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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I always wonder how hyperlexia fits into this debate. It's unclear exactly how rare it is, but basically people can be divided into 95%+ of the population that can only learn to read through phonics and 5% (or less? ~1%?) of the population who will never understand phonics but will likely manage to learn to read despite useless phonics lessons. And presumably some people who don't fit cleanly into either group.

Obviously if that summary is true, we should just not care that some of our students might not be getting anything out of phonics, since they'll almost certainly learn to read just fine anyway. But I wouldn't be surprised if hyperlexia were at least somewhat over-represented in teachers (just generally people who find reading easier/more enjoyable are probably more likely to go into reading heavy liberal arts fields?), and there's some amount of them typical-minding and simply not comprehending phonics because it's useless for them.

@ZorbaTHut Something weird is going on with the tilde/strikethrough parsing in this post. The preview always looks fine, but I can't figure out how to get it to show tildes without turning some of them into strikethroughs. According to the formatting help strikethrough is supposed to require a double tilde on either side, so a single tilde shouldn't count anyway. But I also tried escaping with a backslash and that didn't help.

Something weird is going on with the tilde/strikethrough parsing in this post.

The comment preview issues are kind of a big thing. It's something we plan to fix, we've just been fighting bigger fires up until now. In related news, the site should be faster now!

I've noticed better performance

"Better" doesn't mean "perfect", but it is improving.

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