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i brought in a bunch of my books from childhood, and we started having one-on-one reading lessons with the littles. then i went out and bought about fifty more books secondhand. first step was covering the pictures so the kids couldnt guess what the words said and had to actually TRY reading them first. second step was making a list of new words for each kid so we could learn about those words, what they meant, and if the kids were old enough, some of the etymology behind them (because if you can recognize latin root words, it's easier to make connections for pronunciation later on eg. unicorn -> universe).

the kids HATED this. reading was previously the easiest class and now it was really, really hard. but reading class had also previously been the most boring class; their books were ten pictures with a single sentence on the opposite page. we got through it by taking turns reading books the kids picked out from my collection- they would read one sentence or paragraph, then i would read the whole page complete with funny voices, then it would be their turn again, etc. it turns out that if kids are motivated to hear the rest of a good story or a lot of information about a topic they love, they're more willing to struggle.

the kids improved so rapidly that i honestly almost cried a few times from how proud i was. one little girl (kindergarten aged) went from being unable to sound out the whole alphabet to reading goodnight moon by herself in two months :'>

all this, though, was NOT my job. my job was to keep the kids on task during their online schooling and prevent them from killing each other or starving. i am not a teacher. the school system was failing these kids to the degree that outside individual reading lessons were necessary, and school systems across the US are still doing this!

if this backwards way of teaching reading keeps up, then in the future it is going to create more issues, not only those kids but all of us. if you are in the US, i would encourage any adult to look into their local public school district. some school districts have curricula that can be accessed through their website. if what you find concerns you, then it's time to head to a school board meeting and bring it up.

it might feel weird or uncomfortable, but i assure you, you are as a much of a member of the community as anyone else. it is not weird to care about the community and the school district.

this is a problem that is already affecting all of us and it's only going to grow with time. but there are things we can all do regardless of our status as a parent, childcare worker, or teacher.

(p.s. i think sometimes these things are assumed to be the fault of a teacher, but it is almost always a school board issue. teacher's don't typically get to decide on the curriculum)

I can say, with the weight of professional experience as as a former English teacher, this is all so fucking true.

First off, American teacher education programs separate out reading as a certification from other subjects, so unless you enroll in an additional certification program beyond your primary age group and subject, you are literally not taught how to teach reading. Reading is also a separate specialty for teacher licensing, just like SPED or ELL. Being certified to teach reading is above and beyond the scope of standard secondary educators' training/legal certification. I don't know as much about elementary programs because that wasn't my major (I had no interest in being an elementary teacher), but the fact that it's not included at all in secondary teachers' programs is absolutely wild because if kids don't learn to read during elementary school, they wind up as junior high and high school students who aren't equipped to truly continue their education. And passing kids on to the next grade regardless of their preparedness is all too common until high school because elementary and junior high schools aren't required to hold them back for compliance, and holding kids back is wildly unpopular among parents and students alike. And on top of that, you have another crop of students coming up next year, so anyone you hold back only adds to your future workload.

Also, 3 Cueing isn't even the only garbage pedagogical method for teaching reading. My first teaching job was in a district that leaned heavily on the Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) model, which is assessed using an assessment tool called DIBELS. The tests are very short and easy to administer and the grading is done during the test, so the rollout is cheap and doesn't take a whole ton of time, and if you build your reading curriculum around the assessment (which many districts and schools do), your program will produce readers with lovely fluency (they can read the words off the page clearly and correctly, with appropriate pronunciation), but their comprehension is just non-existent. They have no fucking idea what they just read even though they successfully decoded the text with no problems. Well, some of them are able to comprehend, but usually those are kids who have parents who worked with them on learning to read outside of school, make reading a priority activity in their homes, and who are strong enough readers themselves to know how to work with their kids when they're practicing reading at home.

There's other bullshit out there, too. The education industry is just as susceptible to frauds and scams as any other industry. Mainly because it's an *Industry,* which means that it's not about reality, it's about what you can make money off of. The fact that poor reading literacy makes for a populace that's easier to control by both the state and by private companies is an added bonus.

i brought in a bunch of my books from childhood, and we started having one-on-one reading lessons with the littles. then i went out and bought about fifty more books secondhand. first step was covering the pictures so the kids couldnt guess what the words said and had to actually TRY reading them first. second step was making a list of new words for each kid so we could learn about those words, what they meant, and if the kids were old enough, some of the etymology behind them (because if you can recognize latin root words, it's easier to make connections for pronunciation later on eg. unicorn -> universe).

the kids HATED this. reading was previously the easiest class and now it was really, really hard. but reading class had also previously been the most boring class; their books were ten pictures with a single sentence on the opposite page. we got through it by taking turns reading books the kids picked out from my collection- they would read one sentence or paragraph, then i would read the whole page complete with funny voices, then it would be their turn again, etc. it turns out that if kids are motivated to hear the rest of a good story or a lot of information about a topic they love, they're more willing to struggle.

the kids improved so rapidly that i honestly almost cried a few times from how proud i was. one little girl (kindergarten aged) went from being unable to sound out the whole alphabet to reading goodnight moon by herself in two months :'>

all this, though, was NOT my job. my job was to keep the kids on task during their online schooling and prevent them from killing each other or starving. i am not a teacher. the school system was failing these kids to the degree that outside individual reading lessons were necessary, and school systems across the US are still doing this!

if this backwards way of teaching reading keeps up, then in the future it is going to create more issues, not only those kids but all of us. if you are in the US, i would encourage any adult to look into their local public school district. some school districts have curricula that can be accessed through their website. if what you find concerns you, then it's time to head to a school board meeting and bring it up.

it might feel weird or uncomfortable, but i assure you, you are as a much of a member of the community as anyone else. it is not weird to care about the community and the school district.

this is a problem that is already affecting all of us and it's only going to grow with time. but there are things we can all do regardless of our status as a parent, childcare worker, or teacher.

(p.s. i think sometimes these things are assumed to be the fault of a teacher, but it is almost always a school board issue. teacher's don't typically get to decide on the curriculum)

Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. They proved it with math.

Even with perfect training data and unlimited computing power, AI models will still confidently tell you things that are completely false. This isn't a bug they're working on. It's baked into how these systems work at a fundamental level.

And their own numbers are brutal. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%. Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The "smarter" models are actually getting worse at telling the truth.

Here's why it can't be fixed. Language models work by predicting the next word based on probability. When they hit something uncertain, they don't pause. They don't flag it. They guess. And they guess with complete confidence, because that's exactly what they were trained to do.

The researchers looked at the 10 biggest AI benchmarks used to measure how good these models are. 9 out of 10 give the same score for saying "I don't know" as for giving a completely wrong answer: zero points. The entire testing system literally punishes honesty and rewards guessing.

So the AI learned the optimal strategy: always guess. Never admit uncertainty. Sound confident even when you're making it up.

OpenAI's proposed fix? Have ChatGPT say "I don't know" when it's unsure. Their own math shows this would mean roughly 30% of your questions get no answer. Imagine asking ChatGPT something three times out of ten and getting "I'm not confident enough to respond." Users would leave overnight. So the fix exists, but it would kill the product.

This isn't just OpenAI's problem. DeepMind and Tsinghua University independently reached the same conclusion. Three of the world's top AI labs, working separately, all agree: this is permanent.

Original post Feb 26, 2026. Factcheck Feb 27, 2026

Kansas has invalidated diver's licences of anyone who has had their gender/sex marker changed

There is no grace period, meaning as of yesterday, no-one with a changed gender marker is allowed to drive until they can get themselves to a dmv and switch back to a card with an incorrect marker.