this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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I have dyslexia and legitimately didn’t learn how to read until I was about 13 years old. I mean, I got by on memorizing clusters of familiar looking phrases. Vibes-based reading. Oh and lots of cheating and lying about homework.
Two decades later, I still struggle compared to my peers. But I have had the privilege and luck to learn strategies to make up the difference.
I’m also an elementary school teacher. There’s only so hours I can try to teach my students to read. One of the biggest determining factors for reading ability/comprehension is how much vocabulary children are exposed to at an early age (0-4 years old). Reading to young children is crucial for language development, reading ability, and a slue of related skills. I don’t know enough about linguistics to know this for sure, but I’m assuming most of my students have parents with restricted vocabulary. And probably just not talked to enough as babies. Something just has to have affected their kids cognition in pernicious ways. Them getting COVID 8 or 9 times in their lives probably hasn’t helped either.
So the other week with my fifth graders we’re doing intro geometry stuff. I said something like, “A cylinder is just like the rectangular prism. It’s just that its base is a circle.” And like okay, I’ve been trying for half an hour trying to distill the absolute cluster fuck this caused in my students brains.
“It’s similar to this coffee mug. See? It has a circular base and it’s a prism. I know you’re thinking a prism has to look like the rectangular prism. It might be helpful to think of the cylinder as a circular prism.” I said, exasperated.
“What are you even saying?” a child asks rhetorically.
I eventually have to say something like, “Listen, if you can’t understand this it’s a skill issue and kinda cringe.” There’s a million little things that are hard to put into words how utterly dysfunctional some of these kids brains are and will be later in life.
Oh and I have to speak to these children’s parents on the reg, which is its own sort of hell.
To be fair, at least personally, I learned the word 'cylinder' long before I learned 'rectangular prism'. Maybe because the latter is usually called a cuboid or box, while there is no simpler word for a cylinder.
They know those concepts from previous grades and learning. My example leaves out weeks of scaffolding.
cuboids are what they call people on flatlander 4chan
Tell them prisms are where bad guys go; if they ran a prism, do they want their prismers to be in a cylindrical cell or a rectangular one?
What’s it like talking with their parents?
Probably like talking to the trolls from the hobbit
Maybe show them how you can project a line segment perpendicular to its direction to make a rectangle, then show how you can project a square into a rectangular prism. A visual could help.
Can you use the Microsoft Office graph function? I think they can show bar graphs as a 3D cylinder/rectangular prism.
Great suggestions, thanks.
Why not use a 3d model viewer or something like tinkercad
I thought that would be ideal, but teachers are busy and I don't know if op has the time to learn it.
Tbh you also about lost me when you started taking about rectangular prisms, too, and I'm a 30-year-old former voracious reader. So. Maybe take it a lil easier on them, and come up with simpler verbiage when introducing new concepts?
I think there is a significant difference in two skill affinities at play here. Vocabulary and spatial visualization are both important to solidifying geometry skills but some people just tend to have a lot of difficulty projecting 3-dimensional shapes in their minds, whether or not the words to describe the concepts are in their lexicon.
I personally feel like my Nintendo 64 helped me form the wild geometry and visualisation skills that I have. There's some studies that show a strong correlation. I can visualize a running petrol engine in my mind, create structures and understand the engineering/physics of it's supports. I don't do it for a living anymore, but I'm really good at building things without a blueprint. ADHD probably helps with this too.
Avoid prism at all costs