All posts by agoladka

What does “said” mean?

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A discussion about a fact-check of a Thinkprogress piece for the headline “Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no one noticed”

A Vox take

A Slate take

When I first read the Slate piece I was of course thinking “right on, tell those liberal jurnos that they are biased and just need to see the facts”. But in the process of reading the Vox piece, I remembered reading the Thinkprogress piece days ago and very quickly understanding the point of the author and the headline – which leads to two unrelated ideas/questions:

  • Was the use of “said” correct? Would it have been any better if it was “Brett Kavanaugh essentially said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no one noticed”? I think that would have been clearer but less concise, which pushes me to think that the original wasn’t so bad.
  • There is at the core of the complaint about the headline and Vox’s complaint about the fact checking the issue of – people just need to read more than the headline. The fact that anyone would think they learned something about reality from a headline, especially on a political issue, is infuriating, and highlights an issue with fact-checking, Facebooks efforts, and worries about Facebooks efforts – at some point you can’t protect people from their own thoughtlessness without thinking for them, which is necessarily paternalistic and fraught with peril.

The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids Today’s young children are working more, but they’re learning less.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/the-new-preschool-is-crushing-kids/419139/

Summary: Many preschools have become about preparing children to read – involving lots of desk work, memorizing vocab words. It hasn’t worked, if anything kids are less prepared/burned out on school even earlier.

Funny:

Sometimes, to be fair, what children take away from a conversation is wrong. They might conclude, as my young son did, that pigs produce ham, just as chickens produce eggs and cows produce milk. But these understandings are worked over, refined, and adapted—as when a brutal older sibling explains a ham sandwich’s grisly origins.

Something for me to be better at:

Consider the difference between a teacher’s use of a closed statement versus an open-ended question. Imagine that a teacher approaches a child drawing a picture and exclaims, “Oh, what a pretty house!” If the child is not actually drawing a house, she might feel exposed, and even if she is drawing a house, the teacher’s remark shuts down further discussion: She has labeled the thing and said she likes it. What more is there to add? A much more helpful approach would be to say, “Tell me about your drawing,” Consider the difference between a teacher’s use of a closed statement versus an open-ended question. Imagine that a teacher approaches a child drawing a picture and exclaims, “Oh, what a pretty house!” If the child is not actually drawing a house, she might feel exposed, and even if she is drawing a house, the teacher’s remark shuts down further discussion: She has labeled the thing and said she likes it. What more is there to add? A much more helpful approach would be to say, “Tell me about your drawing,” inviting the child to be reflective. It’s never possible to anticipate everything a small person needs to learn, so open-ended inquiry can reveal what is known and unknown. Such a small pedagogic difference can be an important catalyst for a basic, but unbounded, cognitive habit—the act of thinking out loud.