How to Not Think Like a Bot

"The most exciting moments for a teacher come when students stumble onto something unexpected-when they run to my office to tell me about a new twist in their thinking about birds in Sula or the discovery of yet another biblical reflection in Housekeeping. Those revelations come only when they survey the text as it is, not as they assume it to be."

"Many students assume that they know what they'll see-in books, people, or anything else-because that's what they've been taught, relentlessly and often subliminally. By the time they were learning to read, many schools had moved away from teaching traditional phonics. Instead of asking kids to sound out letters, the new approach, called " whole language," had them divine words from only the first letter, the context, and maybe a picture."

Students often devise a thesis first and then seek evidence to support it, leading them to find what they expect rather than discover surprises. Teachers experience the most rewarding moments when students notice unexpected connections by surveying texts carefully and attending to details. Many children were taught to guess words from context under the whole-language approach instead of phonics, encouraging prediction rather than accurate decoding. That pedagogy proved flawed, and research and reporting have reduced its influence. Despite these changes, people still commonly draw conclusions from context rather than closely examining evidence.

Read at The Atlantic