It’s sorta like how many states had abortion laws on the books ready to return to enforcement the second Dobbs happened.

It’s not as if a sitting Supreme Court Justice has speculated on getting rid of Lawrence v Texas - oh wait:

[W]e should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Clarence Thomas. Shithead would give up Loving v Virginia as long as he keeps getting to be a sex pest and enjoy fun yacht trips.

No see - it’s all about who’s doing the thing. Words are all made up anyway, there are just good guys and bad guys.

Remember how “precedent” stopped them from allowing Obama to appoint a new Supreme Court judge as a lame duck, but the same logic didn’t apply to Trump?

The absolute best strategy for most reading comprehension struggles is read aloud. Active discussion is good too.

Or I also like to tell my high schoolers to be contrarian with the text. To argue against it, to try to prove it wrong, even to the point of bad faith. “You’re saying the book sucks - I want receipts. Tell me about it.” I don’t really have training in teaching english but I will happily pressure high schoolers into reading the books in English class.

Random question -what’s your favorite book? I’m really vibing with your interpretation here.

The point being it’s obnoxious that discussions of any female politician at some point have to bring up their attractiveness. It’s completely irrelevant to the work they do. I can’t think of male politicians getting the same treatment.

Woman: exists

Gooner: is for me?

because it was mandatory to do some

Usually understood to be a violation of ethics if they didn’t provide you the opportunity for an alternative assignment btw.

Thanks for the explanation. It’s very interesting to learn about how others perceive the world.

What does understanding mean for you in this sense?

I don’t mean to come across as ignorant or disrespectful - just curious. A big part of my understanding of that passage is the process of visualization. When I read that passage, I feel it. It’s wet, it’s filthy, everyone is upset and I imagine faces scowling. That’s what “understanding” means to me as a process.

Hey - don’t stand so close to me.

Nabokov is fun, because he had an opinion on basically every author ever. If you feel frustrated about something you read in an English class, you can probably find an essay by Nabokov reading that author to filth.

“Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre- Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human English words expressing several, although by no means all, aspects of poshlost are, for instance,” cheap," “sham,” “smutty,” “highfalutin,”“in bad taste.” dignity - all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of “sinning their way to Jesus" or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, "spilling Jesus all over the place.”

Like c’mon man - if you don’t feel something reading the Grand Inquisitor passage in Karamazov - are you human?

You say in another comment that this is indicative of a failed American education experiment, and that there’s a generation of illiteracy.

Yes, I’m alluding to a larger context outside of that study. In addition to the obvious harms of COVID/virtual school, many US schools switched to a model of teaching reading that omitted phonics entirely. This simply does not work for the vast majority of students, and this had already been demonstrated in the 1970’s.

The authors refer to that larger context here -

My remarks on generalizing the study to Kansas undergrads was to point out that is an entirely acceptable sample size. In statistics, when you think about sample size, you have to think about the population you are studying. This study was specifically studying the literacy of Kansas English undergrads, which I imagine is a small enough population that you can generalize that study to. This would indicate that many future English teachers in Kansas are struggling readers.

We can put that as a data point next to several other studies about the US’s current literacy crisis.

As far as why they chose Bleak House:

N of 85 is entirely reasonable for that kind of study. You could safely generalize that to the population of Kansas English undergrads - run that through G Power and tell me otherwise.

The streets are incredibly muddy, as if the waters of the Biblical Flood of Noah had just receded. So muddy, one would not be surprised to find a giant amphibian frolicking in it up on Holborn Hill.

I really love your breakdown here. You should move to teach English in Kansas, they need you.

Nabokov seemed to think that the fog was important. I guess it’s a novel about a legal case, and maybe the metaphor is the “fog” of legal confusion.

There’s a discussion of the history context too:

These were college students who were seeking English majors. People who are going to go on to teach Dickens - and hopefully have read Great Expectations or Tale of Two Cities at some point in high school.

Sorta like how “awesome” and “terrible” in their current usage are very weak words.

A youth pastor and Cotton Mather could both say “God is awesome” and mean very different things.

Yeah - it’s what’s linked at the end of the OP

It is fascinating and scary. The “whole literacy” experiment the US did - where we ignored decades of research on how to teach children to read while filling the pockets of educational consultants - seems to have created a generation of near illiterate adults.

That last link is a study, where researchers provided English undergrads with that passage, and asked them to think aloud while reading it. They had access to dictionaries and could look up words.

Here are the results:

When Savita Halappanavar died, it woke up Ireland.

But Amber Therman isn’t enough for the US.

Porsha Ngumezi isn’t enough.

If I cared about life, if I cared about pregnant women and their health, I’d be looking at why black women in the US are 3.5x more likely to die in childbirth.

I drive past a Planned Parenthood when I go to work sometimes. We’ve already banned abortion here, but those fuckers will be out with their gore posters. There are children that are hungry in our city, there are children being abused and neglected because Child Protective Services is no longer functioning here after being sacrificed at the altar of Parental Rights - but these “Christians” aren’t protesting that. They’re protesting abortion at a place that doesn’t provide abortions anymore.

”The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

Methodist Pastor David Barnhart