trompete

I have had some thoughts on school book production, which I may as well post here:

So, here in Germany, there are large, private publishers of school books. These are basically monopolies. They create school books based on the curriculum standards set by the government. There is a "market" in the sense that the teachers at the various schools can choose among several books that are available and approved by the ministry (assuming they get budget approval). Those publishers (e.g. Bertelsmann) are, btw, also behind lobbying efforts to open up more parts of the education system to private interests.

These books get minor updates almost every year, which are insignificant for the most part (lots of changing things around so the page numbers are off). Old editions cannot be bought. This causes confusion among teachers and students. This is, I'm pretty sure, so that the schools will buy a new full set of books every couple of years. The publishers also completely discontinue the books every now and then, and instead publish a totally new books.

The way new books are made is that they hire a bunch of teachers, and tell them to write some chapter of the book, based on the government standards. They try to do this mostly on the cheap, so there's a lot of looking at existing books while barely avoiding plagiarism. The quality doesn't actually improve over time, and there is not really much feedback from the actual teachers using the books.

If, instead, the books were made in some sort of collaborative process, by interested teachers, researchers at universities, and so on, that would improve things a lot I reckon. A bit maybe like Wikipedia or Linux, and ideally with a blanket suspension copyright for educational purposes, so that they can include whatever material they like. Of course the teachers should be paid for this work as well.

I think the idea comes from the fact that fluent adults generally do not need to phonetically decipher words letter-by-letter, but rather recognize them instantly, probably by some combination of shape and context. So memory and context is how good, fast readers actually read usually, thus when you want to teach someone to become a good reader, you may conclude that you need to teach them that. The problem is, of course, that (a) people have not actually deliberately memorized all those words, but rather, these instant brain connections have automatically formed through years and years of reading, and (b) when this strategy fails for an unfamiliar word, a good reader will very much fall back on the letter-by-letter deciphering.

This idea is perhaps more attractive for English educators, than it would be in some other language, because the relationship between spelling and pronunciation is rather more complex (or "loose") than in many other languages.

But yeah, I do wonder if these people just totally forgot how they themselves learned to read, and also, it very much flies in the face of empirical evidence.

Reminds me of this:

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.

Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."

No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets."

Apparently, in the US, some teachers are not teaching the relationship between pronunciation and spelling, so some students come with these strategies (or rather, as flan pointed out, they actually teach the kids to do this).

Furry-Thanos (Thandross?) turned himself into an ape and everyone else into little critters, and the F-Zero racers joined the military as pilots to fight him.

They won't kidnap people in Germany to send to the front. It's too risky and too much effort for too little gain, and surely will lead to diplomatic incidents.

Always. Though I'm guessing that right now, they would go after any pro-Palestine activists, socialist or not, if they can find any legal justification whatsoever.

https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/465758.repression-gegen-pal%C3%A4stina-bewegung-gro%C3%9Frazzia-wegen-instagram-post.html

Police in Berlin raided six apartments and two meeting places. They are going after members of the anti-capitalist and feminist group "Zora" for doing "propaganda for the PFLP".

English-language article: https://www.exberliner.com/english-news-berlin/raid-on-cafe-karanfil-antifascist-womens-organisation-searched-by-police/

This is probably just technical jargon.

They're basically saying they do not support a ceasefire now, because it's not ... err ... sustainable. Yeah let's go with that.

Before that it was "No ceasefire until Hamas is destroyed! Unconditional support for Israel!" Not that different in practice, since it means no ceasefire now either way, but I guess they decided being seen giving tongue baths to Israel is no longer such an excellent look.

I'm pro Existenzrecht of

SBU assassinates a guy in Moscow. Ukrainian MP who defected.

Assassinating a guy for picking the winning side, after they already know they lost. These people must have a death wish.

Ok, I'm certainly no expert on this, so take this history/opinion, I'm going to present, with a grain of salt.

I will first note that this has become a culture war issue, and that the reason they want to make this into law, is to score points with the anti-woke crowd. So it's just reactionary populist bullshit.

In German, there are three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neutral (articles: der, die, das).

Most nouns have a roughly equal and seemingly random distribution of those genders. Der Fluss (river), die Insel (island), das Meer (ocean).

There is a glaring exception to this: When you turn a verb into a noun, designating "a person who does that", you append -er and the result is masculine: fahren (to drive) → der Fahrer (driver). BUT you can turn that into a feminine form by appending -in: die Fahrerin (female driver).

In common usage, the masculine form is used whenever the driver is male or the driver is of unspecified gender. Also the masculine plural is usually used when talking about a group of people of mixed genders. Feminists, decades ago, started pointing out that this seems rather to assume that the default is male (think for example about man/woman in English, where man is often used meaning "human"), and also that this might subconsciously reinforce gender stereotypes. Importantly, a lot of job titles fit into this category. An electrician is "der Elektriker", possibly reinforcing the idea that electrician is a job for men in people's minds.

So some feminists set out to make the language more inclusive to women. The first that gained traction, mostly in certain parts of academic, feminist, left and left-liberal publications, was the Binnen-I ("FahrerIn", with a capital I), a stand in for "Fahrer oder Fahrerin" (male or female driver). Because this was deemed non-inclusive to non-binary people, this got pushed out by the supposedly more inclusive "Fahrer*in". The * is supposed to designate other genders, like a sort of wildcard character. Nowadays, you more often see Fahrer:in, which looks better and is apparently better for screen readers on computers, which I've heard insert a little pause there. People who take this very seriously will also insert a little pause where the : is when speaking.

These proposals for more inclusive language are not the only ones in existence btw, just the ones that gained some limited mainstream traction. For example, I had a professor who used "die Programmiererin" (the programmer, feminine form) and the pronoun "sie" (she) for a generic programmer of unspecified gender.

Unfortunately, this ":in" or ":innen" suffix does not address all the issues. There are nouns that have more complex feminine forms than just appending -in. For example, physician is "Arzt", the feminine version is "Ärztin", so "Ärzt:in" or "Arzt:in" looks weird, so you got to go "Arzt oder Ärztin". Even more annoyingly, German doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun like "they", which results in a lot of "er/sie" (he/she). There are more problems like that which I can't recall off the top of my head right now. The result is that this so-called "gendered" writing sometimes creates a lot of added complexity. I'll note that even in most common situations the result is longer and slightly more complex. AFAIK linguists have also complained that applying this consistently is not totally possible.

My opinion: I think this is dead in the water. The extra complexity, inconsistency (think about grading an inconsistent ruleset) and institutional opposition means this has no chance of ever becoming mainstream. I know people vehemently in favor of these proposals for more inclusive language, who themselves do not use it consistently (or even most of the time) when speaking. If even the true believers struggle this much with it, there's no chance this will ever go mainstream. I will also add that the argument that "this is meant to be inclusive to nonbinary people, trust us" is basically the same argument used by the status-quo defenders, who say "this is meant to include women".

Edit: Oh, and this is also important: The extra complexity almost certainly causes issues for people with limited reading comprehension, like immigrants, since the result is more complex and harder to decipher. Language courses are also unlikely to teach any of this, since it's unofficial. There's certainly an argument to be made that doing something that hurts vulnerable groups isn't very compatible with the goal of inclusiveness.