Only 36 schoolchildren had sufficient reading skills. The Plague of the 21st Century: Functional Illiteracy

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Introduction

In developed countries, there is less and less illiterate population, however, such a concept as functional illiteracy is emerging. An increasing number of people are unable to read and write at the level required to perform basic social tasks. There are much fewer people reading in 2014 compared to 1992. 35% of respondents admitted that they practically do not read books, and the quality of reading has also decreased. Illiteracy affects not only the lives of these people, but also the economy and political system of the country. In this regard, the state faces the important task of developing the functional literacy of citizens. It consciously shapes and supports every citizen’s need to acquire literacy; the state guarantees the unconditional implementation of adopted laws, rules and norms and thereby motivates citizens to acquire literacy.

The purpose of the work is to learn about the causes of functional illiteracy and the possible consequences of its existence.

In accordance with this, the following tasks were identified:

· consider the concept of functional illiteracy;

· explore possible ways to combat the increase in functionally illiterate people.

The object of study in this work is functional illiteracy.

The subject of the study is methods of combating functional illiteracy.

1. The concept of literacy and its types

Literacy is the degree to which a person has the skills to write and read in their native language.

Functional literacy is the ability of a person to enter into relationships with the external environment and adapt and function in it as quickly as possible.

Functional illiteracy is the inability of a person to read and write at the level necessary to perform basic social tasks.

2. Consequences of an increase in functionally illiterate people

According to experts, functional illiteracy is one of the main causes of unemployment, accidents, accidents and injuries at work and at home. The losses from it amounted, according to experts, to about 237 billion dollars.

A functionally illiterate person really has a hard time even at the everyday level: for example, it is difficult for him to be a buyer and choose the necessary product (since these people are guided not by the information about the product indicated on the packaging, but only on the labels), it is difficult to be a patient (t Because when buying a medicine, the instructions for its use are unclear - what are the indications and contraindications, side effects, rules of use, etc.), it is difficult to be a traveler (to navigate road signs, site plans and other similar information if you have not been earlier in this place). Functionally illiterate people experience problems related to raising children: sometimes they cannot read a letter from a teacher, they are afraid of visiting him, it is difficult for them to help their child with homework, etc.

To illustrate the scale of this phenomenon, here are some impressive figures. According to American researchers, one adult in four has poor literacy skills. There is also such a thing as passive literacy, when adults and children simply do not like to read. In its report, A Nation at Risk, the National Commission cites the following figures, which it considers "risk indicators": about 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate, having difficulty performing basic tasks of daily reading, writing and arithmetic, about 13% of all Seventeen-year-old US citizens may be considered functionally illiterate. Functional illiteracy among young people may rise to 40%; many of them do not have a range of intellectual skills that might be expected of them: about 40% cannot draw conclusions from text.

3. Methods to combat functional illiteracy

The problem of functional illiteracy turned out to be quite acute, so 1990, at the initiative of UNESCO, was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly as the International Year of Literacy (IGY). During 1991, the results of relevant activities in many countries and international organizations were summed up. Currently, on their basis, legislative acts, decisions, plans and programs are being developed to continue and develop the movement to overcome and prevent illiteracy in its various forms.

In the UK, they formulated a national idea to support reading, which was announced during the screening of a popular series, while a huge audience gathered in front of the screens. In implementing the state idea, both state resources and private business money were involved.

In Japan, a law on school libraries has been in force since 1958, and there is a law to encourage children's reading.

UNESCO believes that school and public libraries should become the foundation of a new knowledge society. The school library is a generator, catalyst, creator of an innovative educational environment necessary for the creative development of the child and the innovation of the teacher. In Russia, library collections are in critical condition; in many libraries books have not been updated for years. As for personal libraries, a third of Russians, according to sociologists, do not have their own library at all, another third has only up to 100 books.

4. Reading Trends

The 21st century can easily be called the century of the “information community”. More and more young people prefer Internet sources and reading using portable technology (e-reader, mobile phone, iPad, etc.) to paper sources. At the same time, reading not so much and not so often, but in terms of content focusing more on mass serial publications of genre literature and to a lesser extent on re-reading classical literature.

Levada Center conducted population studies, the results of which are presented in the table below.

Table 1. How often do you read books?

As we can see, in 1990, 38% of adult Russians (18 years and older) read books at least once a week, in 2010 - 27%. At the same time, the share of people who practically do not read books increased from 44% to 63%.

Conclusion

literacy library educational

Functional illiteracy is the scourge of the 21st century. In developed countries, more and more people are literate but unable to apply these skills in everyday life. Functional illiteracy of a person can become a problem not only for himself, but also for the people around him. There is a slowdown in production, since there is no one to work on the new equipment due to their functional illiteracy, and this affects the country’s economy and its life in general. Therefore, to prevent illiteracy in its various forms, states in different countries are developing legislation, decisions, plans and programs that should help solve this problem.

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Speaking at the congress of commissioners for children's rights, Pavel Astakhov announced the following figures: in 2011 in Russia, 30 thousand children aged 7 to 18 did not study, 670 thousand adolescents were illiterate or semi-literate, of which 610 thousand had only primary general education, 37 thousand had no education at all. The teenagers have since grown up. This means that now more than half a million illiterate young people are working somewhere - in our world of high technology, numerous gadgets and countless instructions... Of course, they can read, but are they able to adequately understand what they read?

Functional illiteracy is a fresh topic, the relevance of which is growing by leaps and bounds. On the one hand, illiterate children are growing up, on the other, the number of older people is increasing, who cannot keep up with the rapidly changing information environment with all its Vibers and WhatsApp.

The number of functionally illiterates - those who are able to formally read a text, but are unable to understand its meaning and draw correct conclusions - is increasing faster as the world becomes more informationally complex. At the same time, in modern conditions, people who do not understand instructions, misinterpret warnings, and do not pay attention to important details become a real source of danger.

Most often, the roots of the problem should be sought in the family: functionally illiterate parents grow up with the same children. But sometimes even literate adults give a child a tablet with a cartoon or a game - this is much easier than communicating “live”, telling fairy tales, answering numerous questions. Unfortunately, cartoons with games do not contribute to the development of speech and understanding of complex meanings. To be functionally literate, you need to constantly read long and complexly constructed texts that require active involvement, brain function, and mastering new words and speech structures.

“Research conducted in different countries shows that readers differ from “non-readers” in intellectual development. The former are able to think in terms of a problem, grasp the whole and establish contradictory connections between phenomena, more adequately assess the situation, quickly find the right solutions, have a large amount of memory and active creative imagination, better command of speech. They formulate more accurately, write more freely, make contact more easily and are pleasant in communication, are more critical, independent in judgment and behavior and form the qualities of the most developed and socially valuable person. Many glide through huge amounts of information without perceiving it. This is potential functional illiteracy,” notes Tatyana Zhukova, president of the Association of School Libraries of Russia, expert of the State Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children.

Daria Sokologorskaya's article on functional illiteracy, published by the Sigma project, found a lively response on the RuNet. In her opinion, in modern consumer society there are forces interested in the functional illiteracy of the population. These are the sales and marketing departments. After all, it is much easier for someone who is functionally illiterate to muddle their brains and hang falsehoods on their ears. He will fall for a bright picture, a catchy inscription, a repeating slogan, and he certainly won’t read the small print that contains mandatory information about the components of the product.

Manufacturers, naturally, benefit from this too. But here we get an interesting paradox: on the one hand, every manufacturer is interested in competent employees, on the other hand, in primitive buyers to whom you can sell anything. A dialectical contradiction that leaves some hope.

Needless to say, the functionally illiterate are the most grateful audience of our “for everyone” television. All these Tolstoy-Soloviev-Gordon-Malakhov shows, all this frontal propaganda, repeating the same thing every day and appealing not to reason and logic, but exclusively to emotion, is precisely for them.

The Internet also contributes to the maintenance of functional illiteracy: the main stream of products here is either copy-paste of horrors, cats and cute things, or cliches like “Murzilka”, “Putinoid”, “liberast”, flavored with dubious adjectives. Very often on forums you can see people discussing something completely different from what the author of the text said. They didn’t understand him at all, and they don’t care: they seized on individual details and are throwing around “Putinoids” and “liberals.”

In Western countries, functional illiteracy was actively discussed in the 1980s - the problem began to acquire alarming proportions due to the increasing complexity of life. People lacked the literacy to understand banking and insurance documents, fill out tax returns, adequately use purchased equipment, and use medications correctly. According to experts, functional illiteracy is one of the main causes of unemployment, accidents, accidents and injuries at work and at home.

According to data given in an article by one of the Russian researchers of functional illiteracy, Vera Chudinova, at the end of the last century the figures were as follows: “In Canada, among persons aged 18 years and older, 24% are illiterate or functionally illiterate. Among the functionally illiterate, 50% have studied for nine years at school, 8% had a university degree. Survey results in 1988 indicate that 25% of French people read no books at all during the year, and the number of functionally illiterate people is about 10% of the adult population of France. Data presented in the report of the Ministry of National education for 1989, speak of a low level of school preparation: approximately one out of two students entering college can write well enough, 20% of students do not have reading skills.”

In the USA, the picture is even sadder - there are huge sections of the population in which functional illiteracy is passed on from generation to generation, plus there is a constant supply of millions of foreign-language migrants who assimilate the local culture more than superficially. In general, the movement of tens of millions of people from “third world” countries to more developed countries, which is typical today, significantly aggravates the problem. Functional illiteracy is closely related to speech culture, and people who, as adults, move to a place where they speak a different language, take low-paying hard physical work, even being functionally literate in their language environment, join the ranks of the functionally illiterate in the new country. Typically, their vocabulary is very limited, which hinders socialization. If such migrants settle in a foreign land and start a family there, this is the first risk zone for the emergence of new functionally illiterate people.

How are things going in Russia against the general background? According to Tatyana Zhukova, the problem is being actively investigated in our country, but data cannot be obtained behind closed doors. Indeed, if you enter the query “level of functional illiteracy in Russia” into an electronic scientific library, you will not get anything adequate.

Frightening examples are given in the comments to Sokologorskaya’s article. “I teach children mathematics. Beginning of 2010-2011 (end of September). In two 5th grades, children solve the problem: “In a class of 30 students, there are 6 excellent students. How many times are there fewer excellent students than other students." Those who have decided raise their hand, I come up and the child “confidentially” tells me the answer. Guess how many children out of 58 solved the problem correctly. Not a single one!"

Maybe the data is closed because we have already fallen so low that it’s scary to report?

However, even before, during the Soviet era, things were not going smoothly with education either. I remember how the history teacher, an honored teacher and winner of numerous awards, forced us to memorize Lenin’s April theses. He told it without hesitation - “five”, missed or replaced the word - “four”. His entire teaching principle was based on the fact that we memorized texts and that “dates bounce off our teeth.” And this was one of the best schools in Leningrad. Of course, not all teachers approached their work this way - for example, we were lucky with a mathematician who provided knowledge that went far beyond the school curriculum. In general, it was different, just as it is now.

Fortunately, over the past 25 years, Russia has managed to fit into many international research programs. Data on them is open, you just need to know a little English. So you don’t have to guess from the tea leaves about our level, but simply look at foreign language sources.

Extensive research on the topic of functional illiteracy is carried out by the OECD (OECD - Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). Russia is not its member and in the near future, alas, will no longer be - but until recently it was included in the research programs. This year, too, research took place in April-May in 42 regions of Russia.

The adolescent testing program PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment, dedicated to assessing student performance) has been in operation since the beginning of the century. Every three years, fifteen-year-old schoolchildren in dozens of countries are tested on reading, math, science, and, more recently, financial literacy and problem-solving skills. The selection of schools is random. Tests - on the ability to perceive information and use the acquired knowledge: how to fill out an insurance guarantee, what idea the author wanted to convey to readers, how to apply this or that scheme to a practical situation.

Here, for example, is one of the simple reading subtests. The author tells us that we spend as much money in a year on buying chocolate as our government spends on helping poor countries. Question: what feeling does the author want to awaken in the reader? Answer options: scare, entertain, cause a feeling of satisfaction, make you feel guilty. I hope there is no need to tell which answer is correct.

And here is one of the subtests in mathematics. Helen bought a bicycle with a speedometer, which she can use to determine how far she has traveled and at what average speed. Helen drove from the house to the river, which is four kilometers away, in nine minutes. She took a shorter route back, covering three kilometers in six minutes. Calculate the average speed (in kilometers per hour) at which Helen drove to the river and back. We agree: this task can hardly be called difficult.

For the first time, Russian schoolchildren took part in testing in 2000. Both then and in 2003, the results were more than modest - 2nd-3rd place from the bottom among several dozen countries. Much has been written about this. Why the results were so bad apparently needs to be investigated separately. Perhaps the translation was not the best; Perhaps the children were incorrectly informed and prepared, the form of presentation of the material was unusual...

Subsequently, less was written about Russian results on the RuNet. Fortunately, the information on the OECD website is completely open. Here's what you can learn from the 2012 data. Among the 65 countries included in the study, Russia took 34th place, ahead of the USA, Israel, and Sweden (Russian schoolchildren have the best results in mathematics). The seven first places were taken by Asians - Shanghai Administrative Zone, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Macau, Japan, and only after them come Europeans - Liechtenstein, Switzerland, the Netherlands. And then - here's a surprise - Estonia. I am very happy for our northern neighbor. Behind Estonia is Finland, which for many years was considered the educational leader of Europe. Russia and Latvia are ahead of Russia, but Lithuania and Kazakhstan are lower. Well, the last places went to Qatar, Indonesia and Peru. There are no African countries on the list, with the exception of Tunisia, which is also at the very bottom.

So, in a comparative sense, things are not so bad for us. By the way, on the same OECD website you can find all the tests, methods and evaluation criteria. You can come here and try to solve problems on mathematics, financial literacy, problem-solving skills (you can also see the answers). True, all this is in English. Attempts to obtain tests in Russian from our Ministry of Education and make them freely available have not yet led to success - although all translations have already been made. But we do not lose hope and, if everything works out, we will certainly post it on the Rosbalt website. After all, this is a great workout for the brain.

The accelerating complexity of society and the growth of information flows pose another challenge: in order to maintain your literacy, you must not complete your studies at school, college, or a dissertation, but study constantly. Otherwise, you will fall out of life and find that you no longer understand the context of reasoning, new terms, and even the turns of thought themselves. Everything is changing very quickly.

For now, functionally illiterate people can be divided into three main groups:

1. Young people with insufficient speech development and low intelligence who have not received the necessary incentive in families or child care institutions.

2. Migrants who do not speak the language sufficiently and do not strive to do so.

3. Older people who are lagging behind the rapidly developing information society with all its technological bells and whistles.

What will be tomorrow? Will people come to their senses and begin to teach their children better, will the state recognize the problem, will adults understand the need for continuous education? Or will the divide between the content creators and copy-pastors of all that glitters and the show's devoted viewers only grow wider? We'll find out soon. In the meantime, it will be interesting to get acquainted with the results of PISA 2015.

What can be said here is only that all the reforms carried out in the educational system have led to dismal results.

The main task of the school is not only to provide basic information on various sciences, including labor education, but also to teach children to learn and develop independently. School graduates must be not just literate, but functionally literate.

Our schools teach how to pass the Unified State Exam.

A mother and her 11-year-old son come to see a psychologist. He is a fairly physically developed boy and loves to play sports. Doctors do not find any mental development problems in him. However, he does poorly at school. Together with his mother, he reads paragraphs from the textbook aloud for several hours a day, but cannot answer questions about the content and does not understand the meaning of what he read.

In this particular case, it was determined that the child had functional illiteracy.

Functional illiteracy is generally understood as the inability of a child or even an adult to use reading or writing in a social context. A functionally illiterate person, although able to read and write, cannot apply his skills in practice. For example, he cannot read, understand and use instructions for using household appliances, cannot fill out a receipt or other similar document, and is not able to write a statement with a request.

After a series of studies, it turned out that several tens of percent of people are functionally illiterate, according to some studies - up to 50%.

“Too much bookoff”?

A functionally illiterate person recognizes words when reading, but cannot find any artistic meaning or utilitarian benefit in the text that he read. Such people categorically do not like to read. Some researchers with medical education believe that functional illiteracy indicates more serious impairments in the mechanisms of attention and memory than those found in ordinary general illiteracy.

Today, the term “functional illiteracy” has begun to be interpreted much more broadly. It is more often understood as the degree of unpreparedness of a person to perform social functions.

Lack of preparation is manifested not only and not so much by insufficient understanding of what has been read. Here is the immaturity of speech skills: when perceiving someone else’s words, the meaning is either lost or distorted. One's own thoughts cannot be expressed clearly either. Here is the inability to perceive and accordingly apply in practice the rules of personal safety (a person does not understand the instructions for an electrical appliance, he may get an electric shock). Functional illiteracy also includes the inability to cope with information flows and insufficient computer literacy.

How serious is the situation?

A large-scale study concerning the functional illiteracy of Russian schoolchildren in grades 8-9 was conducted in 2003, and the results were very sad. Only a little more than a third of schoolchildren had sufficient reading skills to overcome this threshold. Of these, only about 25% could complete tasks of medium difficulty, such as oral and written summarization of information located in different places in the text.

Only 2% of those who took part in the study were able to formulate conclusions based on the text and propose their own hypotheses. Russia is no exception: the statistics for schoolchildren in Italy, Finland, England, and the USA are approximately the same.

Of course, in general, the level of functional illiteracy varies across cultures and countries. This is due to the fact that in a more developed society more advanced skills are required. Thus, a level of reading and comprehension of text that is sufficient for a rural area of ​​a developing country can be assessed as functional illiteracy in a technologically advanced metropolis.

The main signs of functional illiteracy of a schoolchild:

1. there is a clear dislike of reading;
2. avoidance of intellectual tasks of any kind, lack of motivation to solve them;
3. asking other people to explain a text or a method for solving a problem;
4. inability to follow simple instructions;
5. attempts to read cause physical difficulties in the form of headaches, eye pain, fatigue;
6. it is much easier to understand the material by ear than after reading the text independently;
7. While reading, children often try to articulate and even pronounce the text.

Causes of functional illiteracy

One of the most popular explanations is a sharp increase in information flows. There is no scientific evidence for this, but the increase in the number of functionally illiterate children did coincide with the development of television. There are a number of studies that prove that young children (1-3 years old), spending several hours every day in front of a TV screen, lost some cognitive skills.

However, the reason for this could simply be that no one is taking care of a child who sits in front of the TV for several hours a day?

There is no clear evidence of the “fault” of television and the Internet in the epidemic of functional illiteracy. But in any case, they take away the child’s time, which could be spent learning to read, write, and generally study.

It must be admitted that functional illiteracy and dyslexia were first described in the 19th century, long before the development of information technology. Then they tried to explain this by heredity and genetics. Today, the genetic factor cannot be discounted either.

Is it possible to fight?

They note that functional illiteracy is not a problem of pedagogical science, but the consequences of incorrect teaching in the primary grades of school. And the problem should be eliminated precisely there and precisely at the age of 6-8 years. To eliminate functional illiteracy, neither additional financial investments nor individual scientific developments are required. All that is required is to include functional literacy instruction in every lesson, be it reading, native language, or computer science. The methods are known, and mastering them is accessible to any modern teacher.

Functional reading is called the main means of combating functional illiteracy. This is reading to find data to solve a pre-formulated problem. Thus, in functional reading, scanning reading techniques are used (they are also called scanning techniques) and analytical reading. Analytical reading is a selection of quotes, development of diagrams and diagrams, highlighting key points in the text.

To help your child cope with the text:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit

1. Train his memory.
2. Teach him to expand his peripheral vision: he should see not just one line, but many.
3. Ask him not to pronounce the text.
4. Show him that there are different types of reading - introductory, educational, viewing.
5. Teach him to divide the text into parts, draw up a plan, and an outline of the content.
6. Master the translation of information from table form to text form with it
7. form and vice versa.
8. Teach him to look for answers to specific questions in the text.

In order to prevent, let alone overcome, functional illiteracy, you need to work hard. A child who has not achieved reading comprehension by age 10 may already be considered functionally illiterate, and this will be more difficult to catch up and overcome at an older age.

Material from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia

Functional illiteracy- a person’s inability to read and write at the level necessary to perform basic social tasks; in particular, this is expressed in the inability to read instructions, in the inability to find the information needed in an activity. The concept appeared in the 90s of the 20th century. According to Tatyana Dmitrievna Zhukova, president of the Association of School Libraries of Russia, it is functional illiteracy that is the cause of many man-made disasters.

Functionally illiterate (semi-literate) is a person who has largely lost reading and writing skills and is unable to comprehend short and simple text relevant to everyday life. Functionally illiterate and semi-literate people should be distinguished from people who cannot read and write (“illiterates”; their number, according to world statistics, is constantly decreasing and amounts to no more than 0.5% of the population in developed countries). The cause of functional illiteracy can be circumstances such as exclusion from school or long-term illness.

Functionally illiterate people are culturally limited (to varying degrees), characterized by poor performance in school, a negative attitude towards cultural institutions stemming from the inability to understand their repertoire and the fear of being ridiculed in this regard.

Since the 90s, a decline in population literacy has begun in Russia. In 2003, the International Reading Institute conducted a study on the quality of reading and functional literacy, in which Russian students took 32nd place out of 40 countries. Today in Russia, only every third 11th grade graduate understands the content of scientific and literary texts. This phenomenon is caused by curricula that focus not on reading comprehension, but on phonics.

Existing systems for addressing the problem of functional illiteracy

To solve the problem, the UK formulated a national idea to support reading, which was announced during the screening of the popular TV series, while a huge audience gathered in front of the screens. When implementing the state idea, both state resources and money were involved

According to world statistics, only half a percent of people on earth cannot read and write. It would seem that a complete and confident victory has been won over illiteracy. However, scientists are sounding the alarm: according to various studies, from 25 to 50 percent of the world's population is functionally illiterate!

It is important to know! According to the results of a study conducted in 2003 by the International Institute of Reading, Russia ranked 32nd out of 40 possible in terms of the quality of functional literacy and reading.

Only every third Russian graduate is able to understand the content of scientific and literary texts.

What is functional illiteracy

A functionally illiterate person can read and write, but practically does not understand the meaning of what he read. He has difficulty reading and filling out documents, and does not understand what is written in the instructions for a medicine or household electrical appliance.

In addition, such a person’s speech skills also suffer: he almost does not perceive the statements of other people or understands them distortedly, and also has difficulty expressing his own thoughts.

How to spot functional illiteracy in a child

Of course, you shouldn’t make hasty conclusions, but if you observe the following “symptoms” in your student, you should seek advice from a neuropsychologist or speech therapist:

• doesn't like to read;
• complains of discomfort, headache or pain in the eyes that occurs every time while reading;
• asks you or someone else to explain what they have read;
• moves his lips when reading or speaks the text he is reading out loud;
• avoids complex mental tasks by all means;
• cannot follow even simple instructions;
• experiences aggression towards those who “load” him with difficult tasks.

Where does functional illiteracy come from?

Researchers associate the increased number of functionally illiterate people with the development of information flow. There is no direct scientific evidence that television and the Internet lead to functional illiteracy, but at the same time, it cannot be denied that among those who spend 24 hours in front of the TV screen or on social networks, the vast majority are functionally illiterate.

Those at greatest risk are children whose parents would rather give their child a smartphone or tablet than read a book.

Limiting to a minimum the viewing of TV shows, computer games, visiting social networks and forums in modern conditions is necessary, psychologists are convinced. A child who has not learned to comprehend what he read by the age of ten is already considered functionally illiterate. And the older he is, the more difficult it is to cope with the problem.

How to prevent functional illiteracy

• Involve your baby in real life, minimize the use of gadgets or completely abandon them, especially in early childhood.
• Train your child's memory (learn poems, tongue twisters, songs, etc.)
• Read aloud to your child, even when he already knows how to read. Give preference to books that are interesting to him.
• Discuss what you read, share your impressions, ask questions about the text you read, and be sure to answer your child’s questions.

What to do if there is already a problem

Do not despair if you notice signs of functional illiteracy in your child. Daily exercises aimed at solving this problem can give good results.

To solve the problem, you should first of all teach your child to work with text:

• ask him not to pronounce the text while reading;
• introduce him to different types of reading: introductory, educational, viewing;
• teach your child to divide the text into parts according to meaning;
• good training is to translate information from text form to table form and vice versa;
• work on expanding peripheral vision: the child should have several lines of text in his field of vision, not just one;
• Teach your child to look for answers to certain questions in the text. Of course, functional illiteracy is not a death sentence, and even the most hopeless cases can be corrected.

The main thing is that a person has a great desire to cope with problems, and then everything is possible!