The Defenders-only Discussion Post!

[ddk_mod]

All Rounds & Other Useful Links | Rules | Mod Post | Fills: Completed & WIPs
The Defenders Prompt Post

Talk about the Defenders! Speculate, discuss, squee and debate. There's a thread for each episode so you can discuss what you've watched so far without being spoiled for future episodes - click on top level view to see only the first comment in each thread and stay spoiler-free.

Anon commenting is not mandatory for this post. Playing nice is always mandatory.

Comments

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

OP

Okay, I figure that this is a cultural difference, then. I'm just thinking comprehension, pretty much. And learning how to interpret different kinds of writing, from fiction to mom-fiction to textbooks...stuff like that.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

SA

See, but that is in part what I don't get: comprehension isn't taught. You can be taught, factually, that some metaphors exist, or that certain themes are a thing, but knowing that does not necessarily mean you'll comprehend the text or will be able to interpret it. Plus, if anything, text comprehension is mostly self-taught? Through reading and challenging yourself?

I think I'm way too European for this.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

NA (American anon, for contrast.)

Comprehension can absolutely be taught! It's kind of difficult and involves a lot of homework and practice, but it totally can be. The way I remember it being taught was stuff like the teacher would hand out a short story and ask us to interpret it and what we felt the plot was, who the main characters were, what the big metaphors/images were, and what the 'message' of the story was, and if the story alluded to something contemporary or historical. And then the teacher would explain their own answers and how they got there ("you can tell this short story is alluding to the Red Scare because of these three metaphors and these four images and the time it was written" "you can see how the message of this story is how cruel children can be to one another because ..."), and then students are asked to do it again with a different short story or reading piece. You can do the same thing but easier with math and science writing, or with academic writing. It's most just show and tell and then practice.

Granted, literary comprehension is also then taught at a higher level by just requiring any arguments or interpretations to be backed up with well-defended evidence from canon--in my schooling experience, wildly crazy interpretations were allowed if they were well-supported, and tamer interpretations that weren't sufficiently backed up were penalized harder. (I wrote a paper once arguing that a specific character in a book was gay and his story was a gay tragedy, and while the professor didn't see it at all she was fine with it because I could show her how I arrived at that conclusion and how rigorous it was. Whereas in a different paper when I argued that The Crucible was about the McCarthy-era witchhunts I almost flunked it because I couldn't explain jack shit or back up my points.)

(But math and science comprehension were taught differently at the higher levels--wrt science and math, we were penalized harshly on the wrong answer because there was one, and if you came away from a literary review and concluded that wolves lived in non-family-group packs in the wild, for example, you'd get a shitty grade. And a bunch of comprehension teaching for those was, I recall, in the form of 'look at this thing and find the mistakes and logical gaps. Fun stuff!)

There's definitely a big role for self-motivation to it, but comprehension can absolutely be taught.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

NA

Comprehension *can* be taught, but the fact that there are whole countries where it isn't, period, proves that it doesn't need to be. It's not a skill you need formal training for.

*Can* you put toddlers in a classroom and teach them how to walk?

Sure.

If you do that, does that mean that if a toddler didn't go to school, they would be forever stuck on all fours?

No, because it's not a skill you actually *need* lessons in to acquire.

There. Done. Simple enough. (Just got out of ridiculously heated conversation somewhere else in this thread, sorry if I sound a bit snappish - it's not you, it's me...)

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Sure! I don't think it's necessarily better to teach it informally or formally (to be honest, I am biased because I got an unusually good education in it), but counterpoint: if a toddler never saw people walking or was ever helped to, would it necessarily learn to walk? (I don't actually know, but it's worth thinking about.)

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting question :)

I think they would, because toddlers stand up and try to walk on their own, it seems like instinct. And also, in the womb the development of a tiny human repeats evolution. It kinda makes sense that some of the last stages of that would carry over onto after birth, and there is an evolutional point in which we start to walk on only two :)

Back in the 50s USA, which was actually way worse than HYDRA in terms of human experimentation, did this experiment with babies being denied touch. Problems with learning to walk aren't among the famous findings, I guess you can dig that up and check.

I'm not sure if anyone thought of an experiment where babies wouldn't see adults walking around, but there some where human interaction was severely restricted if not completely banned.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Huh, that will be pretty interesting once I dig it up! But I do know of 'experiments' regarding mostly feral children, all of whom seemed to be permanently impaired with at least some aspects of language as a result, if only because language is so social.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Language, sure. And general social stuff. But to my knowledge, not walking.

To be fair, a lot of how we use our bodies is actually trained into us socially. Some peoples, for example, have a habit of *crouching* to a meal. Make an experiment: try to crouch for a while with both of your hands busy and manouvering food into your mouth. You'll gain a new appreciation of how closely your body is tied to your particular culture.

But walking is very, very basic. Our bodies aren't really suited to move them around in any different way.

And if we're tying it back to our poor Danny Rand (man, I wouldn't like to read a discussion like this one on myself!), bear in mind that he's not actually "feral". He was talked to, and allowed to speak himself. So language as a concept, sound comprehension, and articulate sound forming would all be known to him, and he'd have more than enough practice in it.

With that, even if he doesn't retain English, he would have all of the cognitive equipment to relearn it. His mother tongue would be whatever they speak in Kun Lun, though.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

No, I totally agree! I just think it's interesting to note that social isolation often can have effects mimicking physical isolation enough that you can sometimes see similar results. And since Tibet has more of an oral storytelling tradition than rich white people NYC, it might be that his own sense of social isolation/alienation (to the degree that it exists) means that he ends up not being good at either literary traditions.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think there's much room for social isolation in a monastery :)

He might not be as immersed in the oral tradition as his peers who were born into it, though, and he obviously didn't do all of his obligatory reading US. students do at school. (You do have obligatory readings, right? I'm a European, we sort of tell horror stories about how your education is organised around here.)

so he wouldn't be exceptionally knowledgeable in either, I guess. But I think people around this thread overestimate how important literary knowledge is in Western societies nowadays. Plenty of people never read a book in their life, and function with the rest of us without much problem.

(frozen comment) Re: To people who watched Iron Fist: A Very Important Question about Danny Rand and education

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe not--I admit, I don't really know much about the day-to-day workings of Tibetan monasteries or Buddhist monasteries in general. But I can imagine it might still permit a deep sense of social loneliness/alienation and have him be very withdrawn, especially emotionally.

We do have obligatory readings! It depends on which school, class, and grade level, and in college it's often a lot more, but we do have books/essays/short stories/poetry/texts that we have to read for various classes.

I mean, maybe, but I...I'm not saying that totally illiterate people can't function, but I do think it would be sharply noticeable to people who know them closely (unless they loved TV and were up on pop culture in that sense, or were huge jocks/sports fanatics and had jobs that didn't require any reading), and at least in the particular area where I live there aren't any people who 'never read a book in their life'. (Which is not representative of the whole US or of NYC either.) And especially with somebody like Danny who doesn't have the requisite socialcultural competence or people-skills to hide any gaps or otherwise make up for them, I really do think that in many areas he just wouldn't function either, or only would because of his money.