Comment by ageitgey
9 months ago
I'm a big fan of Bleak House. The opening chapter is one if my favorite bits of Dickens. But it is a silly selection to expect a random undergrad from a state school in middle America to be able to fully parse on command unless they have some familiarity with London / Dickens or are in the midst of studying it. It's a book that you have to want to read or it is going to be a slog (saying this as a state-educated American).
The intro chapter is written more like a Shakespearean speech to be read aloud than a narrative chapter. The rest of the book isn't nearly so flowery.
Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.
You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".
> You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
I would rate the amount of specific context necessary to understand a random snippet of kernel code much higher than what you need for that Dickens passage. It's certainly much more dense with metaphor and playful use of language than normal prose, but I don't find it that opaque, even as an non-native speaker.
> The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".
Well, yes, but that doesn't necessarily contradict the article. The bell curve at the bottom basically says that the comprehension they were expecting is in the top 3% or so, not the 60% of the general population who "have to get a degree". Add in all the Netflix and TikTok casualties, and the result ceases to be surprising.
> Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.
This was a kind of frustrating part of the article. Not catching the reference to the flood, or the age of the dinosaurs is pretty shocking. But not knowing what Lincoln's Inn Hall is?
They seemed to expect the kids to look up every word they didn't know. Which, if they were being paid to do a professional translation that was going to be published somewhere, would be a legit expectation. Expecting people donating their time for a study... not so much.
> They seemed to expect the kids to look up every word they didn't know.
Yes. They are students. They should look up any term they do not know.
Should they prefer guessing based on context? Just ignoring new terms? Assuming any unknown word means "skibidi?"