walled
- mattas 4mo ago> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Multiple times in my career in tech, I've had people complain that a 2-page write-up is too long. These are well compensated people that went to top universities. I can't imagine what they would do if faced with a 20-page article.
- bdangubic 4mo agoI’ve said this myself myriad of times over a very long career as SWE. never because I can’t read 20 pages but because 20-page write-up is always 18 pages too many. be succinct and keep it simple. if you can’t explain on few pages another 50 won’t help you
- hagbard_c 4mo ago> I can't imagine what they would do if faced with a 20-page article. They'd feed it to a chatbot and glance over whatever summary it came back with and believe it represents the contents of the article.
- ZPrimed 4mo agoIrony: can't read TFA without bypassing a signin-wall.
- Anthony-G 4mo ago> … smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline. Does anyone know what’s the importance of sighing in this context? I notice one of my work colleagues sighs a lot when reading but I assume that’s due to the nature of the work he’s doing – or emails he reads. On a related note, I recently read an article¹ by an Irish fiction writer who teaches her craft to others. While her article focusses on the stages to achieving mastery, the teacher found that even students who want to be writers don’t want to read. I found that to be a bizarre concept and hard to believe; it’d be like wanting to be a musician without listening to music or a film-maker not watching Hitchcock, Welles, Bergman, Capra, Truffaut, Kubrick, Scorsese, Lee, Spielberg, etc. ¹ https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2026/05/04/some-students-believe-they-can-be-writers-without-reading-this-raises-many-questions/ https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2026/05/04/some...
- matthewfelgate 4mo agotl;dr
- GregDavidson 4mo agoI learned to read English the same way I learned to understand it spoken: exposure. As a young child a relative would put me in their lap and a book I liked in my lap and read to me. After awhile I was reading fluently without effort. Most schools teach reading as a conscious intellectual decoding task which leaves little brain power left to engage with the material - the same way most schools teach "foreign" languages. Engage the brain's language centers and language skills will be fluent.
- pavel_lishin 3mo ago> When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger This reminds me of a thing my spouse and I argue about sometimes. She'd get mad as a kid when she turned in homework, because she'd get points taken off for now showing her work. My view is that the teacher doesn't give a shit about the answers, the teacher doesn't need to know what the solution to an equation is, the teacher needs to know that the students are learning the correct techniques to solve a problem, and without showing work, there's no way to evaluate that.