The original article was focused on the US school system, so I wouldn’t expect ours to be quite the same. I just shared for interest; I have a loose policy of not getting out over my skis too far on pedagogy. Teachers are pros, the lit’s enormous, and I don’t know enough to make many broad critiques

That’s definitely the weird thing about learning to read: no matter how you learn, it isn’t how we read as proficient adults

Funny thing is, some of the alternate angles of attack they teach for math these days are tricks I worked out myself as a kid who struggled with math. That approach doesn’t sound like it works well for reading—you kinda do need to bootstrap up off a solid understanding of the fundamentals

In my memory of this encounter, he was a rather forgettable dweeb I had no earthly reason to care about, so I wouldn’t remember at all (however partially or incompletely) if he hadn’t been in so many headlines afterward. Memory shifts and evolves a lot, so it’s hard to be sure without verification

Imperfect views, ambiguous experiences, culturally available explanatory templates—boom, you’ve got yourself monster sightings (plus ghosts etc). The list of things mistaken for monsters is endless! That’s a nuance that gets lost in the skeptical lit sometimes: it’s not just otters, it’s *anything*!

Imperfect views, ambiguous experiences, culturally available explanatory templates—boom, you’ve got yourself monster sightings (plus ghosts etc). The list of things mistaken for monsters is endless! That’s a nuance that gets lost in the skeptical lit sometimes: it’s not just otters, it’s *anything*!

Manatees and dugongs also make high pitched vocalizations that can sound weirdly human-like sometimes, especially when distressed. That might have contributed something to an association with mermaid lore

Manatees have also been mistaken for unidentified monsters in Florida, then “explained” as cryptozoological giant penguin sightings :)

Humans are weird little guys, we get up to a lot of imagining and mistaking (and bullshitting)

For what it’s worth, dugongs definitely have been mistaken for mermaids (in Papua New Guinea at least)