(A Partial List, In no particular order)
Who Cain and Abel are and what Cain did to Abel
What a "hook and eye" is
What feminism is (they think it's "hating men")
That reliable birth control was illegal in (some parts of) this country less than sixty years ago
What Jesus actually said
The difference between Old English and 19th Century English
What "left wing" and "right wing" mean (they know Democrats are evil, but not what a leftist is)
What Pompeii is and what happened there
What a highwayman is
The difference between "a story" and scientific article
The difference between someone with a million dollars (who, yes, is rich) and someone with billions of dollars
What eugenics is
What a sonnet is
when the Civil War happened and what it was about
Likewise WWI and WWII
Anything about any religion other than their own specific sect of Christianity
Anything about Christianity, for that matter
Where England is (probably other countries too, this was just the one I was trying to get them to find on our classroom map)
How common illness like measles, mumps, chicken pox, and tetanus were in this country before vaccines became wildly available
What evolution actually is and how it works (this is even educated students)
What a pogrom is
How common it was for black people to be lynched less than a century ago in this country
The difference between truth and opinion, or how to tell if something is true
How to read difficult material
3 comments:
Yes to all of these! My students call everything with words in it a "story," and their commitment to a certain form of Christianity is not linked with actual knowledge of the Bible. But the one that troubles me the most is how to read difficult texts, because the less effort they're willing to put into reading difficult texts, the more likely they are to eventually find the simplest texts difficult.
World War I?
Baldrick: I heard that it started when a bloke called Archie Duke shot an ostrich 'cause he was hungry.
https://www.johndclare.net/causes_WWI1_Blackadderversion.htm
Bev: I now spend a couple of class sessions early in the semester in my Comp I class walking them through how to read difficult texts. It helps, but only with those who would have put the effort in anyway. A big percentage (maybe half?) of the class reads one or two paragraphs and guesses at what the text is saying. That's if the Sparks Notes version isn't available -- they'll read that if it is.
D Shannon: My kid loved Black Adder. He had a hard copy of all the scripts and had it practically memorized.
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