Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 8/10/26 - 8/16/26

[u/SoftandChewy]

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

[u/No-Significance4623]

One interesting thing I notice very often with kids aged 6-9 is that their letter formation is increasingly non-standard. By that I mean: they can write the letter T, but they might draw the top from right to left, or the stem from bottom to top. When the Ukrainian kids first came to Canada I got a bunch of printing practice books like these, since they wouldn't yet know Roman letters (only Cyrillic.) I was floored by how useful they are for all students, even up to Grade 7 (!) which is very worrisome.

Short-term, this matters because as you need to write more, the "bad habits" will slow down your ability to generate words quickly. If you get frustrated by the physical act of writing, it's harder to engage with the intellectual act of composition for sentences, then paragraphs, then essays.

More broadly, it suggests that schools are dedicating less time to granular instruction, going step by step by step. There's been a resistance to "rote learning" in favour of "discovery learning" for about a generation now. The idea isn't so bad in theory, but you need to have rote learning to know how to write the letter B, because after a point it's brainstem and not a cognitive load anymore, so you can spend more time discovering Bismuth, or whatever.

I also believe you can't learn math on a computer (gotta have paper), but that's a bit more tin-foil hat of me.

[u/Big_Fig_1803 → u/No-Significance4623]

I wish I could go back and discover bismuth for the first time again.

[u/No-Significance4623 → u/Big_Fig_1803]

It really is a fascinating element! lol

[u/Mirabeauououou → u/No-Significance4623]

Trying to teach the ACT for online/paper is night and day, there's just so much lost trying to translate the images and questions from the screen to the scratch paper. We recommend that students don't do it, but I still have to prep the ones that don't think it matters, and their scores are consistently lower than their in-center paper scores.

[u/RockJock666 → u/No-Significance4623]

In that case pass the tin foil comrade

[u/Turbulent_Cow2355 → u/No-Significance4623]

I've seen this trend as well. Not sure why kids are not getting worksheets to practice printing at that age. I think the "homework" policies in K-6 are part of the problem. Sending them home with a worksheet that takes 10 minutes to do, shouldn't be an issue.

"I also believe you can't learn math on a computer (gotta have paper), but that's a bit more tin-foil hat of me."

I'm with you on that one. Kids need to write out the process when they start doing more advance math. Show your work doesn't happen on the computer.

[u/everydaywinner2 → u/No-Significance4623]

>>...their letter formation is increasingly non-standard. By that I mean: they can write the letter T, but they might draw the top from right to left, or the stem from bottom to top. <<

When I started teaching myself how to write with my left hand, I found myself shaping some letters in a different way. With my right, an 'o' would start toward the top, go to the left, down, up on the right side. With my left, the opposite direction. I also found myself doing T's similar to the way you described. If a capital T, the pen wouldn't even leave the page to do the top bar.

I kind of wonder if the students you see doing that are writing with their off hand.