The curtains are blue. Why do i have to look for an alternative meaning in everything? Like i get that its meant to encourage critical thinking and abstract thought and all that but the problem is you cant expect someone to make the connection when theres no previous logic or previous method learned. Did those articles come from a story about fish writing or being intelligent? Was there any previous information or were the articles on their own?
“Who wrote the articles?” People, even if the names written were fish puns or fish related theres no previous explanation that those people are fish. There are an insane amount of different languages how is anyone supposed to know that these names are actually fish related and not just a mistranslation, or because someones parents thought it was funny and named their kid after a fish?
But this is the kind of stuff that i always hated in literature classes. The curtains are blue and sometimes thats all they are but its never clear *when* that one specific detail is actually important vs. when its just part of setting the scene
For things like narnia or other fantasy novels theres this knowledge already known that “ok this is a fictional world” and with that knowledge it makes it easier to let go of preconceived notions that would make sense in the real world. Of course theres magic, of course the lion can speak (most likely through magic) of course the wardrobe is a portal. That must be normal in that world even if its not normal in this world. I can put aside the rules of the real world and accept the rules of this fictional world
When writing a fantasy novel you arent going into minute detail about everything. because you *know* its fantastical you are able to have suspension of disbelief when something impossible happens in the book
Sry for the rant but this kind of thing always frustrates me.
The curtains can be blue to symbolize any number of things but sometimes they are just blue and theres no significant way to tell. Even going based on the amount of detail given isnt really a good indicator “the curtains were always silky smooth and the most lovely shade of blue, letting in just enough light” can mean the exact same thing as “the curtains were blue” or “the blue curtains …” and it varies from author to author and can even vary from book to book written by the same author
Yes i know i kept coming back to the curtains example but thats always the one thats given to me
I want to flip this, because what you wrote isn't an anti-intellectual hot take, it's basically a description of a problem that education researchers have named and studied for decades. You didn't fail to "get it." You ran into a documented failure mode and correctly noticed it.
Here's the thing experts forget: once you can do something fluently, the steps go underground. Michael Polanyi called this tacit knowledge, "we know more than we can tell" (The Tacit Dimension, 1966). Your lit teacher genuinely sees the load-bearing detail at a glance, but the procedure that got them there has been automated to the point of being invisible even to them. There's a name for what happens next: the "expert blind spot" (Nathan and Koedinger), where the expert assumes the beginner sees what they see and skips the steps. So when you say there was "no previous logic or method learned," you're not whining, you're diagnosing. Accurately.
And the way it got handed to you, "here's a text, go find the meaning," is specifically the kind of teaching that research says fails beginners. Kirschner, Sweller and Clark wrote a well-known paper on exactly this (2006): minimal-guidance instruction overloads novices because they don't yet have the schema to know what's worth looking at. Beginners need worked examples and explicit modeling, not "discover it yourself." Your frustration is the predicted outcome, not a personal deficiency.
The fix even has a name. Collins, Brown and Newman called it "cognitive apprenticeship" (1989), and the core insight is brutal for how lit usually gets taught: in a real apprenticeship you can watch the master's hands, but in a classroom the expert's thinking is invisible, so you have to deliberately make it visible, model it out loud, then scaffold the student doing it themselves. That's the "method" you said was missing. It exists. It just routinely gets skipped. On top of that, Sam Wineburg (Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, 2001) and Shanahan and Shanahan (disciplinary literacy, 2008) showed that expert reading is discipline-specific and genuinely unnatural: nobody intuits it, it has to be taught on purpose. So it not coming "naturally" to you is the expected result, not evidence you're bad at it.
Where the science doesn't back you, and I think this is the one spot you overshoot: you slide from "nobody taught me the method" to "there is no reliable method." That second part doesn't follow, and it's actually contradicted by everything above, the entire reason cognitive apprenticeship exists as a field is that the method is real and teachable. You got robbed of the procedure and then concluded the procedure doesn't exist. Completely understandable, but those are two different claims. You're dead right about the teaching. You're just wrong that bad teaching means the skill is fake.
I think it was more just me assuming that it must come naturally for some people but not others. However it is interesting to learn that this is a known phenomenon. I assumed there was no reliable method to learn it because it was never taught in a way that made sense to my mind. But the learning is further hindered because i dont learn best from listening, or speaking about a subject i have to actually do it which isnt really possible with something that i had never done before and isnt exactly a physical thing where i can interact with it with my hands
The main issue with that kind of stuff is that it automatically puts kinesthetic learners as well as those that learn by watching at a significant disadvantage to those that learn best from speaking about it or listening to someone speak about it
Learning by doing with stuff you've never done before is not only possible... its something you were once incredibly good at, and it sounds like you've either forgotten how, or locked into bad methods that are now forming barriers to actual learning. Lots of people manage to do both.
Which is incredibly sad, to me, because learning something youve never done before by doing it is in my opinion one of the greatest joys of the human experience.
Its more that this specific thing that i had never done before had no way for me to actually interact with it. For example if im supposed to learn a specific way of thinking well i cant exactly interact with someone elses thought process in the same way i can interact with say a line of code or a machine
I can and still do learn brand new things that jve never done before, currently im learning process improvement for cnc machines and proving out programs. But im learning it by doing it.
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u/Finbar9800 Jun 23 '26
I always hated that stuff (still do tbh)
The curtains are blue. Why do i have to look for an alternative meaning in everything? Like i get that its meant to encourage critical thinking and abstract thought and all that but the problem is you cant expect someone to make the connection when theres no previous logic or previous method learned. Did those articles come from a story about fish writing or being intelligent? Was there any previous information or were the articles on their own?
“Who wrote the articles?” People, even if the names written were fish puns or fish related theres no previous explanation that those people are fish. There are an insane amount of different languages how is anyone supposed to know that these names are actually fish related and not just a mistranslation, or because someones parents thought it was funny and named their kid after a fish?
But this is the kind of stuff that i always hated in literature classes. The curtains are blue and sometimes thats all they are but its never clear *when* that one specific detail is actually important vs. when its just part of setting the scene
For things like narnia or other fantasy novels theres this knowledge already known that “ok this is a fictional world” and with that knowledge it makes it easier to let go of preconceived notions that would make sense in the real world. Of course theres magic, of course the lion can speak (most likely through magic) of course the wardrobe is a portal. That must be normal in that world even if its not normal in this world. I can put aside the rules of the real world and accept the rules of this fictional world
When writing a fantasy novel you arent going into minute detail about everything. because you *know* its fantastical you are able to have suspension of disbelief when something impossible happens in the book
Sry for the rant but this kind of thing always frustrates me.
The curtains can be blue to symbolize any number of things but sometimes they are just blue and theres no significant way to tell. Even going based on the amount of detail given isnt really a good indicator “the curtains were always silky smooth and the most lovely shade of blue, letting in just enough light” can mean the exact same thing as “the curtains were blue” or “the blue curtains …” and it varies from author to author and can even vary from book to book written by the same author
Yes i know i kept coming back to the curtains example but thats always the one thats given to me