- Sep 2022
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As discussed in Chapter 1, there are many myths and misperceptions sur-rounding who the poor are. The typical image is of someone who haslived in poverty for years at a time, is Black or Hispanic, resides in aninner-city ghetto, receives two or three welfare programs, and is reluctantto work. On all counts, this image is a severe distortion of the reality.
The authors here do themselves and their public a disservice by repeating the myth up front before trying to dispel it. This may psychologically tend to reinforce it rather than priming the reader to come to believe the opposite.
A better framing might instead be George Lakoff's truth sandwich: present the truth/actuality, then talk about the myth and then repeat the truth again.
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- Mar 2022
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hackeducation.com hackeducation.com
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I'd wager it's the most frequently told story about ed-tech — one told with more gusto and more frequency even than "computers will revolutionize teaching" and "you can learn anything on YouTube." Indeed, someone invoked this story just the other day when chatting with me about the current shape and status of our education system: the school bell was implemented to acclimate students for life as factory workers, to train them to move and respond on command, their day broken into segments of time dictated by the machine rather than the rhythms of pre-industrial, rural life.
Audrey Watters starts out a piece on the history of school bells with just the sort of falsehood that she's probably aiming to debunk. Perhaps she would have been better off with George Lakoff's truth sandwich model as starting off with the false story is too often has the opposite effect and leads readers down the road to inculcating the idea further into the culture.
She doesn't reveal the falsehood until the end of the third graph at which time one's brain has been stewing in falsehood for far too long.
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- Mar 2021
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zeynep.substack.com zeynep.substack.com
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But what about the variants? That six-fold drop in neutralizing antibodies? The scary headlines warning about immune escape and vaccine resistant variants? There are things to worry about there, but not necessarily in the way they are being reported.
Zeynep has spoken about these troubling headlines in other places. She shouldn't lead with them, but instead should focus on the better version, then talk about the alternate perspectives, and finally reiterate the positive news again. In other words, she should use George Lakoff's Truth sandwich here.
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