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cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/1006130
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The original was posted on /r/aboringdystopia by /u/Last_Salad_5080 on 2023-10-03 14:21:04.
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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I absolutely believe this.
Growing up in Ohio, I feel like the 100ish people I graduated with kind of plateaued around 4th/5th grade as far as "things you aren't forced to be good at" go.
I tried every year to explain to my English teachers that it causes me physical pain because of anxiety if I have to follow along with group reading. I'm finished with the book by the time the rest of the class finished chapter 5. I have read the same paragraph over 20 times in the time it took for one student to read one sentence. It was a long one, with a couple 3-5 syllable words, but that is just.... Sad.
And nobody had any desire to improve. Boasting about how few books you've read wasn't common, but you heard it a few times a year.
It's easy to feel superior to someone when you don't understand all their "fancy f** talk" and just assume they're the idiot. Pfft. This dumb fuck thinks "pandering" is a word. A pan is something you cook on, dumbass.
Tbf reading sentences aloud for a group is generally much trickier than reading them (silently/subvocalized) for just yourself. You have to guess the tone, word choice, etc at the very start, and you can end up being wrong halfway through. I stumble over my words when speaking already so having to read from something just compounds that problem.
Tldr mad nerd rants about school shit from almost 20 years ago.
Nah, I get that. I read long things to my wife since she has dislexia, it IS harder to do it out loud in a consistent manner. And ANYONE will make mistakes, I'm definitely an above average reader and I make mistakes all the time when reading aloud. Just how it is.
But this was like.... advanced slowness. And people would rather not even try to pronounce a word than be wrong about it, so they would just stop reading and wait for the teacher to figure out they needed help, which made the 10 second sentence into a 45 second sentence.
I'm not a normal case for reading though, there was a program/competition we had at my school that started with "Accelerated Reading" back in primary school, read a book, take a small quiz about it's content, get points, end of year prizes, all that.
In highschool they didn't have that, but had a thing where you could journal about what you read that day, and turn in the journal. If you could read 10 books by the end of the year, you won a place at a pizza party instead of normal lunch. They had levels of prizes, and the top one was 200 books from freshman year to senior year, and you would get a mini fridge and "current gaming system" which could have been a ps3 or 360.
They pulled me and my parents into the office my sophomore year when it became clear I would hit the prize limit before I finished the next year, and convinced my parents the school couldn't afford it, and they accepted a gift card for Walmart for $50. The next year the school dropped 2.6 million to build new stands for the football field. For a team that has not won more than 3 games per year since 2006.
I feel very strongly about my school, both students and admin, and how it treats readers. Apologies if it felt like I had any hostility toward you, I assure you it is completely unintentional.
Rest assured, I did not interpret any hostility from you (towards me) on the matter. After I had sent my initial reply, I had thought about it myself and yeah there were a lot of times where people were painfully slow. I'd stumble over my words when reading, but I'd make an effort—the main thing that would trip me up is trying to have a good speaking voice and inflection to sound engaging, only to realize the tone for the sentence was completely off halfway through!
But then there were the people who struggled with nearly every word, and the pace would slow to a crawl. More often than not, I felt bad for those people and their situation than anything else, but it was also frustrating. It was especially bad when one was expected to read along strictly "with the class". I wasn't nearly as avid a reader in school as you, but I did get in mild trouble a few times for reading several chapters ahead of the class. I'm sorry Mrs. Thomas, you should have picked a less interesting book for class if you didn't want me reading it on my own time!
The situation with the school "not being able to afford" basic prizes to reward reading, then dropping fat stacks on a stadium is pretty fucked. What a harsh reflection of our society's values.