Growing up - we had a lot of programs externally to encourage us to read. I wonder if kids still have the same kind of things
For example, we had things like a Six Flags reading program, Pizza Hut Book It for free pizza, and hand picked Texas Bluebonnet Books. We also had book fairs.
This. I find myself tremendously bored watching most videos online these days, scrubbing through to find things that are of interest. There's just so much filler and even when it's not, the information density is very low.
In the meantime, along with reading, I also have longreads in my RSS reader, so every evening I get a few fantastic long form online articles and feel pretty well connected to what's going on.
Agreed about being faster than a lot of other media - at least in terms of density. Also, the tired eyes thing can be a bonus too. For years I had trouble falling asleep at night and I'd stay up later because I didn't like going to bed until I knew I would conk out immediately.
Now I get in bed and read about a half hour or hour before I want to be asleep. It gives me something to focus on while relaxing and when my eyes get too tired or my mind starts to wander, I know it's time to sleep.
Seriously. This is why I don't like how much knowledge is being locked up in video platforms. I can get what I need to know from text so much faster than video unless the knowledge in question is inherently 3d/visual.
video has the advantage that it still works when i am tired/exhausted, or rather when i want to prevent getting tired, because reading is active and takes more concentration. video makes it easier to focus because it is more passive but all your senses are activated at once.
if i am in a deep flow, the reading to solve a problem is the right approach. but when i have to fight distraction, a video helps me to focus and eventually get into the flow.
I disagree with "much slower" but I do agree that it's different. It's not about having tired eyes (what do you use to watch videos?), it's about shortening attention span (you get bored and want to switch to something else). Long attention span is good, short attention span is bad. This is why reading books (long form) is better than reading Twitter or Instagram (short form). And this is why getting kids to continue to read is important.
I feel the opposite way, at least from the point of view of absorbing information. I often have a hard time with podcasts and often youtube videos because I feel I could have read the info there in a few minutes vs watching/listening to something for much longer
I agree but think that's different. That's probably a 10min-read kind of article versus a couple-hour-long book. I agree with the parent comment that reading is just slower. All of the blabbering people do in podcasts and in youtube videos to draw out the length feels like it ends up in books too but it's harder to skip because you don't really know when the important stuff happens. I just turn youtube videos and podcasts up to 2x speed then I don't really have to worry about it.
If you crank the speed up 2x you’ll also be speeding through the important parts. I feel like all of this drive towards AI “summarization” is really framing the problem incorrectly. I want all of the filler removed, and just keep the necessary bits.
We live in an attention economy but the content that demands our attention is increasingly low value. Often the vast majority of podcast content and YouTube video content could be simplified to maybe 10% of what is there. I have unfortunately seen this in some of the nonfiction books I read as well, which tend to spend way too much time on filler and fluff than actually advancing the main points. This wastes my time and irritates me. (Stuart Russell’s most recent book is majority garbage.)
Not only that, but reading lets you easily jump around to refresh yourself on other parts if you see something reference it much more easily, and you can choose your exact comfortable pace without having to stretch or squeeze the source material unnaturally.
I have a recurring habit of glossing over names I don't recognize when first reading them in a news article and then will frequently need to jump back to find where they were initially referenced when they get mentioned again only with their last name. While this can be a little annoying when reading, it would be far worse in a video; I can't imagine trying to scrub back to the point where someone first was mentioned. At best, the video might have captions (which I'll always have turned on), but it's a lot harder to look at a caption and remember exactly which information came before it and which came after because the text isn't all visible at once.
On the other hand, reading a tutorial on how to do something is faster than watching a video of someone doing it.
It's a lot easier to skip over the bits you already know in written form, with video you need to seek forward, listen a bit, seek forward, listen, whoops too far, seek back a bit etc.
I'm not sure if some people think that audiobooks "don't count", but I think they're the only alternative when you have a heavy schedule and a long commute. Plus you can adjust the speed of the playback as needed. So slowness shouldn't be a problem to put on in the car if your kids are ready to read chapter books.
I think social media, TikTok style short videos etc. are training young people to have very short attention spans. If it doesn't continually provide a Döpamine hit they quit.
> you can also only read for so long before your eyes get tired
I'd say you need some eye correction then. Ever since I got glasses, getting tired by reading means it's time for a visit to the optometrist to update my lenses.
I think the bigger difference is that reading a book allows you to stop, anytime, and think. No other medium allows this. When the story takes an unexpected turn or the author makes a subtle point, in a book you have time to reflect and let it sink in. That's precious, especially in a world where all other media has evolved to overwhelm you with oversimplified pap intended to prevent independent thought. Don't think, just react. But with a book, _you_ control where your focus goes, and nobody else.
> I think the big problem with reading is that it's much slower compared to other media.
Speed is subjective. I read way faster than consuming the same thing with audio or video. Reading also gives me opportunity to wander at a pace I'm comfortable with.
You can skim through text - a skill many kids today don't have. They really think you need to READ every word.
Just skimming through a long-ass tutorial finding the bit you need seems like a superpower nowadays with the younger generation resorting to watching a 45 minute video instead.
You really think that a 40 minute rambling video on how to set up, say, Docker and a piece of software on it is slower than the exact same content written with images?
Personal experience: when I was a kid, I instinctively knew when a book tried to "teach" me something or instill some world view and I immediately know the intention and found that boring. The really exciting books were those that either didn't try to teach anything or those that didn't make it so obvious. Might it be that the contemporary literature for children is constantly trying to push an educational agenda and kids instinctively despise that (as I did)?
Agreed, at least in my experience in the US we are conditioned from a young age to associate reading with tedium and monotony. When you have to 'read along with the class', stop after every chapter to write an essay, hyper-analyze every sentence until all the fun of discovery is sucked out, and generally be in an unpleasant and uncomfortable environment as you do it, you will over time associate the activity in general with those negative aspects and avoid it- despite the activity itself being potentially very enjoyable in a different context
Not sure about that. I would read for fun instead of reading the assigned reading. The teacher would get mad. I'd continue to ignore them and continue reading my book.
So you can't just blame the teacher. If the books give you something essential, you'll turn to them to escape a harsh reality.
School largely ruined my interest in reading until I became an adult and re-found it.
Being regularly told to read boring books, of course any interest in doing it casually was going to go out the Window.
Sure there is value in needing to read certain things from an academic standpoint, Beowulf is a good example. But there was zero reason I needed to read "The Outsiders" when we just watched the movie after reading it anyways.
Just because something is a classic, doesn't mean we have to consume it in its original form to get the meaning.
Instead fill the library with a diverse collection of books, let the kid choose what they want to read, don't rush them, and importantly if it just isn't working let them move on to a new book.
Side note:
I know some people are going to groan at this. But seriously, books based on video games can be a fantastic gateway towards actually caring about reading. It is how I re-discovered by interest in reading as an adult.
Required reading of books I couldn't relate to played a big role in me stopping reading for fun but I don't place that blame on my teachers for it. I doubt they had the freedom to choose which books we were assigned or whether we were assigned books at all.
When your teacher criticizes you for not reading the boring book he/she ordered you to read, you stop enjoying reading and stop reading.
I've read more books than most people, I think. I certainly was in the top percentile by the time I was 18.
I never once read a book start-to-finish that a teacher assigned to me. When I had a book on my desk that I went out of my way to find at the library on one side and then some random book my teacher thought was good on the other side, I picked my book every time. I'd half-heartedly skim through their book and struggle my way through reading quizzes. The only saving graces were Cliff's Notes, film versions, or if the teacher outright read us the book out loud.
At least in our school district, this is not how its done in elementary school. Teachers don't assign books. Either it's completely free choice, or fiction/non fiction, or genre (e.g. mystery).
When I last read about this, it was blamed on 4th grade being the time when you shift from reading just to read, into reading to learn.
My youngest will be 9 soon. Finding books for him is pain. I started trying more in the last few weeks, grabbing more or less random things from my local library (beginning chapter books, chapter books). Most of them are series, he liked a few (Galaxy Zack, Time Jumpers, Desmond Cole books), did not like others (Magic Tree House, something called Byte, Code Breakers, and really anything else I gave him). He mostly outgrew Geronimo Stilton books.
They do have book fairs at school and we always go, but we rarely buy anything as it's mostly gifts. We're trying to get book from libraries as opposed to buy them.
They do have an awesome library at school and he spends a few hours per week there and I see that he's taking some books from there, but it's mostly Captain Underpants, Stick Dog, and other comics.
I absolutely DESPISE Dan Pilkey's books (Captain Underpants and Stick Dog) as well as My Weird School (and other Dan Gutman's products), they really dumb things down and basically lead kids away from "regular" (ie long-form) books. I my opinion they can lead to behavior issues in kids, however it's possible that kids simply start reading them during that period when hormones start kicking in.
I have a bunch of books from DK Publishing (coffee table encyclopedias) and leave them an frequented areas of the house, and notice that kids check them up every once in a while, at least that's something. They are designed for people with decreased attention span, if you want to learn about a subject, you read a page or two and you're good.
My older kids stopped reading a lot around that time (~10yo), mostly after reading My Weird School and Captain Underpants and similar crap.
Older kids did go through the entire Lemony Snicket series though (way before NetFlix series came up) so that's something.
My 8yo has an iPad from school (we were forced to get one from school when he did kindergarten remote) but his time is very strictly controlled, and it's only for studying (no games). He does have access to an old XBox but only on weekends and for a limited time. He will not have a smart phone for a long time, that's where we lost our older kids (around 13).
Just as I said, Galaxy Zack series (he must have been 7 at the time though), Time Jumpers (fairly recently, there's only 4 of them and I don't know if the author will write more), Desmond Cole (about ghosts). But that's pretty much all for the last 1+ years... I'm trying some of the "Scooby-Doo" books, not comics but regular chapter books, and he seems to read them at least. I'm going to try more "grown up" books (just picked up Class Dismissed, it's a winner of some prize or whatever), we'll see how it goes.
But it's honestly really frustrating. I'm older (grew up in the 80s) and we read MUCH more, and I think it's important.
Do you know of any resources/discussions I can look up/participate in?
Some of these might be less interesting to a boy at that age, but here are the books/authors I loved around 9 (lots of talking animals, magic, and adventure/detective plots):
Garth Nix
Sharon Creech
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Jane Yolan
David Clement-Davies
E. L. Konigsburg
Louis Sachar
Avi
Brian Jacques
Louise Erdich
Edward Bloor
Susan Fletcher
"Reader Beware, You Choose the Scare" Goosebumps (like Choose Your Own Adventure but more modern at the time).
I grew into the kind of avid reader that still reads 50+ books a year. My Mom didn't try to control what I read, even if it was complete junk.
I also adored fact books like the coffee tables you mentioned. I remember having a pulpy "100,000 weird facts" book, both covers torn off because it was used so much. This was before Wikipedia.
(I'm going to assume you meant "interesting to a boy as opposed to a girl". If I'm incorrect my apologies).
I only have boys so do not have personal experience but I read/heard that girls do and will continue to read more than boys at any age, and the gap is getting worse starting around that time (7-8-9). I do think that some books are directed at girls, but I do see a lot of books directed at boys too (though not recently, Hardy Boys was a loooong time ago). It's just boys are less interested regardless. Not really sure what to do about that honestly...
From personal experience I think don't rush it and worry about it. Reading gets more fun - perhaps because it is more of an individual understanding - (you read alone and to yourself), after grade 4 even better - grade 5 and 6.
I would suggest some 'classic' adventure stories: most books by Andre Norton - the time trader series for example; Jim kjergaard - Big Red, later on Zane Grey.
Good luck. Have fun with those kids!
My 8yo partially dislikes Geronimo Stilton books because they're "too old" (they started in 2000s and are now mostly done publishing the new ones). The books you mentioned were from mid-20th century :)
> My older kids stopped reading a lot around that time (~10yo), mostly after reading My Weird School and Captain Underpants and similar crap.
Have you considered just being happy your kids are reading stuff they enjoy? If I picked up on this sort of thing from my parents, I probably would have been less inclined to read myself...
If it's painful to you, you're doing it wrong. At 8 you should get him to the library and let him chose himself what books he wants to read. Also, you don't have to like the books he choses. You despising his book choice is irrelevant.
If I just let him do what he wants he just plays on iPads or computers in the library (iPads have bunch of games installed, computers do not have games but you can obviously play Web-based stuff etc). He doesn't care much about books unfortunately. It's my job as a parent to make sure he does read something (I'm trying to find something he likes and something that's more of a long form as opposed to a comic). I do realize that the more I pressure him the less he likes it but I'm doing my best to find balance.
As for choice of books, both Dan Pilkey and Dan Gutman are considered controversial authors and a lot of parents feel uneasy about their kids reading their books. Check parents' reviews on goodreads or any other site, you'll find plenty of negative reviews, it's not just me.
From reading reviews of Dav Pilkey's books in Goodreads I didn't see anything like you describe, is it getting banned by the same fundamentalist Christian parents attacking public libraries in the USA or something?
Reviews are pretty good, most books hover on 4+ ratings.
I won't stand for Pilkey slander. I have worked in education. His books are certainly silly, but they are indeed a very functional gateway to get kids to enjoy reading on their own. Yes, they are immature, they are for kids. No, they won't make your kids into delinquents, especially not if they get your kids to read a lot more than they would have. I think it's important to show kids that reading doesn't have to be all textbooks and dry academics, it can be fun and enjoyable, because why would they ever read of their own volition if by their perception it isn't fun at all?
Well, for starters because HN is not just for programming and startups, things are on HN because they're upvoted (or sometime because it's some YC promotion), and anything that tingles our intellectual curiosity will do (it's even in the site's guidelines).
Look at Ursula Vernon/T Kingfisher (at least the kid/YA focused ones). Danny Dragonbreath might be the right age range for the youngest (text + cartoon), and Minor Mage, Illuminations and Wizards Guide to Defensive Baking would be slightly older (chapter book level).
I'd hold off on the fairy tale (dark. weird) and romance ones (paladins) for a few years yet...
Mine have gone through Paolini (Eragon), Sanderson (all of them. damn he writes a lot), Wings of Fire (Tui Sutherland -- Cute, chapters, skews younger)., Scott Westerfield (Leviathian).
I think I got into reading the most when I hit about 3rd or 4th grade. I think 8-9 years is when the reading possibilities really open up for kids. Its around that time I and many of my friends got into Redwall and Animorphs, and within a few years Harry Potter and books like the Black Cauldron.
Consider an activity that requires reading. For example, my 8-year-old plays "Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom," which involves a lot of reading. She gets stuck and then Googles hints.
Remember: All children are different. I have 3 kids, and their interest level and approach to reading is very different. My oldest loved being read to starting around 6 months, and we started getting into chapter books when she was 5-6. My other two wouldn't sit still for books until around 18 months, and my almost-6-year-old doesn't have the attention span for a chapter book.
If my attention was in a book, I'd be looking up to find one on the roof, one trailing blood and one packing pencils into the toilet.
I'd also not be cooking or cleaning or spending the 1000th hour on the phone with the kids insurance provider. This between activities, assisting with 4-6 hours of homework, working, etc.
Reading to kids every night early on helps. Not being pressured to read stupid crap in school helps. "You can get a library card once you learn to read" helped. Piles of books lying around helps. Older brothers reading a lot helps, especially for reading recommendations.
(Father of 3, youngest is 14 now. after a while, the biggest problem is keeping them in books they haven't read)
I can only speak to my own personal experience, but I was a voracious reader as a child and then sorta just... stopped. The longer life went on, the more I was instructed to ignore or hide my personal feelings and so I just didn't find the characters in the books for my age group, who were largely written by women, to be relatable. There was as large a stretch between the main characters' behavior and what I was taught to do as there was between the real world and Mount Doom. I devoured the entire non-fiction section at my library in the historical and scientific sections by the time I was 10, and then just stopped going because there wasn't a point. None of the books were for me.
I've made attempts to get back into reading from time to time, but I always go into the more rigorous non-fiction areas. I picked up a Brandon Sanderson book and wanted to throw the damned thing against a wall because of how juvenile the narration was. It felt like a very poor apeing of HHTG or Discworld narration without any of the wit.
A lot of the same for me, down to reading silly non-fiction books just to read something as a child. This has become nearly vestigial as I've gotten older.
Books like Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Brave New World, 1984, Animal House, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies, The Old Man and the Sea, etc. made much more sense to me than any of the Judy Bloom style books that are so prevalent. The last of those books I enjoyed was "How to Eat Fried Worms," and then, that only resonated with me because we were forced to participate in a school book dressup day and I realized I could coat crunchy chinese noodles with chocolate and bring them to class.
I was a kid of the 80s and 90s. I grew up outside. I played rough and got hurt and then played rough again. I explored. My parents existed to feed me, clothe me, and yell at me for not achieving enough. Any book depicting a parent who sat their child down to give them sage advice about life was completely foreign to my experience.
I am not sure if you've already experienced-and-disliked his work, but may I recommend Neal Stephenson? I have always appreciated his style of prose, and the way he describes characters. He writes in a nerdy way that I can't quite explain, and I always trust that he will weave separate-seeming narratives together in a way that is satisfying (even if I am often dissatisfied at the _endings_ of his books).
Everyone points to Snow Crash (which I liked too), but recently I also really enjoyed REAMDE and the first half of Termination Shock (I haven't finished it yet). I love the way he describes things. I'd like to say that I could read + enjoy anything he writes on any subject, but for some reason I didn't like his Baroque Cycle books (but don't understand why not).
Also big recommendation for Terry Pratchett. The books all seem silly on the surface but usually have some incisive commentary on wider social issues, as well as being filled with references and humor, subtle and un-subtle. Bonus, they are also a lot shorter than Stephenson's. ;)
> I was a kid of the 80s and 90s. I grew up outside. I played rough and got hurt and then played rough again. I explored. My parents existed to feed me, clothe me, and yell at me for not achieving enough. Any book depicting a parent who sat their child down to give them sage advice about life was completely foreign to my experience.
You might like Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" [0]. The prose style is idiosyncratic, but also arguably his most accessible. It's about a 16 year old crossing over into Mexico and with little else but the clothes on his back and love for horses, but not "juvenile" --- if anything the author elevates the teen's stumbles into love, adventure, and heartbreak, into a grand vision of the American frontier.
Here are some authors to try out instead, biased towards Science Fiction -
Greg Bear - Amazing science fiction author who builds incredible far future worlds. He is asking questions like "what will humanity be like 10k years in the future".
Charles Stross - First off, wonderful characters. His Laundry Files series is like "what is a 1990s geek, complete with a Palm Pilot, worked for a secret government agency that handles occult issues" but over time it gets deeper and the characters get really fleshed out. It is also awesome because you get to see technology move with the time, since the books take place concurrent with our technological progress, so technology like PDAs make way for smart phones.
Elizabeth Bear - Just all around great characters.
Greg Egan - Science Fiction but deeply rooted in real science and math, his homepage https://www.gregegan.net often dives deeper into the math behind his books and includes citations for further reading! Many of his books lack the "science fiction gadgetry" feel (although some have it) if you are trying to avoid that.
Cory Doctorow - He used to be huge in the open source community (not sure, maybe he still is?) his books all explore interesting social issues through the lens of technology driven change.
FWIW many people do not like Brandon Sanderson and I avoid recommending his books.
IMHO all of the above authors have good characters, Doctorow tends to write younger characters (early to mid 20s), but the rest focus on mature characters. Some, such as Stross, let you watch a character start out young and mature throughout the books (I think his main character has gone from his 20s to his 40s, and it shows in how the character acts and approaches issues).
If you really like math, try Greg Egan. Quite a few of his books have the premise "what would be the impact if this odd bit of, real world, complete with citations, math was just a little bit different?" If that is your thing, then you'll be delighted at what he writes. :-D
e.g.
> In the universe containing Seth’s world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a “dark cone” to the north and south. Seth can only face to the east (or the west, if he tips his head backwards). If he starts to turn to the north or south, his body stretches out across the landscape, and to rotate to face north-east is every bit as impossible as accelerating to the speed of light.
> I just didn't find the characters in the books for my age group, who were largely written by women, to be relatable
Were you reading contemporary books or older books? I found that there's lots of fiction for boys, written by men, from the 19th and 20th centuries. A lot of it is very good, many popular classics like Treasure Island. Edit: I see you mentioned that one.
Even Sanderson's "adult" fiction can read as incredibly immature at times. Every character seems to have a caricature of a mental illness. Every thought and feeling they experience seems to tie back to it, and it derails the story while taking away from the excellent world-building. I loved the Stormlight Archives to start with, but they became more and more "woke" (as much as I despise using that word) as time went on.
If you're interested in returning to fiction but through the lens of an adult - a little grittier - I'd recommend Joe Abercrombie, Pierce Brown, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Dan Abnett, and Andrzej Sapkowski.
My daughter is 12 now, and reading tons more than when she was 9. The difference is now she has twice daily access to the high school library versus once a week access to an elementary library.
Not sure how much it generalizes, but what would have had her reading more then would have been a well stocked manga section in the elementary library and daily access.
Manga really is an accessible way to get used to reading, and a gateway. She just finished Lord of the Rings.
My daughters still a toddler, but when she sees me holding a book, she gets hers out too. I taught her to point out what the pictures are, so she does that on any book. If she can read LOTR someday, that'll be something :)
My 10-year-old did not understand that I was reading a book when I was using the Kindle or Libby app on my phone. He was surprised and excited to learn that e-books that I read out loud to him are available in print! This has disturbed me so much that I am contemplating switching back to physical books in order to role model better (or more obvious) behavior.
All that is to say, maybe kids aren’t interested in reading partly because they don’t see their parents doing it … at least in a way that they understand.
One of the problem with a lot of schools is their layout. Yes, they have libraries. But many students have no way to access those libraries during lunch hours except by way of special passes. All school libraries should, by default, be necessarily directly adjacent to the common area so kids can browse during recess in the same way that they are adjacent to school cafeterias.
I don't particularly buy any of the explanations given in the article, or ITT for that matter. I had tons of screen time as a child, that didn't stop me from reading a ton then or now. Schools (and I) were just as test-focused back then. I wasn't getting book recs from my peers so that doesn't make sense to me either.
Maybe I'm an anomaly here but I never found the books targeted at children/teens especially interesting. Around 8-9 my mom gave me a book, a couple hundred pages long, intended solely for adults, but it was about something I was passionate about. I loved it and never stopped reading after that.
My advice: if you want your kid to read, give them books they'd be interested in. Not 'age appropriate books', just books. Read books yourself and talk to your children about them. Build a personal library and lend books liberally, to children, friends, family, everyone. A culture of reading and enjoying books is your best bet for instilling a love of reading in your chilld.
"Give your kids books they'd be interested in" is kind of classic meaningless advice. Like, sure, of course that's what you want to do -- except, if you have a kid who doesn't have an existing strong reading habit, how do you find books they'd be interested in? Like, that's the goal! You can't just assume the solution.
I have a nine-year-old daughter who definitely does read, but isn't a voracious reader, and I've tried a lot of different things to up the amount of time she spends reading. It's tricky. One of the things that I've found is she's more willing to invest in graphic novels than prose novels, but I don't feel like at this point graphic novels deepen her literacy.
I'm not saying they are not worthy of consumption or anything like that, but A: I doubt very many teachers would accept a "book report" written about a graphic novel and B: consuming graphic novels, by their nature, is not purely reading. Your brain/imagination has far less work to do, as you don't have to mentally picture the scenes/people/actions, they are right there for you to look at.
These are... not books.
you don't have to mentally picture the scenes/people/actions
I sort of see what you're saying, even if I don't agree with it. I think the really neat thing about these, are that they present _classic stories_ in a way that is more appealing, and more easily digestible, to kids who might never have considered them otherwise.
I remember when I was in middle school, my English teacher had a box in the corner of comic book adaptations of about a dozen "classic" stories. Several were stories by Poe, and similar 1800s-era classics. (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, etc.) I devoured them (despite loving reading "regular" books too). I've forgotten most of the plots, but remember having enjoyed reading them. Some of them, I've never read the originals, but for others I had already read (or subsequently read) the more-detailed originals. (Anything Sherlock Holmes, at the time, was something I enjoyed.)
Reading these stories as a manga makes you lose out on a lot of details, but probably makes it a lot easier to digest some things. Pride and Prejudice, for example, has pages of details of peoples' social lives, and the complex interactions of several younger and older women, along with descriptions of gardens and houses, and I know that I definitely had trouble keeping track of who all the ancillary characters were. Having visual representations of these characters might make it easier to track that. You lose out on the richness of Austen's prose, but you keep the core character developments, relationships, and emotional interactions that form the basis of the stories.
That makes a while since I've read physical books, but the great things I liked when I was a child was books with illustrations. Not the one with a picture every two pages, but one that tries to paint the atmosphere of the books. For short fictions (150 pages), I'm OK with the cover, but for anything longer a few full pages pictures kinda kept me in. It anchored me in the story.
Picture books have been around from the very beginning. I'd say that the modern graphic novel is just the result of various gradual innovations, one of the important ones being that of embedding text - speech, thoughts, onomatopoeic description - inside the pictures rather than alongside them, which improves the flow of the story, and which helps prevent the reader from becoming focused on either the pictures or text to the exclusion of the other.
I'd posit that anyone whose imagination conjures up mental pictures from a purely written book would be incapable of not doing so with a graphic novel. One's brain could have less to do, true... yet it doesn't choose the easy path. In my personal experience, the scenes of a good story grow and become more detailed in my imagination, regardless of whether they are depicted in prose or picture.
One thing I love about written language is that can be used in so many ways; the vast majority of reading isn't 'purely' reading for me, but associated with other activities - encyclopaedias are reading interspersed with skimming, possibly in order to inform another task such as writing, graphic novels are the appreciation of visual art in a narrative form supported by text, and then there's the entirely practical way in which being able to read "wet paint" helps me from getting myself into a sticky situation.
> I've tried a lot of different things to up the amount of time she spends reading... she's more willing to invest in graphic novels than prose novels
If you haven't yet, push out beyond fiction. In my experience, libraries have a really divergent collection of large, illustrated volumes.
When I was 5-10 I read comic strip books - but also encyclopedias. Specifically World Book; Britannica was too dry.
note: I've no complaint with graphic novels. Sons 1, 2 & 5 were big into them. One is writing fiction. Two was into physics and anime, is now into psychology and early Japanese film making. Five performs+crafts his own music videos.
I have kids, my older is 11 and reads almost whenever she can. She loves to read herself to sleep at night.
We've taken her to the library since she was a baby where we'd find new baby books to read to her. Over time, we stopped picking out books for her and let her wander the isles, picking whatever seemed interesting to her. She usually chooses a wide assortment of things from comics to YA fiction.
My son is much more interested in screens, but he still reads a lot. Whenever we restrict the screens his next default is to read.
We read a lot to both of them as infants & toddlers. We have a couple bookshelves worth of books in the house, but honestly they spend almost their whole reading time on new-to-them library books. We've hit the library checkout limit pretty much every time we go! And it's no waste - every book is returned read.
> if you have a kid who doesn't have an existing strong reading habit, how do you find books they'd be interested in?
I'd start by taking them to the library and letting them explore. Chances are they'll find something that interests them!
>how do you find books they'd be interested in? Like, that's the goal! You can't just assume the solution.
What a strange question?
If they are interested in fantasy movies give them a fantasy book. If they're interested in mystery, the same. If they're interested in Dinosaurs, the same. How is this some great challenge? The things you like to read about are the same things you already like... Are you implying you know nothing about your daughter?
Agree it seems odd. One thing the children in my life are NOT lacking is random interests. Sports books are a great avenue and often highly accessible for younger readers. Pretty much any hobby/niche interest has books that are suitable. Kid likes animals? Give them 'The Soul of an Octopus'. Kid likes scifi movies? Give em 'Childhood's End'. Its really not a challenge when you know them well.
I do. I've given my son who's an avid swimmer a non-fiction book about a group training to try and make the Olympics. I've given my nephew interested in space 'The Right Stuff'. Both devoured the books and went off on their own reading journeys from there.
I have kids and it seems like fine advice. You find books they'd be interested in by knowing about their hobbies, interests, and personality, and finding books that match that in some manner, and then pitching it to them, regardless of whether it is age appropriate or not.
Of course it is hard to do - at least, harder to do than saying "I have a 5 year old, and this book says it is for 5 year olds, so I will have them read it".
I agree with you. Age appropriate usually have terribly boring stories.
To be fair, the same is true for tv shows and movies, I can't stand any "per child" tv show, we moved immediately to disney classics and then onto Miraculous Ladybug (mine are 3 and 5 years old).
As for books, we have a very fun series of "choose your own adventure" books that really hooked them, they love making their choices
This is good advice. My 9yr old reads adult fiction, so long as I have read it and don't think there's anything too "adult" in there. I'm saving Heinlein for his teen years lol.
Yeah, a bit of supervision at that age is appropriate, but my advice is don't screen their books for too long! If they're mature enough to be actively seeking out mature titles, you trying to gatekeep them isn't going to prevent them reading what they want to for long. Better to let them make their own choices and discuss sensitive topics with them as adults.
I was never very keen of non-fiction books. The reason is because I could usually just watch it in movie format which is a lot less time-consuming.
The last fiction book I read (over a decade ago) was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the reason I read it is because I had watched all the previous Harry Potter films and wanted to know what happens but the movie didn't exist yet at the time. I was hooked and there was literally no other option. I'm sure this effect worked very well in J.K. Rowling's favor.
Some people claim that they prefer fiction in book format because they can fill in the gaps and imagine the worlds and characters however they like... But personally, I prefer getting as much information as possible; visual information is part of it. If I had to choose between watching a film in color or black-and-white, I'd choose color for the same reason... With black and white, I could let my mind wander and assume that the person's clothing is made of gold yarn but I'd rather not as it mostly distracts from the story and those aren't details that interest me.
When I consume fiction, I'm looking for narratives, external perspectives, messages, lessons, principles and insights in a format that is as objective as possible. In book format, there's too much that comes from me, I end up projecting my pre-existing biases into the story and it doesn't feel as satisfying or mind-expanding.
I prefer fiction in book format because the depth of characterization, thought processes, internal monologues, etc. allow me to connect with and understand the characters at a level that is impossible when watching an actor portraying that character on screen.
Personally I find the messages, lessons, principles, and insights come through a lot more clearly when I have access to the characters' internal thoughts, perceptions, and reasoning, and you get a lot more of this in the printed version.
Throughout grade school, I had several different environments. Most of them were unsupervised and not regimented. Before class, class, after school, home, out of the house, exploring away from the house, time with friends.
My kids had class and home and sometimes activities. None were unsupervised or non-regimented.
Coming home from exploring and popping open a book is nice. Opening a book and hoping it provides some escape from the 160th hour in a box with adults is desperation.
> Yet I can’t help but be worried that the kinds of books that changed my life between ages 8 and 12 are falling by the wayside. Is there room for the thoughtful, serious, beautiful young-person’s novel in 2024? Can you publish Bridge to Terabithia in the age of Captain Underpants?
...Uh, come the 90s, Bridge to Terabithia was a required reading book that I don't think anyone my age cared about. The popular series I remember were, in no particular order: Animorphs, Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, Harry Potter, and Redwall.
I think it's much simpler, adults don't know what kids are interested in. For example, just before that age I was interested in animals and the solar system. Read anything I could find on them, and had no interest in anything being pushed by school or parents. At age 9, I just happened to see Animorphs #11 The Forgotten in the impulse-buy section of our local drugstore and begged my parents for it - for anyone unaware, the Animorphs covers showed kids turning into animals, which was how it drew my attention. That set me onto sci-fi in general, then fantasy - and I've kept reading since.
It's probably a mistake to think kids need new books to be published. The classics are classic for a reason. There are many childhoods worth of incredible books already available. I'm not weeping for struggling authors. If they write something incredible it will be noticed, if they don't then just like you said Bridge to Terabithia, Nancy Drew, Redwall, HP, The Hardy Boys, Chronicles of Narnia, Eragon, etc, etc, etc. still exist.
> ...Uh, come the 90s, Bridge to Terabithia was a required reading book that I don't think anyone my age cared about
> I think it's much simpler, adults don't know what kids are interested in
Pretty much everyone I know (including myself) who read a lot as a kid but doesn't read much anymore identifies being forced to read things in school as the reason they don't. Being forced to read stuff we didn't find interesting isn't the whole issue though because I think there are things I might have actually enjoyed reading in another context. In my experience, the larger issue is what happened in the classroom alongside the reading. Most if not all teachers I had would give quizzes designed to ensure we kept up with the reading that essentially would pick out tiny random details from the assigned chapters ask us about them, and that took the focus away from actually absorbing the higher-level themes and insights that I'd normally make when reading on my own. Even worse, when discussing things afterwards in the classroom, there was usually a certain analysis or viewpoint that was deemed "correct" that we were supposed to figure out and be able to reproduce when we were tested on the entirety of the book after we finished it. Making me read a book to memorize random details and _not_ have any thoughts of my own on what things meant because I would just get told what to think later ruined any enjoyment I used to have of reading; they might as well have just given me a page of bullet points to memorize than give me an entire book full of pages and pages of stuff to distract from what they actually were trying to make me learn.
When I was in elementary we had a program where you could read a book and then take a test on that book. If you passed the test you would get a prize from snacks to coupons at restaurants. There were no limits and the book choice was large.
I ravenously read through books at first and would take the test asap. I was gaming the system, but through this I found books I became enthralled with. This was the foundation of my love for reading.
Not sure what my point was, but I wonder if any programs like that exist anymore.
I stopped reading because it became a larger part of school. I strongly disliked school, so reading was a part of the thing I strongly disliked. Really, anything they tried to force was soured on me for a long time.
> Indeed, several people I spoke to mentioned that middle-graders’ lack of phones created a marketing problem in an era when no one at any publishing house has any idea how to make a book a bestseller other than to hope it blows up on TikTok. “BookTok is imperfect,” said Karen Jensen, a youth librarian and a blogger for School Library Journal, “but in teen publishing it’s generating huge bestsellers, bringing back things from the backlist. There’s not anything like that right now for the middle-grade age group.”
This part of the article is very off-putting to me. You don’t need TikTok to find good books for kids. Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy.
The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject.
> This part of the article is very off-putting to me. You don’t need TikTok to find good books for kids. Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy.
They need a library stocked with "books that kids will enjoy," recently published doesn't have anything to do with it. It's not like filling the school library up with stuff only published in the last 3 years is what we need to get kids reading.
> The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject.
I doubt that's the root cause. Frankly, all the other things seem more significant: making reading education more test-focused and less fun, screens (in a zillion different ways, subtle and obvious), the pandemic breaking peer-influenced reading, etc. They're all probably working together dis-synergisticly.
I also wonder if there's other missing social components. I remember in elementary school feeling that reading "chapter books" was important step to being more mature. Do kids still feel that way? Of course I also often read pulpy junk that was fun or interesting, not serious.
The OP said:
> Connor was more blunt: “Maybe you think a book about a school shooting is really important,” she said, “but kids want to read a fun book. That’s what kids want today—they want to have fun.”
I think that's always been true. IIRC, I always disliked the "important" books I was forced to read for school (e.g. the ones that tended to win important awards from adults and get articles written about them in the New York Times to this day).
> It's not like filling the school library up with stuff only published in the last 3 years is what we need to get kids reading.
I’ve heard newer English literature evangelized quite a lot since older English literature gets more and more Eurocentric the further back you go. Usually on political grounds, but also with the claim that newer literature is better and more relevant to especially diverse children’s lives.
Recent can be a generous time period, but it's not unimportant. When I was very young, I was able to enjoy the Hardy Boys and the Chronicles of Narnia, but even in the 90s, just forty years after the latter was written, they both felt very, very old. When I started finding more current writing, like Redwall or Animorphs, I never looked back.
> This part of the article is very off-putting to me. You don’t need TikTok to find good books for kids. Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy.
> The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject.
You also need "evangelism" from people in a position to influence. That's unlikely to be librarians; and parents/teachers are also not the best-positioned for that.
Overall the costs of social media likely still outweigh the harms here, but it seems to me like they've identified a legimitate "good" usage in encouraging reading in certain niches.
How to replicate that without social media? Gotta make a bunch of local kid "influencers."
I'd like to propose an update to Godwin's law; call it NPC's Law or maybe just Trump's Law if we're being literal:
"As an online discussion of a problem grows longer, the probability of assigning blame to Donald Trump approaches 1."
Shall we wait for the factual rebuttal or just assume this offhand dismissal is all of it? I have yet to hear a word about the content being inaccurate, just people like you, that didn't like the presentation.
My apologies for not refraining from charged words when my country is being stolen out from under me, by some of the worst people in the world, that keep getting elected by the "fuck your feelings" crowd.
Also, it's germane to this topic.
You, however, remain above it all, so enjoy your pedestal.
Believe it or not, I feel the same way. But writing angry screed on the internet accomplishes literally nothing. Worse, it further entreches the people you disagree with.
That's bullshit. The people I disagree with spent the last decade yelling, "Fuck your feelings", and you think discourse is going to pull their heads out of their asses?
My rant won't either, but I feel better, and if any of them happen to read it, I hope they enjoy it.
Good luck with your campfire and mallows. I'll even send over an .mp3 of Kumbaya and you can hold hands with them, and discuss whatever you like.
I mean, they're literally banning books ... like, that was a major platform issue very recently ... "why does everyone keep blaming the cannibals for all the half-eaten corpses lying around!?" ...
Keeping certain books out of school libraries for younger age kids is not a bad idea. Just like preventing children from watching porn is not a bad idea. Parenting is about finding a balance between protection and pushing their boundaries. Schools should be safe places to learn without having to worry about your kid coming home wanting to transition into an asexual raccoon or whatever the hell is trendy that year.
>Keeping certain books out of school libraries for younger age kids is not a bad idea.
Except, this isn't what's happening. FFS, it's happening in all libraries, not just the ones meant for the kiddies. You know this, yet paint a different picture, in support of your position.
>Just like preventing children from watching porn is not a bad idea.
Now we draw the false parallel between non-pornographic books and actual pr0n.
>Parenting is about finding a balance between protection and pushing their boundaries.
Now the feel-good statement, providing us all with a justification for their statements. THE KIDS! All of this is somehow aside from the fact that the parents and other children and the internet are much more influential than a book by Gloria Steinbeck, that makes racists uncomfortable.
> Schools should be safe places to learn without having to worry about your kid coming home wanting to transition into an asexual raccoon or whatever the hell is trendy that year.
Finally, we draw another parallel between 2 things that are completely unrelated, because we have no real justification for our point, just feels.
I’d love to see your sources showing the data to support that books are being banned in “all libraries”.
This is mostly a conversation about morality and I dont think we’re going to convince one another to change our principles here so my instinct is to say “you win” and move on.
But for context, I personally despise Donald Trump and think he’s a symbol of the downfall of our country. And I mostly think the government should stay out of any choices about how we raise our kids.
The books in school libraries issue is part of a larger discussion about who gets to choose what our kids learn. I don’t have the full answer but I do know, for my kids, it is not “gender studies graduates and communists”.
Sources: The internet and news. If you look, you'll find it easily.
This isn't really about morality alone, imo. This is about attempting to legislate morality with a hammer, which is just as bad. There is no basis for many of the books being banned, other than Republican horse shit.
For the record, I'm not seeing Dems line up to ban books. It's activist clowns with an axe to grind.
It's all wrapped up in Jesus and FOR THE CHILDREN, but that's a lie as well.
I seriously doubt many 9 year olds checked out The Diary of Anne Frank, yet it's being banned, because some idiot thinks they know better than everyone else.
We do agree on the govt. staying out of child rearing.
The current crop of "people" that get to choose what people can learn are not the people any sane person wants making these calls, yet here we are.
Lastly, your kids, along with everyone else's are exposed to things, daily, that you have zero control over. You have zero input, when the event happens. You're sole option is to teach your kids to think like rational humans, have some compassion for others, and lastly, just leave people alone to live their lives.
So did you read that USA Today article? I did not see a single example of a book being banned from a non-school library. In fact, every example in the article was about a book being removed from taught curriculum, or a state passing a law requiring schools to notify parents when a book contains a sexual content.
Your last point makes me think maybe you don’t have kids? Because yes of course every parents knows that they can’t control every aspect of their child’s experience. This discussion is specifically about what should and shouldn’t be in children’s libraries. I think parents should have a say in that. Kids are like sponges. If you tell them it’s totally normal to kill puppies, some not-insignificant percentage of them are gonna kill puppies.
I loved the book Middlesex, and have nothing against transgender people. My concern is that a “movement” has started around this naturally rare phenomenon and it has become increasingly trendy to cut off your penis or breasts. This is not what sane parents want for their children.
This is still about legislating morality, which has never worked, in any circumstance that I'm aware of. This is simply minority groups imposing their personal views upon everyone else.
Why does a minority group get to decide what books are available?
Why does a self-described religious minority get to impose their values upon everyone else, in a country founded, in part, on religious freedoms?
A simple example of the fallacy of book bans is the Bible. The bible covers things that most people would not want a 9-year old to read about, yet, it'll never be banned, because it's special. smh.
People can censor things all they like, at home, but shouldn't get to determine who gets to read what, based on their own personal POV.
> Keeping certain books out of school libraries for younger age kids is not a bad idea.
The book banning efforts aren't limited to keeping books out of school libraries for younger age kids, or even school libraries generally.
(Nor is it limited to books where that argument is reasonably applicable Even when it is in school libraries for younger children.)
> Schools should be safe places to learn without having to worry about your kid coming home wanting to transition into an asexual raccoon or whatever the hell is trendy that year.
Gender identity differing from gender assigned at birth is a low-rate but widely observed phenomenon across times and cultures. Stripped to this from what is either hyperbolic or driven by propaganda designed to obscure real issues in your description, no, its not something parents should be protected from in their children.
Watching someone do a thing and doing the thing are different. One of the pitfalls of a lot of recommendation systems is that they don’t know or care about the difference. Watching a video about a book is fine, but then you need to go out and read.
It’s a little like reading an article before commenting. Most people don’t. You will get a lot more out of the conversation if you do though.
I think you dramatically underestimate the influence that TikTok has on young people. If you want something to be popular amongst young people, making it popular on TikTok is a huge way to do so.
Libraries already have thousands, if not millions, of books on hand. I don't think it's a funding issue.
There’s a lot more cost involved in running a library than buying books. Staff and building upkeep are big expenses. That said, you want to have some newer books coming in, too, if you want to keep kids interested.
I have quite a few teacher friends in Georgia and NYC, and I can tell you that this is the case for them. Organizations that represent teachers have said so themselves. Hard evidence is best though. Do you have numbers to dismiss their claims?
What is the case, they literally are not allowed to have (any) books in the classroom? Can you be specific as to the mechanism here? Do you yourself have any link to any evidence? You (the article) are making the claim.
There is a lot of book banning occurring and the rate seems to be increasing fast (see links below).
There are penalties in some jurisdictions and zero teachers want to face the kind of shit that has gone on with parents and politicians, churches and local body meetings.
So rather than search out each book they have and keep track of its status, then recheck a few weeks later, just remove the lot. Teachers do not have time for this crap, and why risk their jobs?
It’s chilling and it’s hard to see how this isn’t the aim. ‘Who ever needed more than a bible?’
> So rather than search out each book they have and keep track of its status, then recheck a few weeks later, just remove the lot.
That doesn't pass the smell test. The only way I can see that being even remotely true is if the teacher's goal is mainly to push up against someone's line, politically.
Even in the most hostile environment, I doubt you'd run afoul of anyone with a well-stocked library of widely beloved classic children's books.
I'd think Tolkein's "The Hobbit" would fit this description? Or CS Lewis Narnia series, one-offs like "The Secret Garden", Also Edith Nesbit, fantastic children's author, "The Railway children" probably her most famous. century old at least.
The Hobbit is banned by multiple school districts. It actually pissed off a lot of teachers too. It is books like that being banned that make teachers not want to have a library at all. It is really easy to have a banned book, and teachers do not have the time to source each book in their already existing libraries.
But I guess in their words:
> the teacher's goal is mainly to push up against someone's line, politically
Wow! I'd no idea the Hobbit was banned anywhere. Madness. Its just a work of art. Hardly even controversial. Kids should be able to make their on judgement about it. People need to be allowed to think critically. I could possibly see why one might disallow, say, Mein Kampf in a school library but even then you could possibly have, for historical purposes, a copy annotated with a lot of warnings and reminders of who the author was and what he did.
Sure, but then you’re just reinforcing the attitude that reading is just for stodgy old people rather than a way to understand the world as it is today.
You need a bit of both old and new surely? I'd argue, that great literature, whether for kids or adults, is timeless. Our daughter loved learning Greek legends for example in school. The challenge I think with modern stuff can be, finding the good stuff amongst the crp. Whereas classic stuff has stood the test of time, the crp has mostly fallen by the wayside.
This is why I ask beloved by whom and classic by what standard.
Look, Narnia has witchcraft in it and depicts Christ as a lion. It's probably blasphemous (though, yes, I get that it is intended as a regular Christian allegory and is not supposed to be blasphemous). It is not universally loved in the evangelical community and is a possible target for a book ban. It's also got racially insensitive stereotypes depicted and that's a target for complaints from a different direction.
The Hobbit is indeed a popular book, that has repeatedly been the subject of book bans, again for the magic/wizardry/witchcraft thing.
The point is, if your job is to be an elementary school teacher and people try to get you fired for having a book they find objectionable, it's a lot keep on top of. The books people object to vary wildly.
Additionally, when people make these classic book lists, they suffer from what I think of as "classic books that adults believe children ought to like" syndrome. Sometimes these books overlap with what kids actually like, sometimes not.
Interesting reply :) Some thoughts: (1) "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" contains in certain ways a re-telling of the Gospels in a way that speaks to children. But its a great story in itself, one can take or leave it's resemblance to the bible, its also enjoyed by atheists. I'd debate seeing it as blasphemy. Why would God object to the bible story being respun by an author who's themselves a Christian with such decent motives for writing? (2) Racial insensitive stereotypes- sure that's a problem in older books, some bad examples too in the highly entertaining "Just William" series, but these can be an opportunity to talk to children about what's appropriate to say , and how thinking has moved on in good ways. I'd support reprints of such books having extra text added to point out that some content would nowadays be considered racist or whatever (3) Hobbit being banned for witchcraft - to be honest, whoever is banning this is nuts IMHO. Should "Hansel and Gretel" be banned too then? You're probably gonna tell me it has been. Kids have enjoyed stories about witches for centuries. Who has the right to tell them that's not allowed? They know its fantasy. (4) I take your point about it being a PITA to look after a library as a school teacher, especially in the current climate particularly in USA. Maybe there needs to be a ban on bans? ;) Apart from restrictions due to age appropriateness, who is anyone to tell someone else what they're allowed to read? (5) "classic books adults think children ought to like" -its a fair point- I can imagine some adults might do that, sure, not all kids like classics. With our kids we just try to guarantee them access to the good stuff new and old, partly just take them to the library and see what they find. If one ever pushes a kid to read, or read a certain thing, they'll rightly push back. Not for adults to force them, just to provide them with quality stuff. I think the original article though was complaining of the market dropping out for content for 9-yr-olds, but really you'd want to read a mix of classics and modern though, right? Same as a symphony orchestra wouldn't play ONLY Beethoven or ONLY 21st century composers?
> The only way I can see that being even remotely true is if the teacher's goal is mainly to push up against someone's line, politically.
Doesn’t this swing both ways? Surely banning books is seen as a fairly extreme and intended to impose your views on someone else. What other interpretation is there?
> Doesn’t this swing both ways? Surely banning books is seen as a fairly extreme and intended to impose your views on someone else. What other interpretation is there?
No. I was only responding to the false hyperbole that teachers can't keep books in their classrooms anymore.
Also, the whole controversy around "banning books" is stupid and full of dumb propaganda. That extends to the term "book ban" itself, which is a bit of manipulative, misleading spin that rivals "death tax." If anyone was really against "book bans," they should demonstrate their commitment by fighting for a Hustler subscription and some "gender critical" books for every classroom. It's really a fight about who gets to do the banning.
That pen.org article focuses on "number of bannings" but mixes together state law (predominantly Florida alone) and individual school district policy choices.
It also avoids discussing which age is appropriate for these topics. Most of the support for including explicit sexual violence seems to be about high school, and even there it's not clear that explicit content is necessary to these purposes (I'm not familiar with the books in question).
Then there are the books by Kendi etc. and an example where that was required reading in an AP course (college-level). Sure, that's debatable but isn't of much relevance to reading, reading for enjoyment in particular, by young kids, which is the topic of this HN post.
The pen.org article says "books aren’t harmful—censorship is." So it gives no credence to any kind of concern about age-appropriate topics.
> So rather than search out each book they have and keep track of its status, then recheck a few weeks later,
This sounds like nonsense.
Sure, they may have to do this for books that are close to crossing the line, or they could simply leave out any controversial book.
Does that mean that the school library won't have some books? Well, yes, but they already don't stock "every book ever written".
My school, back in the 80s, did not keep Nabakov's Lolita. The public library had it, though.
School's aren't there to "teach the controversy". I said it back when the controversy not being taught was Intelligent Design, I stand by it in 202x when the controversy not being taught is LGBT.
Teachers are leaving the profession en masse because they feel unsafe, unsupported, underpaid, and harassed by national organizations.
Teacher unions list book bans as one of the primary reasons for leaving.
They have data and testimony backing that up. We see legislation and organizations all over America.
Here is a quick article describing the number of books being banned and the effects it has on teachers [1]. It list numbers. There are numerous articles all over the internet from well respected organizations like the NYT saying the same stuff.
The numbers are already presented by them. We see the teachers leaving. We know education is suffering from systematic national pressures from both political sides. Feel free to look it up. hell on first principles, book banning has a direct effect on libraries teachers can have when they include such classics. Again, what numbers do you have? Or just first principles logic to dismiss them at all?
From first principles, it is normal to ban material. The ages and exact policies are debatable but these articles are entirely one-sided.
It appears that most of the handwringing is about politically disagreeing with the bans, not hardships of obeying bans. There are always bans. But they want this material (sexuality, gender, "race theory") available even to pretty young children because of their societal goals/agenda. Others do not want that. Fight.
This recent WSJ article mentions primarily reasons of salary and student behavior, as any layman would guess from first principles. It did mention "political battles over issues such as how race and gender are discussed". Well, this is not going away -- the battle is fought from multiple directions. Another direction is the industry profits from institutions being morally obligated to buy a lot of new diversity-related books.
> From first principles, it is normal to ban material.
Sure.
> It appears that most of the handwringing is about politically disagreeing with the bans, not hardships of obeying bans
That is not true. The ban list is overly broad. The hobbit is banned in some locations. Harry potter and asoiaf... Maybe high schoolers and middle schoolers shouldn't be reading that stuff. Multiple teachers in multiple districts have been disciplined over books they did not expect. It is far more sustainable for teachers to avoid this issue.
> But they want this material (sexuality, gender, "race theory") available even to pretty young children because of their societal goals/agenda
I am not going to judge this statement's veracity. Let's take it as true. As I mentioned before, the issue would then be that they are also banning other books that have nothing to do with this, and that still makes the jobs of teachers difficult. It is not feasible to have this much overhead on book bans because of political battles and also expect teachers to manage this overhead.
Thanks for sharing your first principles argument. If you have the time, please share some numbers.
There seems to be a lot of "first principles" thinking in this debate which leaves out essential factors. It ignores that children have brains of their own with likes and dislikes who will readily decide for themselves how much they like a book. It gives no benefit of the doubt or generosity to school staff. And it ignores the fact that good libraries are historically a mix of lots of different content that is clearly not all good.
That does not say teachers can't keep a library. At most it says that the titles in said library need to be reviewed/approved by the school.
The emphasis on "taking away libraries" appears to be partly politically motivated.
This isn't about censorship per se since we have a baseline expectation of censorship. We already don't allow teachers to stock racist material or porn in classrooms. This new thing seems to that there are LGBT books which veer close to the edge with stuff like explicit sex scenes.
It mentions other "proposed" laws, some of which seemingly setting a lower bar. But "proposed" laws aren't banning libraries now.
In any case, how can this possibly be an important and relevant issue today contributing to an already-observed decline in reading in 9-year olds nationally?
The fact that these laws are applied to all books with LGBT content regardless of what they contain - while non-LGBT books with sexual content remain unbanned and available to minors - is what makes it censorship[0].
Sure but that was backed off. The law does not, in fact, apply to all books with LGBT content regardless of what they contain. There was a March 2024 legal settlement clarifying many cases that are explicitly not prohibited.
Also, do you think these laws have been important regarding the "decline by 9" of 9-year olds reading for enjoyment?
One possible issue on the contrary side is promotion of kids' books involving racial diversity themes. Often such moralizing books are not very interesting for pure entertainment value. They are there to meet a market trend, some may be better than others but in general have not stood the test of time.
> That does not say teachers can't keep a library. At most it says that the titles in said library need to be reviewed/approved by the school.
It says the teachers have to remove or cover up their classroom libraries until their books can be approved by the school. I don't know how you can honestly argue that that doesn't constitute removal, even if it might be temporary.
> In any case, how can this possibly be an important and relevant issue today contributing to an already-observed decline in reading in 9-year olds nationally?
I don't know enough about the subject to comment, which is why I didn't say anything about such a relationship. I only responded to you because you were saying someone else was wrong and I didn't think you were right
I brought this up because the slate article cites book banning as a reason for decline of reading for enjoyment by age 9. I am arguing it is irrelevant and also essentially false in terms of classroom libraries generally not being removed on any significant scale (or at all, probably) even in Florida.
The article cited a particular school district directive which seems to be a temporary review procedure for its high schools. It would be disingenuous to say that means teachers can't keep a library, full stop, and even in that case it seems it was immediately backtracked. The law in question has since been clarified.
It’s a pretty standard pattern in right wing politics. Defund a thing, it becomes less efficient, politicians claim the thing they broke is better handled by the private sector, defunding continues. We have seen this with pretty much every public good since the Reagan/Thatcher era. The nice things we had in the West have been gutted and sold off for parts.
It should tell you something that these “concerned parents” never pressured Amazon to stop selling the books they complain about. It was never about the books.
> They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy.
Sure. The next step is helping them making a decision on which book to read and provide a social environment for doing that. Libraries do not really do that and haven't done that even in the early 90s.
I am sorry your experience at libraries was so unfulfilling. To me, libraries opened up a world of knowledge. When I was a kid my mom would take my brother and I to the library and just let us loose. As a kid I could spend what felt like days looking at cool cutaway diagrams of castles or reading about how black holes worked. And at the end I took home 5 or 10 of the most interesting books. And it was all free!
If you don’t need TikTok to find good books, how would you recommend finding good books? Even if you’re at a library that doesn’t narrow things down all that much, I’ve been to libraries with several floors filled with bookshelves.
Long before TikTok and YouTube and even Google there was the Dewey Decimal System. We use it to categorize books into a hierarchical tree structure. So I think what most people do is to find a category they’re interested in and look inside that category for either subcategories or books they find interesting.
The Dewey Decimal Classification is terrible. It's an incredibly dated system with serious flaws like an pervasive European/Christian bias - for instance, notice that class 200 ("Religion") is almost entirely devoted to Christian topics, with a single subclass 290 for all "other religions" - and a lack of effective classifications for modern technical topics.
It's also basically useless at classifying works of fiction, to the extent that most libraries don't even bother using it for that purpose. Standard practice is to group all fiction into a few broad categories (like "mystery" or "fantasy", as well as a catch-all for general fiction) and shelve them alphabetically by author. Needless to say, this isn't conducive to browsing.
i was going to say that a detailed classification of fiction would not really help finding interesting stuff. apart from the broad categories as you mention, interesting books are more defined by writing style, characters, etc.
i am struggling with this as i keep looking for new books to read. being in a book club helps a lot.
> Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy.
At 9 I had no idea how to go into a massive thing like a library and make a selection for myself. "Word of mouth" made a lot of choices for me when I was young.
In the NYC public libraries there are kids sections where you just walk around and look at books. If something seems interesting then pick it up and read it. I preferred things with technical pictures so the kids section was quite boring.
When I was that age my teacher had a thing where reading something like 3 books got you out of a lot of homework and your parent had to sign a paper listing what you read and you turned it in.
As a kid who already hated school, and used reading as an escape from a pretty shit childhood, I was clocking in 5 books a week.
The teacher first accused my parents of lying that I read that many books, because it quickly got to double digits, but I was able to summarize all of them off the top of my head, so instead I was just forbidden from doing it altogether.
> The teacher first accused my parents of lying that I read that many books, because it quickly got to double digits, but I was able to summarize all of them off the top of my head, so instead I was just forbidden from doing it altogether.
> Not sure what the lesson is there, lol.
Lessons learned:
a) Incentives matter (economy 101)
b) If a market offers possibilities for arbitrage, market participants will attempt to make use of them.
c) By market laws, arbitrage opportunities will close very fast, so in the long term, markets can be assumed to be arbitrage-free.
d) Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
e) Authorities (or those in power) will attempt to cheat you. Don't trust them.
In high school we had to make a list of 12 books we read in the year. I was reading a few a week. My list contained 12 books.
(Side note, we lived some distance from the library in elementary school, but we got through the books -fast- so the librarians gave us extra library cards to reduce visits to like once a week. I also got adult-cards pretty young (like 10) because I'd read all the kids books and was already reading older fare. This was in the days before YA was a genre :)
Of course you had a poor teacher because they obviously desired to teach you something, but forgot to tell you what the lesson was. Other than they were a bad teacher, but i guess you may already have known that.
was there any benefit to reading more than 3 books in a given time period? if not i would have only reported 3 books. it's none of their business what i do beyond that.
the lesson is that overachievers are often not welcome.
Same - except many of my friends were reading for fun. Oh this has a skeleton on the cover? Guess I’ll read everything this guy/gal ever wrote.
All the libraries I’ve been to recently are very well set up for discoverability. Especially the kids section. There are hundreds of books on display with some indication of what it’s like and themed sections and all kinds of stuff
Everyone seems to say children should go to libraries more.
At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.
I suppose the fact that books were physical and I did not have something like TikTok on my phone when I was 9 helped me read whatever was lying around.
As adult I used Kindle for a while but got back to sourcing physical books, even though I have no permanent place and books are difficult to travel with.
> At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.
You know what isn't cheap in the 2020s? Space.
My grandparents had a full-ass room just for books. I can't even fit my modest blu-ray collection in my apartment, they sit in storage along with my DVDs and physical books.
I've got a Kindle and Calibre with hundreds of books and they don't take any space.
Your grandparents’ house must be huge. We never had a room just for books, not me, not my parents, not their parents. A family of 4 in 2 bedrooms, one living room. Shelves are not expensive and you’d be surprised, they can fit quite a lot of books. Over time some books were lent or given to libraries, others added.
When I was a kid we lived in a small apartment. We still managed to have room for books though. A single bookshelf or two takes up only about 10 square feet of floor space.
I've become an avid reader of web novels when I found out about them as a teenager sometime before 2010.
Idk, for me it completely removed the urge to get physical books. I've got a Kindle too at some point, but I felt the form factor was terrible for reading fiction. There is a reason why newspapers always put their publications into columns, because it makes for an extremely fast reading experience - which is great for fiction.
Another factor is that web fictions are targeted at people that just want to read for a short moment, so you're basically only gonna read for 5-10 minutes before the chapter is over and you're done until the next publication.
IMHO the biggest danger to the medium (written fiction) are LLMs. Since they've become well known, the amount of content has skyrocketed and most of it is without any point. No coherent story that develops with characters growing over the months/years you're following them.
I never got into reading web-native writing, though sometimes I wish I did. I also don’t piecemeal publishing, even though I know many classics were published that way initially. On the contrary, I like to read for as long as I want, finishing a book is always frustrating.
Agreed, LLMs are an issue and will probably reduce the amount of written content published in the open (or at all).
Going to the library means you pick what you want to read from a much wider variety of available books, not just the ones the adults in your life deemed worthy of purchase.
I would almost certainly be on a diet of some attractive but unchallenging fast food like teenage detective novels if I had that choice as a kid. Would my life actually have turned out better if I didn’t read the likes of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Garcia Marquez back then? Perhaps, but at the time I was enthralled and didn’t mind being able to choose among the books adults in my life had around (likely knowing I would end up reading some of them).
I don't really think it's a gender thing, my friends who were boys and I talked about books pretty frequently. They were pretty much the same as videogames, comic books, movies and shows to us so we'd talk about them in the same way.
I specifically remember that when the first Harry Potter (I was a child cut me some slack) came out I bounced off it because I didn't like it, and then one of my friends at school couldn't stop talking about it and got me interested enough to pick it back up.
And don't even get me STARTED on the LotR books. Or Star Trek novelizations (which I still consider books).
> Nice humblebrag. Also, I find this hard to believe.
If they did, they didn't tell me about it. That might tell you how much the other kids talked to me. Not much of a brag now is it? :-D
However, I have good reason to believe it. I went to the public library every weekend when I was in elementary school. I never, ever ran into anyone from my class there in all those years. If the other kids in my class at age 9 read for pleasure, they weren't anywhere close to me in volume.
It's not a brag, and not a real achievement. The tallest kid in a class at age 14 might only be of average height in a crowd 10 years later. This is the same thing.
> "[W]ord of mouth" is probably mostly for girls. I never once had a boy tell me growing up that I needed to read a particular book
Crazy gender stereotype based on just anecdotes (nothing wrong with saying it tho, its always awesome to hear about different experiences)
Most of the books that changed my life, got me into tech, programming, got me into business, entrepreneurship, hustle, etc.
All the books, podcasts, etc were either shared directly to me by my male friends (im male too) who insisted i read those books for my betterment cuz those books were acc. to them : “Awesome” , or books that i discovered while exchange discussions about what books are we reading right now, exchanging reading lists, etc.
There are tons of girls out there who hate reading books, (my mom included, she always has hated books, outside of school homework and exams),
I do not like reading fiction books much, nor do my peers, we’ve exchanged book suggestions since childhood, now even more with more and more internet friends.
Ive had great books on gardening, or agriculture, or history, etc recommended to me either inside books by authors, or by random telegram groups consisting mostly of nerd men.
99% of the books recommended to me were by men, and im a man.
So i dont think its a girl only thing, plenty of people exchanging book, just go to any major reddit forum on reading and booksuggestions (like r/suggestmeabook) and you’ll find tons of men who are more than happy to give you suggestions, if you cannot find classmates or neighbours to share with
At 9 (and before) i had bookit; where if you chose one of many of the sponsored books at the school (or public) library you got a personal pan pizza coupon.
An interpretation is book cos have cut physical benefit advertising for cents on the dollar internet advertisements.
That’s ok, part of the joy of going to a library is finding out about new things you’ve never even heard of. And we also already have human recommendation systems, they’re called librarians!
I ended up in the government section. Reading reports about arms and equipment transfers from the US Government to the Middle East made in the 1980s. It was definitely fascinating, especially because the Middle East was in the news at that time, but I really was only there because I had _no idea_ what to actually do.
I'm not saying the library doesn't have exceptional value, or that 9 year olds shouldn't be in it, but maybe for younger patrons a "concierge" type service or "first timer group experience" being available would help a lot.
Typically that concierge service would be the conversation you have with the librarian as you sign up for a library card. What kind of books do you like, are you interested in Middle East arms transfers, oh have you heard of this one, etc. If you’re 9 years old perhaps that would also involve guiding you to the children’s section, although it seems you’ve turned out alright regardless.
I assume they were talking about the school library, rather than a big library downtown somewhere. Certainly that is where I first fell in love with books. Sometimes all it takes to make someone a lifelong reader is a good librarian with a shelf full of curated picks, eye-catching covers facing out.
As the article notes, school libraries are getting defunded and politicized, which is extremely sad to me, and disproportionately worrying for the future.
Well my school did trips to the local library so that everyone could acquire their paper card for borrowing books. The process of borrowing and the different sections in the library were explained by the librarian and at least in my mind that helped a great deal to seek out books on my own.
It's interesting that all problems in America are due to "funding". It's actually quite curious because funding was a problem for electric vehicles, funding was a problem for space, funding was a problem for literally everything. But then sometimes people come up and succeed at things that others have described as a funding problem for ages.
I think I can conclude reasonably from this is that the lowest efficiency lever one can pull is funding. Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance. That's because the people there only know one answer to every problem: "funding".
> Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance.
It could also be because the schools with the most special / high needs children need the most funding.
Schools in poor neighborhoods need more help just to achieve median results. They need to contend with issues like teen pregnancies, drug use, violence, and kids who don't even have food at home.
Compare those challenges to rich suburban kids and of course the schools in poor areas need more funding.
The billionaires who look for every tax loophole possible certainly know the value of “funding”. They are currently funding their yachts to take them to their superyachts. Private equity controlled health care companies are extracting billions of dollars in profits (read: overcharging people who want to live) leading to “efficiencies” like understaffing and under training which cause thousands of excess deaths every year.
Elon Musk received plenty of government funding for his companies as well. And guess what? BYD sells more cars than Tesla now (a few years ago Elon said he wasn’t worried about them and now they’re suddenly a problem) because of what? Government funding. Governments have also funded the majority of fundamental research which made present day technologies possible. Even today NIST, DARPA, NHS, NSF etc continue to fund science and technology research.
I think most of our problems are due to digital marketing....
it's not good for stuff.....something's....but it's not a panacea.... Meta and Google and Tiktok all claim otherwise.....but the cultural effects show.
advertising in the modern age is not good .....
it's not sticky.....
it's vapid and forgotten faster than the fly you accidentally swallowed at some point in your life...
This whole thread - and that whole chunk of TFA - is totally alien to me.
When I was 9, our school had a small library with a librarian (or at least an on-duty teacher), and if you wanted to read something you could always go and ask her what she thought you'd enjoy - and that was on the off chance you couldn't find something that looked appealing.
There are also public libraries where you could do the same thing with your parents in tow.
Reading is a solitary activity. I stopped reading when I was in a relationship, so I have to spend some leisure time together. It was terrible at first, then I found Lars Von Trier films and the burden was a bit better, so... that was it.
Also, society has changed so much.
I grew up in a time when there was no such thing as "children's books". My first reading was some pulp fiction, then some bestsellers, then Dracula. I got to Wuthering Heights when I was n. I found it gripping, but I understood almost nothing. Luckily - crazy luckily - I have a friend, a n-year-old girl, who also read Wuthering and introduced me to it. So I read it again.
Another issue is books are too long. Especially non-fiction books. Book publishers know no one is going to buy a 50 page book, so there has to be filler and excessive detail to make a book long enough to be sellable.
It ends up just being the same thing over and over again. The author explaining minute details about the day they interviewed someone, what the weather was like, extreme details of the interviewee's facial expressions. The author somehow managing to fit the Stanford Prison Experiment in the book. The author going into excruciating detail about the scientific method. The author giving an unnecessary history of the topic back to when humans were hunter gatherers.
It has been a very long time since I came across a non-fiction book that didn't feel like it could've been 50 pages long. I end up giving up a few chapters in.
I have an heuristic for this. If I can find the book in an airport, it has the filler you mention. Textbooks are another item where this usually does not happen.
How we sleep, the secret to business blabla, consulting tricks, the life of tech visionary, or lifehacks for the 21st century: filler,filler, filler.
Self help books are especially bad for this. I was reading Dopamine Nation and the author describes their office:
> My office is ten by fourteen feet, with two windows, a desk with a computer, a sideboard covered with books, and a low table between the chairs. The desk, the sideboard, and the low table are all made of matching reddish-brown wood. The desk is a hand-me-down from my former department chair. It’s cracked down the middle on the inside, where no one else can see it, an apt metaphor for the work I do.
> On top of the desk are ten separate piles of paper, perfectly aligned, like an accordion. I am told this gives the appearance of organized efficiency.
There is something really funny about reading a book about instant gratification and the ways modern technology has altered our demands for it, and then criticizing that book for not getting to the point quick enough.
I do agree that 90% of self-help books are better left as blog posts, though. To be honest, all of these "how to fix your attention span" books have been repeating the same thing for nearly 2 decades now. They don't really say anything new about how to do it; they package the same repeated things in new packaging.
The book has a distribution challenge in that the content is the same for all people. Sort of like how every programming language book has some content about setting up ones environment, building and the basics that make the rest of the book usable for the person of least experience/knowledge.
Just skim past the umpteenth telling of Abraham Wald and the bulleted bombers and get to the meaningful parts. Even Thomas Jefferson condensed the New Testament down to 84 pages. [0]
It sounds like you're talking about adult non-fiction bestsellers. I don't think that has much to do with the reading habits of nine-year-olds. There are plenty of 80-150 page books being published for this age group.
Pound-for-pound, science fiction short stories are perhaps the most worthwhile and personally enriching literary medium.
I love an endless series of giant fantasy novels, but I've read so so many SF short stories that really stick with you and make you think. As long as you're not going back to the old pulps, any decent collection is probably really good.
Books are trending shorter since the advent of ebooks since a short ebook looks the same as a long ebook. So that DEFINITELY doesn’t seem causal to me.
I’ve also been hearing for a long time how novellas are the future of books and people simply don’t buy them and they remain a niche format and I don’t see that changing.
Part of this is because a lot of popular non-fiction (i.e. non-academic) comes from long form journalism. Personally, I like that style but understand that some people don't. The focus on that style is not pure information --- the authors aren't writing a textbook or a self-help book --- the authors are telling a story. I could read the wiki page on the Wright Bros, but I read David McCullough's "The Wright Brothers" because the writing is graceful and elegant and the storytelling is vivid and captivating.
The worst offenders, in my opinion, are the self-help/business books that aspire to long form journalism but are probably better off left as a bullet list on a blogpost. These ones are also infected by the idea that everyone of their bullet points needs a vague connection to some elaborate neuroscientific explanation and a "case study" that is usually some oversimplification. Cal Newport is painfully guilty of this, for an example; but it's everywhere in the self-help genre and especially in "airport" books. (I actually think Newport is a better blogger and occasional NewYorker writer than a book writer. His "insights" aren't that grand.)
Fiction, well, I think a long work of fiction is fine as long as the story can handle it. My tastes tend toward florid, "purple", and quite dense prose and descriptions. I like when an author "paints a scene". On the other hand, I find the recent trend of extremely "to the point", stripped down "minimalist" writing that is very common in a lot of contemporary literature (Rooney, for example) and fantasy writing (Sanderson, for example) to be downright boring and comes off as half-baked. There are probably too many 500+pg books because of publishers though. Fantasy has its own obsession with "epics". 200-250pgs is actually a great goldilocks zone that doesn't get published so often nowadays, but should make a comeback. The big publishers hate them though.
Haha. Most books are padded or compressed so they fit pretty much the same volume. A paperback can have dense, small type in it, or larger type with wide margins to "puff up" the size. I've also noticed some paperbacks having thicker pages to make it look like there's more material. I suspect books the same size can have a 2:1 difference in the amount of text.
Idk about anyone else but my school had a program called Accelerated Reader where you could read a book and take a test about it to score points. Harder books were worth more points, at the time I think Anna Karenina was the "hardest" book on the list. Anyway the drive to win was what initially got me reading a lot.
The industry can’t depend on Captain Underpants forever, even though, as [Brenna Connor, an industry analyst at Circana, the market research company that runs Bookscan] noted, “The devil works hard, but Dav Pilkey works harder.”
"Book people" know why 9-year-olds stop reading. "We have met the enemy and he is us.” [0] (which my child read from the reissue [1]).
Take a closer look at how much homework children have, and how much assigned, mandatory reading children have.
I went to a private "college prep" high school, and the amount of assigned, mandatory reading was insane. I spent so much time reading assigned novels that I just didn't have time to read for pleasure. (And why read for pleasure if I already spent 30+ minutes reading a boring / awful novel as part of my homework?)
Once I was out of college, I rediscovered reading.
This was my experience as well. Loved reading when I was younger, but lots of assigned reading from elementary onward poisoned the well, so to speak.
In retrospect, it's surprising how rigid the required reading was at my school: no choice in the material whatsoever, so the most important engine that drives reading (curiosity) was held out of the equation.
Any tips? I didn't, somehow. After leaving high school, then university, my brain went into full on "be productive all the time" mode. My brain somehow doesn't think reading is a good use of my time, so I've settled for audiobooks when falling asleep or on long drives.
The last book I was able to devour and actually enjoyed was the Harry Potter series, which ended just before I went to university.
Oh yeah, I've listened to all of this and some of Dennis E. Taylor's other stuff, as well. I've also listened to all of ExFor and everything Andy Weir, almost everything narrated by Travis Baldree, too.
Its the next blockbuster series. If my mother, who claimed murderbot was too complicated and has never played video games loved it... the series has legs.
Seconding the "audiobooks count" that Imzadi said, I'd like to note that the Martian audiobook is exceptional, and I've heard that others by Weir are excellent as well.
You might enjoy reading _short_ novels. I really liked the "All Systems Red" series, each of them feels short enough to read in a day. If you enjoyed Harry Potter, you might also enjoy the Invisible Library series, or maybe the Harry Dresden novels. They both felt like fun-pulpy romps through magical worlds.
Maybe you can convince your brain that reading at bedtime is a good use of time because it promotes healthy sleeping by not being on a screen. ;) (It hasn't worked for me, I still have a backlog two shelves long.)
It sounds like you enjoy books, the problem is convincing yourself you deserve to take time to read them. To quiet that anxiety:
> The habit of reading is a meaningful way to meditatively intake large portions of information. Reading helps with creativity, focus, and communication. Reading light-hearted, entertaining books increases these skills while preserving focus for work in a way that reading the latest O'Reilly book does not, while making reading non-fiction books in the future easier because you've been practicing reading.
Separately, humans are not machines. In general, we aren't wired to constantly be doing things, and taking time to play or to enjoy stories or to do absolutely nothing is an entirely necessary maintenance task.
Removing joy and rest from your life for productivity is the biological equivalent of accumulating technical debt. This debt can intensify until you need a complete rewrite; when this happens, it's called burn out, and it's kinda really bad.
> the problem is convincing yourself you deserve to take time to read them
This hits home in so many more ways than just reading. I find it hard to do any leisure activities because doing them means I have spare time to do any of a thousand items on my personal backlog. It's very stressful.
the average audio book is 10 hours long. let's say reading a book takes 10 hours. then you only need 20 minutes per day to read one book per month. it should not be hard to find that time.
what you say suggests that you have a backlog of non-leisure activities that you feel are more important.
i solved this by making leisure activities more important. call it work-life balance if that helps. leisure is part of a healthy day. i started going for a daily walk for exercise. i considered important for my well being. i watch one tv show per day. and only one. i simply decided that is part of a healthy routine. and i made a list of what i want to watch so i don't waste that hour on random stuff. i still do spend more time on random stuff, eg youtube, but that is a different problem. when i run out of time, i stop wasting time on youtube, but i don't stop that one tv episode. i figure i have earned the break after being busy for a day. i should do the same with listening to audiobooks/stories but i haven't been able to re-establish that routine yet.
General change to my habits has been that if I’m not feeling a story, it’s okay to put it down. The amount of reading I have trudged through because I was afraid of quitting…
I suggest Stephen King as a reintroduction for general audiences (since a lot of people have a hard time vibing with high fantasy, I know I do).
He's not the greatest writer of all time, but he's enjoyable while not feeling like you're reading YA or something age inappropriate. And his classics are classics for a reason.
Can't go wrong with Carrie, The Stand, Misery, The Shining or Salem's Lot.
One key thing is: don't feel like you have to suffer through reading an entire book if you don't like it. If it's a chore to read it, find something else - different author, or different type of book.
If you need shitty books to practice giving up on, I can autograph and send you some books written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author who shares my name and writes terrible books. Email in profile.
I would add: don't try to convince yourself that you actually like this book because it has great reviews or your friends recommended it. Plenty of novels with great reviews are actually trash (IMO, of course, but also in yours, which is the point). Admit to yourself that you don't actually like it and that's OK.
I wouldn't call audiobook "settling", I enjoy them more than books with a great narrator.
What got me back into reading was Harry Potter. I hadn't read a book for fun since middle school and had grown to loathing reading of any kind from all the assigned reading. (just give me the cliff notes).
HP was new, all the rage, and wife convinced me to give it a try (she had always been an avid reader). I had maybe 3 books to catch up on and I read them all back to back and was eagerly awaiting the 4th. We'd do midnight releases and each buy our own book and didn't sleep till we were through.
Setting aside time for relaxation and leisure activities is highly productive, but unfortunately that isn't something that becomes obvious until your work visibly suffers from "all work and no play". The costs of overworking yourself truly are insidious. It really is akin to a rogue wave - you don't know how deep it runs until it finally hits.
> The last book I was able to devour and actually enjoyed was the Harry Potter series
Actually, it was Harry Potter that got me back into reading. I read the first 5 books over the course of 2 weeks the summer after I graduated college.
In some cases I'd see an interview on late night television and read the book the guest was promoting. More recently I read a book that was discussed on the radio during my commute.
In other cases, there was a subject I wanted to learn about, so I'd read books about the subject, or biographies on people who were known in the subject matter.
Sometimes I'll see a movie / TV show based on the book, and like it enough to read the book.
And: J. K. Rowling's new series about Coroman Strike (written under a pseudonym) is excellent. Read it slowly, though. I'm also slowly re-reading Harry Potter to my kids and it's a lot more enjoyable in bits instead of as a binge.
I would up vote trying audiobooks.
They are great for traveling, also cleaning up and other chores.
Classic narrators make everything fun to listen to. There are voices for lulling you to sleep. Others to make the stories exciting.
The Harry Potter books have two narrators -they are both great, in different ways.
Lord of the rings is much more fun in audiobook format.
Try to find audiobooks read by Simon Vance, for example - he reads the Master and Commander series, and the original James Bond series.
Have fun.
I'm not an avid reader, but I've rediscovered reading in the past couple years. A few tips that help me:
1) Keep a list of book recommendations mentioned from HN, podcasts, friends, etc. Eventually, some will be recommended twice or more, and that may be enough to tell your brain "this will be worth it."
2) Try non-fiction if you're usually a fiction person, or vice versa. I grew up enjoying only fiction. But now I realize I enjoy non-fiction a lot more.
3) Don't stick with boring books for more than a couple chapters. I've been using thriftbooks.com, so it's affordable to toss a few dollars away and try again.
- Try something entertaining instead of something useful. Pick books out of interest, not out of pragmatism or obligation. If a book doesn't work for you, try another.
- Make it a special time. Start your bedtime routine early, light some candles, make tea and have a go at it. Or sit in a nice café, or after a nice picnic. I love reading myself to sleep, or with tea on the balcony in the morning.
- Remove distractions. I read on a disconnected iPad with no internet and no apps except for reading and notetaking.
If you want to put it in productivity-over-everything terms, reading before sleep is a really good way to wind down and get solid sleep. It's also a great way to build vocabulary, get different perspectives, and enjoy idle time without doomscrolling.
Yeah, don't read "worthy" stuff, or things to enlighten yourself, find your particular brand of entertaining trash and mindlessly consume it.
I recommend bad litrpg and progression fantasy personally. Mother of Learning is a good one to start, it's free on royalroad.com or available on Kindle.
Absolutely agree. The definition of "worthy" comes from a narrow group of haughty English majors. That may be your thing, but there's a huge world of non-worthy stuff out there.
Those chinese cultivation novels are my guilty pleasures. I still look for a good translation, but they what I reach for when I just want to pass the time (and they're really long).
Here's a trick that helped me after a ten+ year hiatus and having my attention fried by social media:
A lot of people who have lost their attention span to technology will find themselves reading but not absorbing, their mind wandering, until they realize they'd "read" 3 pages and don't remember what happened.
So read slow and with purpose, but most importantly at the end of each page, ask yourself what you just read and have a conversation with yourself about it. This helped rebuild my comprehension and focus. This is similar to how English classes will read a book as a class: Reading then discussion, reading then discussion. But instead of as a group, do it as an internal dialogue.
it takes some practice. and i find it's more difficult with short stories because there every detail counts. if you miss a few details from a longer book, it tends to matter less.
and then while listening i need to do an activity that doesn't require mental focus.
so i can't sit in front of the computer, unless it is mundane photo editing or some other repetitive task that doesn't make me think.
going for a walk and housework work for me. especially housework. there is nothing else i can do while washing dishes, cooking, doing laundry or cleaning. the work doesn't require much focus, and is quite repetitive. that makes listening easy.
One of the things that helped me was to have an actual dialog with the book.
For non-fiction books, this means pushing back against claims that appear to be unsupported. When I read in a paper book I do so with a pen to make notes in it (I don't sell my books, and I obviously don't do this with library books), but ebooks just get marked up in my ebook reader and it's very nice. It's also good when reviewing a book because I can see all of my thoughts and questions and often can answer them by the end of the chapter/section/unit.
For fiction books, this ends up being a "what would I do there/what would an ordinary person do?" It's very helpful to try and place yourself in the character's shoes and see how you may have reacted differently or if you agree with the character understanding _why_ you agree with them.
i was an avid reader in my youth but stopped when i entered university (and got a computer (guess where i spend most of my time instead of reading books ;-))
about a decade ago i discovered audiodrama, short story audio magazines and finally whole audiobooks. i mostly listened to them on my commute. later when i had no commute i started going for walks (to get out of the house and move) and i also listen during housework or other mundane tasks. i tried listening before going to sleep, but that didn't work because i would doze away and miss sections while hearing others. that meant hi had to relisten the next day to catch what i missed.
i get about an hour of listening time on average, sometimes two, when i have a good daily routine, less otherwise.
one hour per day is enough to listen to 2-3 books per month. i alternate between all three types so i usually only get one book in a month, sometimes less. but that adds up too. my reading list has almost 80 titles. with an average of 10 hours per book you can finish a whole book in a month with only 20 minutes per day.
In my mid twenties I had a mundane 30 minute commute in a crowded London tube which meant no internet (maybe thats different now). I cranked through so many books in that ~2 year timespan.
If you're into fiction, can I suggest looking for short story magazines in your preferred genre. Look novels are great and all, and I love devouring a book that really hooks into me, but the modern publishing landscape is full of 500+ page books that are part 3 of a 48 book series. That can be overwhelming and certainly difficult to drag yourself into if you're not in the habit of reading.
Sort story magazines introduce you to multiple authors and multiple stories, most of which could be read in 30 minutes before bed, and give you a chance to enjoy reading for fun without committing to a who "extended universe" of material you feel like you have to know.
If SF&F is your preferred genre, "Asimov's", "Analog", and "Fantasy and Science Fiction" are old staples that are still being published. "Locus", "Lightspeed" and "Strange Horizons" are also options, with Lightspeed and Strange Horizons being relative newcomers to the field. weightlessbooks.com carries a couple of those and some magazine in other genres too if SF&F aren't your jam.
It's not reasonable to do a cognitively demanding job all day and then expect to do cognitively demanding leisure at night. Unemployed people are great readers.
Maybe it's a problem of taste? Maybe you don't like the books you've tried to read because of the contents of the book?
From what's popular these days I think you should try reading: The Martian and Cradle. If you don't like it then stop reading and go for something else.
If you want to try a lot of different stuff I would recommend trying web novel on sites like RoyalRoad, Web novel, Scribblehub. Just pick something, read a bit. If you don't like it, find something new.
Regarding time reading is faster than listening. Also way more efficient than movies, series or video games. I can’t play story based video games anymore like Witcher 3 because at one point I’m like I’m wasting so much time compared if I was just reading the book.
Also books are less isolating than listening, for example if you are in a park with nature sounds.
If you enjoyed The Expanse you could try the last 3 books. If you haven’t read for a long time it’ll be hard at first to stay focused but by the middle of the book you should hopefully get the feeling of wanting to pick the book anytime like a new episode of the show just dropped.
Read when you're fresh (set your alarm earlier and read before you get out of bed) rather than when you're tired at the end of the day. Use a habit tracking app (mine is Streaks on iOS). If tired, walking around the house while reading ticks off pages and steps. Read books you like; quit anything that you feel is a waste of time. Read while eating breakfast if it's not antisocial. Pick shorter books to get momentum (Old Man and the Sea, Into the Wild). Read on your phone, so it's always an option. Put your Books app prominently on the home screen and relegate social media apps out of view.
I never really had any homework, or I never did it. I never read for pleasure either. I don't think it's that, but I get your point. Too busy = no time for reading for fun
Not just no time, but making even otherwise fun things mandatory with a volume that's overwhelming can suck the fun out of it and/or make it seem dull.
Yup. I initially thought that it would be a good idea for me to major in Computer Science.
For some reason I majored in Finance after a few years of electrical engineering courses.
I don't think I'd be programming today if I had to be force fed programming assignments.
Computer Science is actually kinda of lousy for teaching the things most programmers can do. To the point where if I was hiring, I'd rather hire someone who's less experienced and self-taught, but with some sort of "interesting" background, where "interesting" is almost anything that teach's critical thinking about abstract concepts and how to articulate ideas. Could be anything from a Journalism degree to someone who spent a decade working their way up the ranks of a machine shop from operator to foreman.
I can tell you the last time I had to write a singly-linked list implementation though. October 17th, Nineteen Ninety Never.
Yes, but the most important lesson about data structures is to let someone smarter than me implement them, and just use the widely known, well documented, battled tested one.
I decided to jump on this bandwagon a while back and asked ChatGPT to do some tedious legwork for me with a bunch of geo-search primitives. I'll say the CS and general CS expertise came in very handy because boy this thing was wrong. Not obviously wrong but subtly and confidently wrong. :-)
Agreed. The things I look for most when hiring programmers (assuming they have a resume showing they have the skills) are attention to detail, empathy, and ability to communicate without feeling like I'm arguing all the time or pulling teeth.
Empathy tends to win here: you need to understand why people are using the software and how they are using it to make good decisions.
Communication tends to be better with people that have empathy.
Yes, I also find that physicists don't make the best auto mechanics. Mechanics never need to derive the equations of astronomical motion when repairing an engine block.
Why do you believe that Computer Science is less "critical thinking about abstract concepts and how to articulate ideas" than Journalism?
> I can tell you the last time I had to write a singly-linked list implementation though. October 17th, Nineteen Ninety Never.
The point of writing (and working with) linked list implementations in a CS2 course is not because linked lists are something you'll have to implement yourself later (although there are certain areas of systems programming where return values of various system calls are, effectively, linked lists).
The point of working with LLs in CS2 is because they are an extremely simple data structure that you can inspect the entire implementation of; and their use of references/pointers gives practice with that concept before upgrading to the concepts of trees and (linked) graphs; and their fundamental structure and properties are so different from array-type list implementations that they provide a good first example of two different implementation strategies that can produce exactly the same output/result but with different space and time usage properties; and the parallel implementations are also a motivation for abstracting interface away from implementation and keeping data private and interface public.
So, that's why I teach linked lists in CS2. I try to be very up-front with my students about that; sorry to hear that your professors maybe weren't. I pretty solidly agree that a LinkedList per se is not particularly useful to a working software engineer; but that's not why we teach them.
At one point I came to the realization that "reading is supposed to be fun". But it wasn't for me during school. At all. I hated every minute of it.
It made me wonder if children in the future will be forced to watch movies and play video games in their "literary education" and whether they will hate watching movies and playing games because of that.
Funnily enough I recently came across an online discussion asking why people used to like khan academy, when today “everyone hates it”. The poster was about 15, from memory, and apparently it was standard practice in their experience to use khan academy within classes or as assigned homework.
The thread seem to be missing even stronger case, that was true for me: making otherwise fun things mandatory, period. The volume doesn't matter; that a book was assigned as mandatory at all deterred me from reading it. Same with homework, which I was spectacularly good at avoiding.
Same here, absolutely. And the fact that that highly appraised literature seems to be mostly a fringey group of self-centered 'intellectuals' that think they're so important that their drivel must be spoon-fed to teenagers.
When can we change our education to promote better educational outcomes instead of training for the test or alternatively being devoid of fundamental knowledge/skills? It feels like we should be progressing in this area much faster then we are. Yes - i know - its way to broad of a question.
I'm sure it's more complicated than this but something that definitely has had an influence -- when budgets for a school district are determined by how many students pass vs being left behind, there is an outsized incentive to prepare students for the test instead of for more broadly reasoning or for enjoying the practice of learning.
Some of us determined that school is something to be avoided. To squeak through it with absolutely minimal effort. Never do the assigned reading. Never do the homework.
Which leaves mountains of free time (an irreplaceable commodity, you will agree) for reading whatever the heck you like.
I had plenty of assigned reading and half-assed it because high school classwork was not hard l remotely hard. Writing an acceptable book report was trivial with only some brief scanning.
I had a similar, but different, experience. My issue is that in school I approached reading as a task to be completed in the most efficient manner possible - consuming as much as I could, as rapidly as I could, while ensuring an ability to regurgitate on demand. So I never really got to experience the joy of actually reading; in many cases I never even actually thought about what I was reading. So many books have amazing moral tales, metaphors of major events, and so on - yet one can completely consume books and remain absolutely clueless to what you're really reading.
Then as I aged, at some point I ended up getting into classical literature somehow, and now that I actually "got it" and could see and understand what it was saying - beyond the words themselves, it became a complete joy to read. For instance reading "The Republic" in modern times can make one think Plato was a prophet more than a philosopher. Or reading Aristotle's "Politics" can give one such an incredible amount of insight into thinking in the past, society, and even into your own thoughts. Or reading Aurelius' "Meditations" while bearing in mind these were the inner thoughts, never meant to be published, of not only one of the greatest leaders in history, but also arguably the single most powerful man alive at the time. It makes reading feel amazing. Another less well known example would be The King's Mirror [1]. A Norwegian text from 1250 that was a training/philosophy manual, in the form of a Q&A, intended for King Magnus VI. Highly recommended.
Now I see things like middle schoolers being assigned Animal Farm and I just kind of sigh, though it's not like I can think of a better solution!
I fully agree with your point, and your experience is similar to mine in a sense.
I got lucky in never "bending" to the task of reading because I had to, just reading the school curriculum books if they were interesting to me. And I enjoyed reading greatly. But some books Ichose to read I slogged through and could not enjoy them because of my lack of maturity and perspective. Revisiting them revealed a lot more depth. And my reading of them grew with my understanding of the world. So I guess the experience is normal. And I wonder if I did not slug through those books at that time if I would have ever reached the insight I had on subsequent reading.
I am certain things from a good book stick with you, even if you don't recall it explicitly. It just lingers there in the back of your head, like bricks that are piled up on each other until you don't see them anymore but you do see the wall they form.
I agree as well and had a similar but slightly different experience. I think that some of the material that I read in high school was great; but not appropriate for my age. While reading that material in school, I was bored and frustrated because I did not have enough life experiences (and empathy) to understand the emotional delicacy that the piece was bringing to my mental palette.
When I grew up (just by a few years) and accidentally re - discovered a work that I hated in school, I found it extremely deep and thought provoking.
Maybe high school students are not a great audience for appreciating a lot of literature, at least I wasn't.
Any book or movie that I enjoy I end up doing a deep dive on it's author, their situation in life, what was going on in the world at the time it was written, etc just to get a context for what may have inspired the creation. Sometimes a single detail about someone's past can instantly click the meaning or moral or conflict they were trying to portray.
It’s not just homework it’s outside activities… but also the time spent at class is often wasted so there are not enough hours in the day to do everything.
> Take a closer look at how much homework children have, and how much assigned, mandatory reading children have.
Yeah. My nine years old goes to a school where there's no homework. She now reads a lot: kids at school all shares any cool book they read and then they all want to read it. Today she brought back a brick and started reading it. She devours book.
Out elementary and middle schools have a no to low homework policy. By high school the most they assign to non AP courses is 15 min per class.
Only assignment is reading 30 min a night, any book they want (including graphic novels). Yet that does not foster a love of reading.
I had a ton of homework, but still read a book a week (though I did not do sports, only band, so had way more time than most mainstream students in that regard).
My reading waned when I had kids, basically as working parents I am always too exhausted to read, I always doze off. So I can’t set a good example, which I wonder if that is part of the problem — my mom was always reading.
My 9 and 11 year olds have no real homework (primary school in Australia) which seems to be public school policy for this age group. Rarely, it's 10 minutes on one night in a week; they often ask for homework and are enthusiastic if given worksheets. They read for literally hours a day.
I read huge amounts as a kid but then lost the habit as an adult. It takes any number of habits and tricks to try and get it going again. Like someone upthread, I'm often fighting tiredness, and one trick that can work is prioritising reading in the morning and leaving news and social media for when I'm tired.
At the same age in southern California, my kids had what was supposed to be 1-2 hours of homework a night. Which was made worse by ADHD. And, additionally, I had to teach my son basic skills that school failed to teach him. Like spelling and his times table.
I attended school in Georgia (the US state) and it was similar for me at that age; their goal was to assign about an hour of homework each night.
By the time my sister reached that age (she is 10 years younger), it had gotten so much worse: they were aiming for about two hours of homework. It realistically took closer to 3 or 4, and with many tears shed, even with me and both our parents helping. (She has since been diagnosed with ADHD.)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, she and I have both decided to not have children. Being a kid really fucking sucked then, and it's probably even worse now.
15 mins x 7 periods so 2 hours of work after working from 7-3, some light sport or after school activity until 5. Home, dinner, and more work? Absurdity.
Yeah, and the worst part is that 15 minutes per class isn't enough to actually do any useful learning. It's just going to be two hours of pointless busy work.
I wouldn’t expect it to be 15 minutes from each class each night - more like a weekly assignment from each class that means each night you do 1 hour of one class, half an hour each of two others, rotating.
For many classes though, 15 minutes/night would be very useful. Language learning, for instance, or music practice. Most kids would benefit from 15 minutes of writing prose for any reason, and I think even high school math topics could provide 15 minutes of worthwhile practice questions each evening. All of these are things that you get better at with repeated practice.
This isn't really advice, because ymmv, but young me just ignored homework (with minor exceptions).
I started programming at age 12, and that was more interesting. School was mostly boring so I didn't feel the need to extend it at home.
Looking back I recognise I was fortunate. My teachers didn't seem to over-mind (perhaps because I was well behaved and engaged in class, and did ok in tests). My parents didn't seem to mind as long as my teachers didn't complain too much.
I also now recognise that I went to a school with progressive values, good teachers, and a focus on flexibility (to a point).
I used to joke afterwards that I had a "unspoken agreement" with my teachers. They could hand out as much homework as they liked, and I would quietly ignore it all.
> My reading waned when I had kids, basically as working parents I am always too exhausted to read, I always doze off. So I can’t set a good example
I don't know if you want to set a good example so this advixe is certainly unsolicited, but in my case reading really took off after having children. First when they were tiny and needed to be carried/pushed around which is great for reading, and now that they're toddlers and I'm in the habit, I squeeze it in where I can.
I hope we can read together more as they get older. I'm really looking forward to re-reading some classics like the Hobbit and the books about Narnia. For every year, the space of literature they are capable of expands massively.
I think a lot of it is what goes on at home (surprise, this is basically for all education). I know I did reading as part of my schoolwork and homework. The reading I most remember was during the summer. A few were summer work related and needed reports, but the book choice was open ended. Many were not school related but encouraged by my parents.
Is 30 minutes really the amount of novel reading we find unacceptable these days? I’m not asking quite as snarkily as that sounds.
Do you think the problem would be alleviated if the hours of class time were shorter and (maybe) handed over to a study hall period or even to just being sent home? In college I know the theory is supposed to be that one hour of class time equals two hours of homework (though that rarely happens in practice, in my American experience). But high school has far more hours of class time.
For me as a kid who loved reading and fell out of it by the time I finished school (and then re-found that love decades later), the biggest contributing factor wasn't 30 minutes of reading for school. It was forced reading of books that were uninteresting to me in the first place, and then having to engage with those books in a wholly artificial way.
There's a lot of interesting things to be gleaned from books and certainly expanding students horizons is not in and of itself a bad idea. But school reading is painful, whether it's 10 minutes or 4 hours. You're given pre-selected material with pre-selected lessons to be taken from that material. You are expected to write summaries that explain why the curtains in the foyer of this book were blue (regardless of whether there's actually a reason the author did that or if the lesson planner just hallucinated some meaning out of thin air), and then discuss obvious lessons in non-fiction materials as if there was any other purpose to writing the book in question except to present that lesson. Sometimes you're given books to read that match whatever the current hot social topic is, again without regard to the quality of the books, and then expected to regurgitate the correct opinions on that topic as if the book presented those opinions, and again without regard to what the book actually said (or failed to say).
Reading in schools is presented and treated with the rigor of a mathematical proof, and the soullessness of dispassionate scientific observation of dying rats. It should be no wonder that what that is the experience of children with reading, so many fail to find a hobby or pleasure in it. We don't seem surprised when most students don't do mathematical formulas in their spare time after learning it in school, why should reading be any different?
Everyone always complains about the "blue curtains". Did everyone but be ready the same book, or are you just repeating a meme? (for what purpose?)
But I do analyze literature and study mathematical formulas in my free time, so maybe I'm built different.
It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
I can confirm, we ”analyzed” the color of the curtains in some novel I now forget. I believe they were, in fact, blue. The teacher was adamant details like that were always meaningful and certainly not just to paint a scene. It was far from the only instance of such “analysis”.
What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
>What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
I find it disappointing how poorly the lesson is taught. The question shouldn't be 'Why?' [The author did something] it should be "What?" [did the author do]. Whether they were colored for a purpose or not, what does the blueness of the curtains convey?[0]. The point then is to be able to generalize to 'what is this media conveying,' occasionally with intent[1], and 'how do I create media with my intended conveyance'.
[0]'Nothing in particular' is a valid answer, that the protagonist's favorite color was blue could be another.
[1]e.g. in a commercial: actors, wardrobe, setting, et al are all very intentionally selected to convey the message 'this product will make your life better' or similar.
> What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
Same in german. Die Leiden des jungen Werther - dry, boring, irrelevant.
It's certainly possible that "blue curtains" specifically is a memetic reference that I've absorbed via osmosis, but the experience of having to analyze minute details to a ridiculous extent was very much a true one, regardless of the specifics of the example.
I feel like the "blue curtains" problem with reading in schools is akin to the "shape -> rectangle -> square" problem that early OOP education has. It might be a very basic and simple attempt to explain a concept (inheritance in the case of OOP, symbolism in the case of books), but its simplicity and inoffensive genericness is so overwhelmingly devoid of any of the usefulness that the concept brings that its more harmful to the students than helpful.
I've long argued that programing courses are broken. They present a concept with a hugely simplified model, and then tell you when you don't understand why you'd want to do it that it will make more sense when you build a "real" program. I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced. A sort of "in medias res" method of teaching.
I think something similar applies to a lot of the way literature concepts are taught in schools. Boring books that don't connect with the readers and students are assigned, and then terrible examples that are either overly contrived (blue curtains) or blindingly obvious (the bad guy kicks the puppy which shows he's bad) that they just turn the students off. There's no excitement or interest nurtured into the concepts because the taught examples are so lifeless and far removed from what is actually possible.
>It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
My personal opinions on the matter are
1) "too much mandatory study". Yeah when they're adults, they'll need to work 8 hour jobs, but kids need time to be kids and they need time to let the things they're learning sink in and discover real world applicability in their own lives. 6-7 hours of schooling + 1-3 hours of homework + projects + "extra curricular" programs adds up to a lot of time where students don't have any time to find anything interesting in what they've learned before they're shuffled off to the next things. School is stressful enough when you're just learning, but all the other stuff that's piled on and the regimented testing just burns them out. I was turned off of math courses for half of my schooling because 2nd grade math was full of timed tests in which failures were punished by loss of recess time.
2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling. I had friends who were held back from advanced classes where they would have been challenged and engaged because early in elementary school they performed poorly on a handful of standardized tests and were locked forever in the "standard" track. So much of what you want to teach as a skill can be taught via multiple different avenues, and we should offer schooling that takes advantage of that. Literary concepts like foreshadowing, metaphor, symbolism etc can be taught via film, books, poetry, games and even music. Why does every student then need to go through the same literary courses with the same set of books to learn the material? Math concepts can be taught with money, or physics, or chemistry or computer programming or wood working. Why does everyone need to go through the same math textbook?
The most memorable teachers I ever had were the ones that stepped outside the books. The ones that explored teaching a concept from multiple angles, and who understood that often it was necessary to let ...
Disclaimer: I live in The Netherlands; perhaps the situation is different in the US. It would be great if it was.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on your wishes. I didn't necessarily have the same experiences, but that's mostly beside the point. But as a very junior university teacher:
> programing courses are broken [...] I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced.
There is no time. I want to teach what you say, and as a student I wanted to be taught what you say, but that takes more time, especially if you want to cater for the whole class — that "the hard way" programming is less efficient than doing it the right way, unsurprisingly, so it takes more time (not only that, you're asking them to do the same assignment twice, which is anathema — no time for that!), and the curriculum is already chock full.
> My personal opinions on the matter are: 1) "too much mandatory study".
Sure, but then you have even less time. You'll make the previous problem worse.
> 2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling.
Yes, everyone knows this would be good, but there is no money and there are no teachers. Skilled primary school and high school teachers are incredibly hard to find, and even if you'd find them, there is no money to pay for more teachers than we have now.
Yeah, I have family and friends who are teachers, definitely aware that there's no time. Fundamentally the modern way we deal with education is broken. It's not even mostly the funding, but the way we try to measure it, package it and distill it and spread it around equally. The only way to do that is the same way McDonalds does, strip it down to the barest essentials done by rote , crammed into as small a time unit as possible with as little variation as possible. It works, but it has all the same problems.
Education as a whole needs a re-work in how we approach it, for many reasons but also to make time for this sort of careful nurturing; even if it means we don't cover as many things. We can no more teach all the children all the things in 18 years than we could have them listen to all the music ever produced in that same time. And to my mind then we'd be better served doing everything we can to nurture and encourage children's natural curiosity and desire to learn and do on the absolutely necessary of the things necessary that will quash that curiosity.
How do we do that? I don't know. I have thoughts, but there are certainly going to be no easy answers, and decades of bureaucracy and infrastructure around the current system will not go quietly even if we had the answers in the first place.
Several high school teachers I know don't assign long reading sessions because their students are dealing with some kind of unstable home life (or are homeless) and don't have an appropriate setting for it outside of class. That is, they avoid it because it injects a class bias into their grades.
Given that, making space within the school day for such things seems like a good idea.
It's not so much about competition between the students as it is about competition between the schools.
If your curriculum puts economically disadvantaged students at an academic disadvantage, and your school has many of such students, then your school ends up with less funding because your students do poorly on tests compared with the well off schools. So if you want to help the students you've got, you come up with curriculum that doesn't penalize them for having jobs, kids, or other outside-of-class reasons that they can't sit down and read at length.
Half an hour is fine, it’s really the cumulative volume. If a kid has 7 classes and each gives half an hour of homework, that’s 3.5 hours of homework. Add on the classes and they’re “working” 11.5 hours a day or 57.5 hours per week, every week.
That would be concerning for adults, it’s well into burnout territory. Then we want to act surprised when kids don’t want to read on their own and only want to play video games, as if all us adults are working 60 hour weeks and then excited to keep doing our job in our free time.
My novel approach would be to cut out a bunch of shit that kids don’t strictly need and hope that gives them the time and freedom to explore those things on their own.
We do not need 12 years of history classes. They’re nice to know, but widely forgotten anyways. That could probably be cut to like 4; I do not and will never need to know about Sumerian burial rites.
We do not need most of the flowery English classes. Reading comprehension is important, identifying symbolism is not. No one has ever asked me to check if an email contains a motif.
Much of our science classes are generally useless; chemistry comes to mind. I have never, even once, used anything I learned in chemistry. I know too little to do anything practical with it, and yet it was a year long class.
The other option would be to just kill summer break and use that time for teaching instead of homework. I don’t care for that, though. In a decade we’ll be back to having homework and summer break isn’t going to come back.
One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo.
You know the same things that your neighbor knows, within a reasonable margin of error. Therefore, you have social compatibility with them.
You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth.
That's valuable, right?
To get that, you had to go through the same 12 years of history and bored idiot English teachers telling you about symbolism and metaphor and giving you terrible 5 paragraph essays to fill out with the same dumb rote formula.
If you look at the overall social outcome, for the majority, this is a good thing.
If, however, it turns out that you are special and of a rare breed, then for your own children you should hire private tutors or school them overseas or do something somehow to cultivate their greatness.
If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.
> One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo.
I’m not saying that we completely get rid of public education, just that we stop appending things to it and pretending they’re important.
Nobody remembers most of this alleged common ground anyways. Go ask around what the 5th amendment says, or what a high pH means, I’d be shocked if a quarter of people remembered.
> You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth.
Sure, if we’re talking about something covered in high school, but for any topic I’d be realistically interested in hearing them talk about, no. Why would me or Bill Gates want to discuss symbolism in Catcher in the Rye? I’m certainly not going to talk to Musk about chemistry; I’m doubtful he’s a through and through rocket engineer, but his tangential knowledge likely trumps my very limited recollection of valence bands and I have no idea how that relates to the energy density of rocket fuel.
This is just a veneer of equality we tell ourselves. Sure, we’re all equal in the sense that we’ve largely ignored our high school education and probably haven’t really advanced our biology knowledge.
That doesn’t imply that we’re all going to sit around and suddenly want to talk about that instead of rockets or operating systems or investment strategies; I am not on the same part of the bell curve for the topics that make them interesting.
> If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.
I don’t disagree there are pleasantries, but at what cost? We’re pushing children into working near-slavery workloads, with no recourse to change that, and our means of motivating them is primarily threatening their entire future if they don’t play along.
It’s like the worst job in the world; Amazons warehouses look like a vacation comparatively.
Children can’t switch schools on their own like adults can switch jobs. Children’s records follow them when they do switch, so they can’t escape even if they switch schools. I’ve never had HR records follow me across companies. And any employer that tried to control their employees by threatening to ruin the entire rest of their lives would have the NLRB crawl up their ass and build a branch office.
We’re trading the happiness of children for what? Me and my neighbor having equally shitty recall of the French and Indian war?
I still remember being in high school, and I still remember how miserable it was. I remember kids showing up with huge bags under their eyes because they had to go into “crunch time” and work til midnight because they got a bunch of big assignments at once.
I remember meeting most of my high school classmates and how bright eyed and cheery we were. I also remember senior year, and how many of those smiles had faded into blank, exhausted stares.
I remember the kids who had problems in their family lives whose personalities either disappeared or curdled into sour milk as they tried to cope with 60 hour weeks and just didn’t have the spare time and energy to try to process their parents divorce.
I remember the suicides and addiction the most though. The kids that had bottomed out so hard they would do anything they could to escape the loop of stress, failure, threats about their future, and back to the beginning. The only options we offer them are death or complete desperation, and some kids picked one because they just couldn’t do it anymore.
There were multiple suicides while I was in high school. 3 that I can recall, and one kid that ran away from home and overdosed while sleeping in a public park.
There are enormous flaws in public education, some of which you have addressed, but eliminating the study of history and english is going to do bupkis to address any of that.
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, stated that living in a warbound society:
"In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Obviously, our governments are always in war. Our schools are always in war. Millions to the football stadiums and rarely even pennies for the arts. Churn out grist for the malady mill and milk the survivors of every drop of value. Every business and enterprise of man is but war in a capitalist society.
Taking away the seeds of the arts because they might not grow into more juice for the war machine is at best a shortsighted thought and at worst the hateful demands of a small and selfish person. They didn't benefit you, but others they do.
The flaw in public education that I'm trying to address is its tendency to grow to occupy any potential free time, largely because children are powerless to prevent that.
> Taking away the seeds of the arts because they might not grow into more juice for the war machine is at best a shortsighted thought and at worst the hateful demands of a small and selfish person. They didn't benefit you, but others they do.
I haven't the faintest interest in taking away access to art or English or history. I don't generally believe in removing access to things. I am interested in not forcing a vulnerable and powerless group to donate their time to the cause of "keeping art/English/history alive" if they don't want to.
There is some subset of knowledge that is a practical requirement for being able to navigate society. People need to know enough English to communicate, enough math to make change, enough science to have a basic understanding of the world we exist in. Those are basically untouchable if we want society to continue functioning.
Art knowledge is not a necessity for living a normal life. A person can pursue an immense number of paths in their life without ever encountering a requirement to know things about art. It's honestly notable for someone to have encountered a situation where they needed or were aided by having taken art classes. Creative writing and the analysis of creative writing are much the same.
If hours in the day were limitless, or children stayed children for longer, I'd agree with you. Knowledge of art has value, as does creative writing and history; I firmly believe that all knowledge has some degree of value.
I do not agree in light of what we're putting children through. Something has to give, and it's either going to be the school workload or children's mental health. The teen suicide rate has nearly doubled since 2000, and I don't feel like playing a game of chicken with rising suicide rates to preserve art or ancient history or creative writing or like a dozen other things.
Give the kids back their free time and I'm sure a lot of them will gravitate towards art or creative writing naturally. They naturally appeal to a lot of kids and people, if we'd just give them the room to get there themselves instead of force-feeding them a list of Baroque artists to make flashcards out of.
It seems like you would be better served in a Montessori or similar education system.
I had a lot of issues with public education in my life. I don't regret the information I learned, no matter how trivial, but I do regret the time wasted, being a student who easily absorbed the entirety of the semesters knowledge for all non-stem classes by reading the book in the gap before classes started.
I would have appreciated being able to go further faster rather than wait for my classmates to make it to the starting line.
That being said, school isn't just about knowledge. We live in a society and we have to have a standard by which to relate to one another. Like it or not, our fellow humans are dark forests with gaping maws yearning to devour us, and we are the same to them.
Without some trauma bonding, some common fountain from which we draw our waters, we would willingly or not destroy one another until only our little clans remained.
Modern society has blinded us to the travails of our forefathers, where the people who live a few miles away might rise up and slay us if they have a bad harvest one year.
That we have come so far as to reduce the occasional rampages down to traumatic school experiences is quite amazing from a neutral third party viewpoint, even though it definitely doesn't feel that way from someone who has experienced it firsthand, but compared to being murdered and eaten by the person who happened to be my classmate, getting picked on and feeling some long term anger over the situation is vastly preferable to me.
All of that aside, we can do better. That much is obvious. We could do better easily if we could get everyone on the same page and standard, and make the standard "Maximally educated according to your individual ability" so that it would adapt to the learners potential rather than being concerned with the easier to manage yet still brobdingnagianly difficult standard of "minimally viable high school graduate".
I had AP classes in high school and a 20 hour a week part time job - easily 10 hours a day on the week days including homework and ongoing projects. So at 17 I was working 70 hours a week. College was more of the same - honors classes and projects.
I graduated college and was like "I only have to work 40 hours a week? What's the catch?"
I would dissagree on the chemistry. A working knowledge of chemistry is quiet valuable in the kitchen. Understanding of the maillard reaction, or of caramelization is useful for making better tasting food. I keep pH strips in my kitchen for use in making ferments, understanding chemistry will make it intuitive which foods to cook on cast iron or not to because the acids will eat the pans seasoning. Knowledge of polymerization lets know you can wash the cast frying pan despite the folk wisdom to the contray.
I confess I mostly just read cliffsnotes and sparksnotes. Felt a little guilty about it at first, but it helped me ace the tests, and saved a ton of time.
I never understand why we are forced to read so much of the literary canon. Most of it is so hard to read, and so unenjoyable. Many of them could be re-written in a more enjoyable way for young children, through teenagers. I am exactly like you: I hardly ever read for pleasure when I was younger unless there was a blatant bride ("award") awaiting me. Most of the time, I was underwater reading some garbage prose from 1850 that doesn't stay with me today.
I wouldn't say it's "garbage prose" but I read A Tale of Two Cities in school and found it impossible to form a mental image from the text in some parts.
I'm still struggling to understand what "Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail." means.
Or more recently, the run on SVB last year where everyone started panicking that the bank was no longer able to hold its deposits, just because it announced that it had taken action to generate something like $40 billion in liquidity. And then the next day alone, customers withdrew $42 billion.
All of this was much worse during the Great Depression, before we had FDIC insurance guaranteeing deposits up to a certain threshold. If you've ever seen It's a Wonderful Life, it depicts a bank run during that era as George Bailey is about to go off on his honeymoon. (I remember my 6th grade history teacher describing this as we watched that movie around the holiday season.)
Not really the media were covering it a lot in 2008 - Front page headlines in newspapers and first story on TV news.
Ok people did not lose money directly. But they were withdrawing from some banks (e.g. Northern Rock) and it made massive economic and political issues.
I wasn't familiar with the passage but having read it I think it means that the sounds and sights of the nighttime mail carriage ride made the bank messenger fantasize a run (i.e. an excess of customer withdrawals) upon his bank. The wider context is that the shadows of the night are cast as various phantoms in the minds of the people on the carriage, and even the horse pulling it:
> While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out of HER private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.
> What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.
> Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger—with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.
I actually think it's a really neat passage, it invokes the surreal more than I would expect from 19th century prose. Also, this part just before is very vivid and quite funny:
> Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.
I hated Romeo and Juliet. Teachers loved to explain how this was so relevant to us teenagers and yet it’s two people in a deeply concerning relationship who die for each other for pretty stupid reasons. Modern interpretations are far more interesting.
I wouldn't use the term "garbage prose", but I do agree that many books from the literary canon aren't the greatest choice to assign to kids.
Steinbeck and Faulkner come to mind.
I understand that they're important, influential, and well-written. But I just didn't relate to them. There was almost nothing about the main characters' challenges or desires that I could understand.
My son was assigned "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton - he didn't mind reading it, but he said he just didn't really relate to any of the characters. Even though it's set just 50 years ago, the culture it describes bares basically no resemblance to modern-day life for a teenager.
“ My son was assigned "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton - he didn't mind reading it, but he said he just didn't really relate to any of the characters. Even though it's set just 50 years ago, the culture it describes bares basically no resemblance to modern-day life for a teenager.”
Maybe that’s ok? I read the Outsiders when I was young (25 years ago or so) and although I thought it was a bit weird, it wasn’t bad. My life bears little resemblance to many current contemporary people’s lives the world over, but exploring those differences can be good. I am all for giving the kids a chance to see a different world and get a sense of how things can change.
> I am all for giving the kids a chance to see a different world and get a sense of how things can change.
Not if you're discouraging children from reading as a hobby by assigning the driest works there are. With the exception of Faust, all 'homework books' were horribly dry and frankly boring. For example, The Sorrows of Young Werther - utterly irrelevant. I would understand any child or teenager who gave up on reading if they were forced to read books like these - and even worse, spend endless hours discussing and being tested on them.
The Great Gatsby is the one that comes to my mind. How exactly is a modern high school student supposed to relate to any of the characters in this book? Even when I was reading it in school I kept stopping and questioning just what these characters even were. It felt like reading about aliens, totally disconnected from reality. I not only lacked the historical context, I didn't have enough social context to grasp the character motivations or actions.
The whole book was like the allegory of the cave.
Steinbeck is a close second, though. I had to read three of the man's books (The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, and Grapes of Wrath) and I don't think I enjoyed a single page of it. I remember finding a copy of The Pearl as an adult and being shocked it was less than 100 pages. We somehow extracted 18 weeks of discussion and essays and tests on that book. No wonder I hated it. We tortured every word of it.
1) There's no way to have a set of readings that every Xth grader is going to enjoy. It's just impossible. There is a wide range of interests and predispositions and reading ability among people of the same age. It's obvious just from this sub-thread; everyone pipes up with a different set of books they disliked in school and they therefore think no one should have to read. I loved reading Julius Caeasar in high school and hated The Catcher in the Rye. I loved Dandelion Wine and hated Absalom, Absalom. Them's the breaks.
2) Part of the point of reading literature is to see things from a different perspective. i.e. to read things that are not necessarily "relatable", and thereby possibly expand your mind about the range of human experience. It's an opportunity to learn about history and learn about cultures other than your own.
Shakespeare and Chaucer were fucking awful. They did nothing but make me hate reading and English class. It took me years to enjoy reading after the "classics". Many of my classmates were similar.
As an alternative perspective, I am glad that my middle and high school curriculum included several works of Shakespeare, especially Macbeth and Hamlet, and several 19th century classics.
They really do require time, they’re hard to make time for, and while reading them wasn’t exactly fun, I’m glad that I did it. Many of the themes are timeless, the prose is elegant if difficult, and there are cultural references to these works everywhere.
They form a big part of the English speaking world’s cultural history. I think it’s worthwhile for children to be exposed to that history.
And if not then, when? I couldn’t make myself do the work now; I’m too busy and tired to read anything but easy/fun fiction after work. And I’m not sure I would have had the focus then if it hadn’t been assigned. Sometimes education isn’t fun or easy. That doesn’t make it less valuable.
My point is the prose is a huge turn-off for most people and serves very little purpose in a modern society. As I mentioned in my post, I recommend to re-write these titles using a prose that will be more appealing to the age group. You can keep all of the same lessons to be learned in the re-write. I do not support this idea that learning needs to be painful or needlessly difficult. For most people, success in education is a positive feedback loop: If you do average or well, you look forward to more of it. And vice versa: If you below average, you try to avoid it and see it as a chore. I'm not saying to dumb down everything, but this "pain == good learning" seems from the 1980s and before -- outdated.
>What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.
I also went to a private college prep school, and the workload was practically abusive at times. I remember some days when I’d work on homework during class, get home, then continue working on homework clear until 3 or 4 AM. Then it was back up at 6 AM to go back to school. Some nights were light and I got to bed at 12p-1a. The weekends following the hard weeks were mostly nonexistent because I was unconscious for most of them.
Another thing is the mandated reading comes with punishment attached. One goes into it knowing that they’ll have to puke out some key points, contort bullshit into an intro-body-conclusion format, or worse, overanalyze it for “meaning”.
Early in high school among other things I had to read was “The Veldt”. Of course I hated dealing with it like everything else. I couldn’t have even told you who the author was a few weeks after the assignment.
In late high school, I discovered Ray Bradbury as I began exploring my local library, branching out from comics (Calvin and Hobbes, pogo, bloom county) and nonfiction books into fiction. He quickly became one of my favorite authors due to the sheer volume of short stories he had. Many were good, some were bad, and some were great. It was a bit of a pleasant surprise to encounter “The Veldt” again without a teachers whip at my back. It was sad to finally work my way through the last of what he wrote knowing there would be no more.
You've almost certainly come across them by now, but his novels are fantastic. I started with The Martian Chronicles and then The Illustrated Man, but ended up loving Something Wicked This Way Comes and even Dandelion Wine.
There's something about good fiction and youth that just went together so well -- maybe people who did a lot of, say, swimming in their formative years feel that way about "good swimming" and youth, but I have to believe that good fiction would still trump most everything else for the time period.
For me, fiction was a way to explore my thoughts and dreams indirectly as a kid. I’ve never been one much for introspection, but reading tickles something in that part of my brain to reflect on my life and sometimes relate what happens to a character to what I’m feeling/have felt. In a story, the author has to tell you how the character feels explicitly (usually) in addition to the normal story beats. Occasionally I would notice a mismatch between my own gut reactions and that of the character which would make me stop for a second and try to dissect what the differences were between my interpretation and that of the author.
Not to even mention that reading is a way to escape and explore without leaving the comfort of your own home.
The only downside I find currently is that reading new things is quite expensive and I haven’t found a great digital solution yet. My phone is too small but carrying a book or a reader tablet is not practical every day.
8+ years ago I accepted an offer to join some family on an impromptu weekend trip. Plenty of pool time was expected so I brought the novel I was 3/4ths the way through, its sequel, and an unrelated book on the off-chance I wanted something different. Combined these books took up half my carry-on satchel (I enjoy long epic fantasy), turning it from a simple carry to a painful shoulder-biter and hip-digger.
I purchased a Kindle after that trip. I read a lot more than I used to because between my phone and the physical Kindle I always have my current book ready to go. Physical book purchases can now be hardcover-only because I'm buying for a permanent collection, not endless consumption.
Yea, I'm also a fan of epic fantasy! I largely find myself moving to audiobooks to get around carrying books everywhere.
Do you have experience with devices that aren't kindle? Not super thrilled about the Amazon ecosystem, though I know it's not terribly difficult to jailbreak them.
>>overanalyze it for “meaning”.<< I doubt overanalyzing actually happens. But pupils, including younger me, just don't understand how much more work and thought have gone into the legends they are reading. Yes, it's a 500 page tome. No, neither the blooming flower nor its color on page 356, line 38 are "random" and them symbolizing the meaning of life isn't "bullshit." Yes, a work like this happens only once a decade on one continent. That's exactly why it's one of the maybe 20 books that you read in full during your schooling.
> No, neither the blooming flower nor its color on page 356, line 38 are "random" and them symbolizing the meaning of life isn't "bullshit."
I firmly believe that most of this stuff in schools is massive over-analysis and that most authors, whose works are analysed in this way, have not planned all of this ridiculous nonsense we had to invent on the spot during a test. And that's exactly what we did - assign meaning to any meaningless detail and somehow connect it to the character or plot. The curtain is blue? It must signify the protagonists deep longing for love.
In short, 99% of it is indeed overanalysed bullshit.
I was always astonished at how much my literature teachers could seemingly hallucinate at-will on a piece of text and come with some hidden meaning for every word, comma, or rime.
I did not seem to be blessed with the accepted form of creativity for literature analysis, and, with every rebuttal, the pleasure of exploring those texts became less and less..
After many, many, many years, I'm slowly coming back to some of them to read on my own terms, and most books have been a pleasure to re-discover.
Is it so hard to accept the fact that an author might not be completely 100% conscious of all the things influencing them when creating a work of art? That some choices they made because they just felt right in the moment come from somewhere else? And that someone else can see this happening from an external perspective and propose that way of reading the text that the author didn't think about?
At the same time, is it monstrous to put forward the option that you, as an audience member, are not a passive brainless drone, but you are collaborating in creating the meaning of what you experience? That your inner life and meaning and interpretation stemming from being exposed to art are actually interesting and worth talking about?
Why do we have to live in a world where we assume words written on a page or colors dripped on a canvas have a single truly objective interpretation? Why do we have to beat with a stick on the head of someone telling them "no, you're enjoying this work in the wrong way because the author said so"?
If such things influence works of fiction, they must surely influence works of nonfiction just as much, if not more so — yet I never had a schoolteacher ask me to analyze nonfiction writings anywhere close to the depth I had to analyze novels.
It wasn't until the tertiary level that I first analyzed science writings and related philosophy writings to a similar depth (albeit for a different purpose), and discovered to my delight how many of them are written with a beauty and a kind of humanity that verges on poetry. It moved me in ways that fiction never has, I think in part because of the purity and honesty of my discovery — so unlike the trudging hours I spent miming proundness in school until I could no longer recognize it.
I am truly glad that nonfiction analysis was neglected in school, because it otherwise would have been robbed of all its spirit and magic, too.
Why do we force students to analyze text in this manner at the cost of killing their love for recreational reading? So many children, who once loved story time best of all, grow up to hate books and poetry. Yet they still love the search for meaning in cinema and music which, as yet, still remain mostly beyond the killing touch of involuntary study.
Is it any wonder literary analysis feels fake to so many people?
If you look at it, I'm sure you'll find equally plenty of people rolling their eyes at film critics for "making that up".
But I broadly share the sentiment of your message, and I personally blame some sort of variation of Goodhart's law. School curricula take an unquestionably good thing ("the critical search of meaning is an important skill to have") and have to pigeonhole it into something standardized and quantifiable (otherwise, how can you stitch a grade number to it? The horror!). The result is this desolate widespread contempt for everything that is not a literal interpretation.
Indeed. To me, a lot of stuff like this (the kind and color of a blooming flower) is basically a way for the author to create or maintain an atmosphere/background to the book. Mentioning flowers a lot makes it clear this is not an action packed plot driven thriller. Mentioning military ranks and insider jargon and abbreviations paints a military atmosphere.
Basically a lot of words are “set pieces”. Very important for the general atmosphere but not overflowing with meaning and significance per se.
I remember Kurt Vonnegut being interviewed and clearly saying that he did not have any hidden meanings in his writings. Yet, I remember how my English teacher would go on about x passage as a metaphor for y. I think we were discussing a short story of his. We would spend hours finding the hidden meanings in authors' writings. I'm sure that's the case for many of the books we read in school. I'm sure many authors are more philosophical than others but definitely not all of them. True, overanalyzing authors' writings is a thing. It's a shame because reading becomes a chore rather than a joy.
There isn’t any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is s*t.
I loved the approach my “high school” (in The Netherlands) took around 2002: you had to pick a few books from a list of books the teacher read. Then read those books and have a 30 minute “free format” discussion with the teacher about them. She’d ask for shared themes between the books, or differences in the way the stories were told, what it showed about the approach or background of the authors etc. Basically a teacher-student one-time book club.
I stopped reading books because of mandatory reading.
When I graduated from high school one of the thoughts on my mind during the ceremony was "YES!! I will n e v e r have to read books again!!"
I also stopped reading around age 9-10 for fun.
My 'favorite' book during school was Crime and Punishment. I didn't like the book, but I knew the teachers liked it. So if it ever came up I 'liked it very much'.
Many years after school anime -> manga -> light novels -> web novels got me back into reading. Now I spend far too much time on reading, but I don't think I will ever read fiction in my native language again.
As an adult who does a gargantuan amount of reading for a living - while work is busy i cannot fathom reading for fun but during breaks I start up again. To me this is all quite sensible and a bit bit of support for the argument we need to slow everything down a bit. Fix work-life balance accross the board.
Obtaining information through books is like trying to put out a fire by sucking water out through a straw.
The printing press was great but it's a slow and constrained way to get into from the greatest minds. I read voraciously as a child but when I came to university I pretty much stopped reading when the experts were there to teach in real life using all the senses.
If I were a 9 year old today I'd probably pick YouTube over reading. When I built my house I found myself learning way faster watching tradesmen and listening to them on YouTube than having to suck that information through a tiny straw that is reading a book . I find myself truly hating reading now, far too inefficient.
I read a lot when I was young and a big motivating factor for me was the natural progression to reading grown up books and works of literature with more interesting plots and subject matter. Nowadays, there seems to be more commercially-driven infantilization of entertainment where comics and books for kids are no longer a stepping stone but an end destination. My teenager only reads manga and comics which can be very deep and cover mature topics (unlike anything I could get my hands on in the 90s) but are still, ultimately, not novels. I haven't decided if this is a good or bad thing - it probably just 'is what it is' and I'm getting old.
I agree. Looking back at my own reading as a kid, I worked my way through the "age appropriate" material really quickly, in part, because those books simply weren't that interesting. They were more about learning to read. Once I got through those kids books (and I saw them as kids books even when I was a kid), I moved to "adult" books as soon as I could because they are better novels, and I could tell that right away, with more complex stories, better characterization, better prose, different settings, and a real sense of scale and ambition.
A lot of it comes down to context: my parents were and remain voracious readers. They read all the time and have strong opinions about books, and I wanted to read what they did and have strong opinions about books in the way that they do. That sensibility was something they taught and which I grew up in. I could just as well see the absence of that having an effect.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadFor example, we had things like a Six Flags reading program, Pizza Hut Book It for free pizza, and hand picked Texas Bluebonnet Books. We also had book fairs.
Add in the fact that you can also only read for so long before your eyes get tired and then people just naturally veer away from it.
In the meantime, along with reading, I also have longreads in my RSS reader, so every evening I get a few fantastic long form online articles and feel pretty well connected to what's going on.
True about eyes getting tired, though: I try to take a break every few hours.
> If I wanted to read, I'd go to school —B-H
Agreed about being faster than a lot of other media - at least in terms of density. Also, the tired eyes thing can be a bonus too. For years I had trouble falling asleep at night and I'd stay up later because I didn't like going to bed until I knew I would conk out immediately.
Now I get in bed and read about a half hour or hour before I want to be asleep. It gives me something to focus on while relaxing and when my eyes get too tired or my mind starts to wander, I know it's time to sleep.
if i am in a deep flow, the reading to solve a problem is the right approach. but when i have to fight distraction, a video helps me to focus and eventually get into the flow.
Then I can decide if I know enough or whether I want to listen to the full video.
I have a recurring habit of glossing over names I don't recognize when first reading them in a news article and then will frequently need to jump back to find where they were initially referenced when they get mentioned again only with their last name. While this can be a little annoying when reading, it would be far worse in a video; I can't imagine trying to scrub back to the point where someone first was mentioned. At best, the video might have captions (which I'll always have turned on), but it's a lot harder to look at a caption and remember exactly which information came before it and which came after because the text isn't all visible at once.
It's a lot easier to skip over the bits you already know in written form, with video you need to seek forward, listen a bit, seek forward, listen, whoops too far, seek back a bit etc.
I'd say you need some eye correction then. Ever since I got glasses, getting tired by reading means it's time for a visit to the optometrist to update my lenses.
Speed is subjective. I read way faster than consuming the same thing with audio or video. Reading also gives me opportunity to wander at a pace I'm comfortable with.
Just skimming through a long-ass tutorial finding the bit you need seems like a superpower nowadays with the younger generation resorting to watching a 45 minute video instead.
Entertainment with a message is fucking boring no matter the form. Movies are no better in this respect.
Unless they're done by a genius but then you won't even notice the message.
That's why I stopped reading for fun, probably when I was 15 or so. Seems they've just accelerated it
Sure enough, that seems to be their guess too. Maybe our school systems kinda suck
When your teacher criticizes you for not reading the boring book he/she ordered you to read, you stop enjoying reading and stop reading.
It's the teachers' faults.
So you can't just blame the teacher. If the books give you something essential, you'll turn to them to escape a harsh reality.
The mass availability of low effort digital entertainment options is what made the difference
School largely ruined my interest in reading until I became an adult and re-found it.
Being regularly told to read boring books, of course any interest in doing it casually was going to go out the Window.
Sure there is value in needing to read certain things from an academic standpoint, Beowulf is a good example. But there was zero reason I needed to read "The Outsiders" when we just watched the movie after reading it anyways.
Just because something is a classic, doesn't mean we have to consume it in its original form to get the meaning.
Instead fill the library with a diverse collection of books, let the kid choose what they want to read, don't rush them, and importantly if it just isn't working let them move on to a new book.
Side note:
I know some people are going to groan at this. But seriously, books based on video games can be a fantastic gateway towards actually caring about reading. It is how I re-discovered by interest in reading as an adult.
I've read more books than most people, I think. I certainly was in the top percentile by the time I was 18.
I never once read a book start-to-finish that a teacher assigned to me. When I had a book on my desk that I went out of my way to find at the library on one side and then some random book my teacher thought was good on the other side, I picked my book every time. I'd half-heartedly skim through their book and struggle my way through reading quizzes. The only saving graces were Cliff's Notes, film versions, or if the teacher outright read us the book out loud.
When I last read about this, it was blamed on 4th grade being the time when you shift from reading just to read, into reading to learn.
My youngest will be 9 soon. Finding books for him is pain. I started trying more in the last few weeks, grabbing more or less random things from my local library (beginning chapter books, chapter books). Most of them are series, he liked a few (Galaxy Zack, Time Jumpers, Desmond Cole books), did not like others (Magic Tree House, something called Byte, Code Breakers, and really anything else I gave him). He mostly outgrew Geronimo Stilton books.
They do have book fairs at school and we always go, but we rarely buy anything as it's mostly gifts. We're trying to get book from libraries as opposed to buy them.
They do have an awesome library at school and he spends a few hours per week there and I see that he's taking some books from there, but it's mostly Captain Underpants, Stick Dog, and other comics.
I absolutely DESPISE Dan Pilkey's books (Captain Underpants and Stick Dog) as well as My Weird School (and other Dan Gutman's products), they really dumb things down and basically lead kids away from "regular" (ie long-form) books. I my opinion they can lead to behavior issues in kids, however it's possible that kids simply start reading them during that period when hormones start kicking in.
I have a bunch of books from DK Publishing (coffee table encyclopedias) and leave them an frequented areas of the house, and notice that kids check them up every once in a while, at least that's something. They are designed for people with decreased attention span, if you want to learn about a subject, you read a page or two and you're good.
My older kids stopped reading a lot around that time (~10yo), mostly after reading My Weird School and Captain Underpants and similar crap.
Older kids did go through the entire Lemony Snicket series though (way before NetFlix series came up) so that's something.
My 8yo has an iPad from school (we were forced to get one from school when he did kindergarten remote) but his time is very strictly controlled, and it's only for studying (no games). He does have access to an old XBox but only on weekends and for a limited time. He will not have a smart phone for a long time, that's where we lost our older kids (around 13).
So yeah, it's a major problem...
What books did you end up liking for 9 year olds?
But it's honestly really frustrating. I'm older (grew up in the 80s) and we read MUCH more, and I think it's important.
Do you know of any resources/discussions I can look up/participate in?
(At that age, I was a huge Animorphs fan, but some parents might not be comfortable with the violence and gore.)
Garth Nix Sharon Creech Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark Jane Yolan David Clement-Davies E. L. Konigsburg Louis Sachar Avi Brian Jacques Louise Erdich Edward Bloor Susan Fletcher "Reader Beware, You Choose the Scare" Goosebumps (like Choose Your Own Adventure but more modern at the time).
I grew into the kind of avid reader that still reads 50+ books a year. My Mom didn't try to control what I read, even if it was complete junk.
I also adored fact books like the coffee tables you mentioned. I remember having a pulpy "100,000 weird facts" book, both covers torn off because it was used so much. This was before Wikipedia.
I only have boys so do not have personal experience but I read/heard that girls do and will continue to read more than boys at any age, and the gap is getting worse starting around that time (7-8-9). I do think that some books are directed at girls, but I do see a lot of books directed at boys too (though not recently, Hardy Boys was a loooong time ago). It's just boys are less interested regardless. Not really sure what to do about that honestly...
Have you considered just being happy your kids are reading stuff they enjoy? If I picked up on this sort of thing from my parents, I probably would have been less inclined to read myself...
As for choice of books, both Dan Pilkey and Dan Gutman are considered controversial authors and a lot of parents feel uneasy about their kids reading their books. Check parents' reviews on goodreads or any other site, you'll find plenty of negative reviews, it's not just me.
Reviews are pretty good, most books hover on 4+ ratings.
Well, for starters because HN is not just for programming and startups, things are on HN because they're upvoted (or sometime because it's some YC promotion), and anything that tingles our intellectual curiosity will do (it's even in the site's guidelines).
I'd hold off on the fairy tale (dark. weird) and romance ones (paladins) for a few years yet...
Mine have gone through Paolini (Eragon), Sanderson (all of them. damn he writes a lot), Wings of Fire (Tui Sutherland -- Cute, chapters, skews younger)., Scott Westerfield (Leviathian).
Remember: All children are different. I have 3 kids, and their interest level and approach to reading is very different. My oldest loved being read to starting around 6 months, and we started getting into chapter books when she was 5-6. My other two wouldn't sit still for books until around 18 months, and my almost-6-year-old doesn't have the attention span for a chapter book.
I'd also not be cooking or cleaning or spending the 1000th hour on the phone with the kids insurance provider. This between activities, assisting with 4-6 hours of homework, working, etc.
Reading typically came out of sleep time.
source: father of 5
(Father of 3, youngest is 14 now. after a while, the biggest problem is keeping them in books they haven't read)
I've made attempts to get back into reading from time to time, but I always go into the more rigorous non-fiction areas. I picked up a Brandon Sanderson book and wanted to throw the damned thing against a wall because of how juvenile the narration was. It felt like a very poor apeing of HHTG or Discworld narration without any of the wit.
I'm curious what books you felt were 'for' you?
I was a kid of the 80s and 90s. I grew up outside. I played rough and got hurt and then played rough again. I explored. My parents existed to feed me, clothe me, and yell at me for not achieving enough. Any book depicting a parent who sat their child down to give them sage advice about life was completely foreign to my experience.
Everyone points to Snow Crash (which I liked too), but recently I also really enjoyed REAMDE and the first half of Termination Shock (I haven't finished it yet). I love the way he describes things. I'd like to say that I could read + enjoy anything he writes on any subject, but for some reason I didn't like his Baroque Cycle books (but don't understand why not).
Also big recommendation for Terry Pratchett. The books all seem silly on the surface but usually have some incisive commentary on wider social issues, as well as being filled with references and humor, subtle and un-subtle. Bonus, they are also a lot shorter than Stephenson's. ;)
You might like Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Horses" [0]. The prose style is idiosyncratic, but also arguably his most accessible. It's about a 16 year old crossing over into Mexico and with little else but the clothes on his back and love for horses, but not "juvenile" --- if anything the author elevates the teen's stumbles into love, adventure, and heartbreak, into a grand vision of the American frontier.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Pretty_Horses_(novel)
Greg Bear - Amazing science fiction author who builds incredible far future worlds. He is asking questions like "what will humanity be like 10k years in the future".
Charles Stross - First off, wonderful characters. His Laundry Files series is like "what is a 1990s geek, complete with a Palm Pilot, worked for a secret government agency that handles occult issues" but over time it gets deeper and the characters get really fleshed out. It is also awesome because you get to see technology move with the time, since the books take place concurrent with our technological progress, so technology like PDAs make way for smart phones.
Elizabeth Bear - Just all around great characters.
Greg Egan - Science Fiction but deeply rooted in real science and math, his homepage https://www.gregegan.net often dives deeper into the math behind his books and includes citations for further reading! Many of his books lack the "science fiction gadgetry" feel (although some have it) if you are trying to avoid that.
Cory Doctorow - He used to be huge in the open source community (not sure, maybe he still is?) his books all explore interesting social issues through the lens of technology driven change.
FWIW many people do not like Brandon Sanderson and I avoid recommending his books.
IMHO all of the above authors have good characters, Doctorow tends to write younger characters (early to mid 20s), but the rest focus on mature characters. Some, such as Stross, let you watch a character start out young and mature throughout the books (I think his main character has gone from his 20s to his 40s, and it shows in how the character acts and approaches issues).
If you really like math, try Greg Egan. Quite a few of his books have the premise "what would be the impact if this odd bit of, real world, complete with citations, math was just a little bit different?" If that is your thing, then you'll be delighted at what he writes. :-D
e.g.
> In the universe containing Seth’s world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a “dark cone” to the north and south. Seth can only face to the east (or the west, if he tips his head backwards). If he starts to turn to the north or south, his body stretches out across the landscape, and to rotate to face north-east is every bit as impossible as accelerating to the speed of light.
Fun mind bending stuff. :-D
Little Brother was, for a long time, my absolute favorite novel. That and Pirate Cinema.
Were you reading contemporary books or older books? I found that there's lots of fiction for boys, written by men, from the 19th and 20th centuries. A lot of it is very good, many popular classics like Treasure Island. Edit: I see you mentioned that one.
If you're interested in returning to fiction but through the lens of an adult - a little grittier - I'd recommend Joe Abercrombie, Pierce Brown, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Dan Abnett, and Andrzej Sapkowski.
Not sure how much it generalizes, but what would have had her reading more then would have been a well stocked manga section in the elementary library and daily access.
Manga really is an accessible way to get used to reading, and a gateway. She just finished Lord of the Rings.
All that is to say, maybe kids aren’t interested in reading partly because they don’t see their parents doing it … at least in a way that they understand.
Maybe I'm an anomaly here but I never found the books targeted at children/teens especially interesting. Around 8-9 my mom gave me a book, a couple hundred pages long, intended solely for adults, but it was about something I was passionate about. I loved it and never stopped reading after that.
My advice: if you want your kid to read, give them books they'd be interested in. Not 'age appropriate books', just books. Read books yourself and talk to your children about them. Build a personal library and lend books liberally, to children, friends, family, everyone. A culture of reading and enjoying books is your best bet for instilling a love of reading in your chilld.
"Give your kids books they'd be interested in" is kind of classic meaningless advice. Like, sure, of course that's what you want to do -- except, if you have a kid who doesn't have an existing strong reading habit, how do you find books they'd be interested in? Like, that's the goal! You can't just assume the solution.
I have a nine-year-old daughter who definitely does read, but isn't a voracious reader, and I've tried a lot of different things to up the amount of time she spends reading. It's tricky. One of the things that I've found is she's more willing to invest in graphic novels than prose novels, but I don't feel like at this point graphic novels deepen her literacy.
https://www.mangaclassics.com
I'm not saying they are not worthy of consumption or anything like that, but A: I doubt very many teachers would accept a "book report" written about a graphic novel and B: consuming graphic novels, by their nature, is not purely reading. Your brain/imagination has far less work to do, as you don't have to mentally picture the scenes/people/actions, they are right there for you to look at.
I remember when I was in middle school, my English teacher had a box in the corner of comic book adaptations of about a dozen "classic" stories. Several were stories by Poe, and similar 1800s-era classics. (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, etc.) I devoured them (despite loving reading "regular" books too). I've forgotten most of the plots, but remember having enjoyed reading them. Some of them, I've never read the originals, but for others I had already read (or subsequently read) the more-detailed originals. (Anything Sherlock Holmes, at the time, was something I enjoyed.)
Reading these stories as a manga makes you lose out on a lot of details, but probably makes it a lot easier to digest some things. Pride and Prejudice, for example, has pages of details of peoples' social lives, and the complex interactions of several younger and older women, along with descriptions of gardens and houses, and I know that I definitely had trouble keeping track of who all the ancillary characters were. Having visual representations of these characters might make it easier to track that. You lose out on the richness of Austen's prose, but you keep the core character developments, relationships, and emotional interactions that form the basis of the stories.
I'd enjoyed The Malazan Book of the Fallen more if I had this edition: https://subterraneanpress.com/erikson-gotm/
I'd posit that anyone whose imagination conjures up mental pictures from a purely written book would be incapable of not doing so with a graphic novel. One's brain could have less to do, true... yet it doesn't choose the easy path. In my personal experience, the scenes of a good story grow and become more detailed in my imagination, regardless of whether they are depicted in prose or picture.
One thing I love about written language is that can be used in so many ways; the vast majority of reading isn't 'purely' reading for me, but associated with other activities - encyclopaedias are reading interspersed with skimming, possibly in order to inform another task such as writing, graphic novels are the appreciation of visual art in a narrative form supported by text, and then there's the entirely practical way in which being able to read "wet paint" helps me from getting myself into a sticky situation.
If you haven't yet, push out beyond fiction. In my experience, libraries have a really divergent collection of large, illustrated volumes.
When I was 5-10 I read comic strip books - but also encyclopedias. Specifically World Book; Britannica was too dry.
note: I've no complaint with graphic novels. Sons 1, 2 & 5 were big into them. One is writing fiction. Two was into physics and anime, is now into psychology and early Japanese film making. Five performs+crafts his own music videos.
We've taken her to the library since she was a baby where we'd find new baby books to read to her. Over time, we stopped picking out books for her and let her wander the isles, picking whatever seemed interesting to her. She usually chooses a wide assortment of things from comics to YA fiction.
My son is much more interested in screens, but he still reads a lot. Whenever we restrict the screens his next default is to read.
We read a lot to both of them as infants & toddlers. We have a couple bookshelves worth of books in the house, but honestly they spend almost their whole reading time on new-to-them library books. We've hit the library checkout limit pretty much every time we go! And it's no waste - every book is returned read.
> if you have a kid who doesn't have an existing strong reading habit, how do you find books they'd be interested in?
I'd start by taking them to the library and letting them explore. Chances are they'll find something that interests them!
What a strange question?
If they are interested in fantasy movies give them a fantasy book. If they're interested in mystery, the same. If they're interested in Dinosaurs, the same. How is this some great challenge? The things you like to read about are the same things you already like... Are you implying you know nothing about your daughter?
For the the mid-teens, Mistborn series.
Of course it is hard to do - at least, harder to do than saying "I have a 5 year old, and this book says it is for 5 year olds, so I will have them read it".
To be fair, the same is true for tv shows and movies, I can't stand any "per child" tv show, we moved immediately to disney classics and then onto Miraculous Ladybug (mine are 3 and 5 years old).
As for books, we have a very fun series of "choose your own adventure" books that really hooked them, they love making their choices
The last fiction book I read (over a decade ago) was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the reason I read it is because I had watched all the previous Harry Potter films and wanted to know what happens but the movie didn't exist yet at the time. I was hooked and there was literally no other option. I'm sure this effect worked very well in J.K. Rowling's favor.
Some people claim that they prefer fiction in book format because they can fill in the gaps and imagine the worlds and characters however they like... But personally, I prefer getting as much information as possible; visual information is part of it. If I had to choose between watching a film in color or black-and-white, I'd choose color for the same reason... With black and white, I could let my mind wander and assume that the person's clothing is made of gold yarn but I'd rather not as it mostly distracts from the story and those aren't details that interest me.
When I consume fiction, I'm looking for narratives, external perspectives, messages, lessons, principles and insights in a format that is as objective as possible. In book format, there's too much that comes from me, I end up projecting my pre-existing biases into the story and it doesn't feel as satisfying or mind-expanding.
Personally I find the messages, lessons, principles, and insights come through a lot more clearly when I have access to the characters' internal thoughts, perceptions, and reasoning, and you get a lot more of this in the printed version.
My kids had class and home and sometimes activities. None were unsupervised or non-regimented.
Coming home from exploring and popping open a book is nice. Opening a book and hoping it provides some escape from the 160th hour in a box with adults is desperation.
...Uh, come the 90s, Bridge to Terabithia was a required reading book that I don't think anyone my age cared about. The popular series I remember were, in no particular order: Animorphs, Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, Harry Potter, and Redwall.
I think it's much simpler, adults don't know what kids are interested in. For example, just before that age I was interested in animals and the solar system. Read anything I could find on them, and had no interest in anything being pushed by school or parents. At age 9, I just happened to see Animorphs #11 The Forgotten in the impulse-buy section of our local drugstore and begged my parents for it - for anyone unaware, the Animorphs covers showed kids turning into animals, which was how it drew my attention. That set me onto sci-fi in general, then fantasy - and I've kept reading since.
Captain Underpants is at least 20 years old now. Becoming a piece of classic American fiction in it's own right.
> I think it's much simpler, adults don't know what kids are interested in
Pretty much everyone I know (including myself) who read a lot as a kid but doesn't read much anymore identifies being forced to read things in school as the reason they don't. Being forced to read stuff we didn't find interesting isn't the whole issue though because I think there are things I might have actually enjoyed reading in another context. In my experience, the larger issue is what happened in the classroom alongside the reading. Most if not all teachers I had would give quizzes designed to ensure we kept up with the reading that essentially would pick out tiny random details from the assigned chapters ask us about them, and that took the focus away from actually absorbing the higher-level themes and insights that I'd normally make when reading on my own. Even worse, when discussing things afterwards in the classroom, there was usually a certain analysis or viewpoint that was deemed "correct" that we were supposed to figure out and be able to reproduce when we were tested on the entirety of the book after we finished it. Making me read a book to memorize random details and _not_ have any thoughts of my own on what things meant because I would just get told what to think later ruined any enjoyment I used to have of reading; they might as well have just given me a page of bullet points to memorize than give me an entire book full of pages and pages of stuff to distract from what they actually were trying to make me learn.
Exactly. It's a book adults think kids should read (because literature or whatever), not a book that kids actually care a rip about reading.
I ravenously read through books at first and would take the test asap. I was gaming the system, but through this I found books I became enthralled with. This was the foundation of my love for reading.
Not sure what my point was, but I wonder if any programs like that exist anymore.
My disdain for school started around 9 or 10
This part of the article is very off-putting to me. You don’t need TikTok to find good books for kids. Kids don’t need to see digital advertisements to make a decision. They need access to a library stocked with recently published books that kids will enjoy.
The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject.
They need a library stocked with "books that kids will enjoy," recently published doesn't have anything to do with it. It's not like filling the school library up with stuff only published in the last 3 years is what we need to get kids reading.
> The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject.
I doubt that's the root cause. Frankly, all the other things seem more significant: making reading education more test-focused and less fun, screens (in a zillion different ways, subtle and obvious), the pandemic breaking peer-influenced reading, etc. They're all probably working together dis-synergisticly.
I also wonder if there's other missing social components. I remember in elementary school feeling that reading "chapter books" was important step to being more mature. Do kids still feel that way? Of course I also often read pulpy junk that was fun or interesting, not serious.
The OP said:
> Connor was more blunt: “Maybe you think a book about a school shooting is really important,” she said, “but kids want to read a fun book. That’s what kids want today—they want to have fun.”
I think that's always been true. IIRC, I always disliked the "important" books I was forced to read for school (e.g. the ones that tended to win important awards from adults and get articles written about them in the New York Times to this day).
I’ve heard newer English literature evangelized quite a lot since older English literature gets more and more Eurocentric the further back you go. Usually on political grounds, but also with the claim that newer literature is better and more relevant to especially diverse children’s lives.
> The author mentions later on that libraries are being defunded, and this is likely to be the root cause. Rather than spending so many words on speculation it would’ve been nice to see some hard numbers on the subject.
You also need "evangelism" from people in a position to influence. That's unlikely to be librarians; and parents/teachers are also not the best-positioned for that.
Overall the costs of social media likely still outweigh the harms here, but it seems to me like they've identified a legimitate "good" usage in encouraging reading in certain niches.
How to replicate that without social media? Gotta make a bunch of local kid "influencers."
My apologies for not refraining from charged words when my country is being stolen out from under me, by some of the worst people in the world, that keep getting elected by the "fuck your feelings" crowd.
Also, it's germane to this topic.
You, however, remain above it all, so enjoy your pedestal.
My rant won't either, but I feel better, and if any of them happen to read it, I hope they enjoy it.
Good luck with your campfire and mallows. I'll even send over an .mp3 of Kumbaya and you can hold hands with them, and discuss whatever you like.
Except, this isn't what's happening. FFS, it's happening in all libraries, not just the ones meant for the kiddies. You know this, yet paint a different picture, in support of your position.
>Just like preventing children from watching porn is not a bad idea.
Now we draw the false parallel between non-pornographic books and actual pr0n.
>Parenting is about finding a balance between protection and pushing their boundaries.
Now the feel-good statement, providing us all with a justification for their statements. THE KIDS! All of this is somehow aside from the fact that the parents and other children and the internet are much more influential than a book by Gloria Steinbeck, that makes racists uncomfortable.
> Schools should be safe places to learn without having to worry about your kid coming home wanting to transition into an asexual raccoon or whatever the hell is trendy that year.
Finally, we draw another parallel between 2 things that are completely unrelated, because we have no real justification for our point, just feels.
Well done?
This is mostly a conversation about morality and I dont think we’re going to convince one another to change our principles here so my instinct is to say “you win” and move on.
But for context, I personally despise Donald Trump and think he’s a symbol of the downfall of our country. And I mostly think the government should stay out of any choices about how we raise our kids.
The books in school libraries issue is part of a larger discussion about who gets to choose what our kids learn. I don’t have the full answer but I do know, for my kids, it is not “gender studies graduates and communists”.
This isn't really about morality alone, imo. This is about attempting to legislate morality with a hammer, which is just as bad. There is no basis for many of the books being banned, other than Republican horse shit. For the record, I'm not seeing Dems line up to ban books. It's activist clowns with an axe to grind.
It's all wrapped up in Jesus and FOR THE CHILDREN, but that's a lie as well.
I seriously doubt many 9 year olds checked out The Diary of Anne Frank, yet it's being banned, because some idiot thinks they know better than everyone else.
Since, you don't seem to google, I'll take care of this one for you: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2022/06/2...
We do agree on the govt. staying out of child rearing.
The current crop of "people" that get to choose what people can learn are not the people any sane person wants making these calls, yet here we are.
Lastly, your kids, along with everyone else's are exposed to things, daily, that you have zero control over. You have zero input, when the event happens. You're sole option is to teach your kids to think like rational humans, have some compassion for others, and lastly, just leave people alone to live their lives.
Your last point makes me think maybe you don’t have kids? Because yes of course every parents knows that they can’t control every aspect of their child’s experience. This discussion is specifically about what should and shouldn’t be in children’s libraries. I think parents should have a say in that. Kids are like sponges. If you tell them it’s totally normal to kill puppies, some not-insignificant percentage of them are gonna kill puppies.
I loved the book Middlesex, and have nothing against transgender people. My concern is that a “movement” has started around this naturally rare phenomenon and it has become increasingly trendy to cut off your penis or breasts. This is not what sane parents want for their children.
Why does a minority group get to decide what books are available?
Why does a self-described religious minority get to impose their values upon everyone else, in a country founded, in part, on religious freedoms?
A simple example of the fallacy of book bans is the Bible. The bible covers things that most people would not want a 9-year old to read about, yet, it'll never be banned, because it's special. smh.
People can censor things all they like, at home, but shouldn't get to determine who gets to read what, based on their own personal POV.
The book banning efforts aren't limited to keeping books out of school libraries for younger age kids, or even school libraries generally.
(Nor is it limited to books where that argument is reasonably applicable Even when it is in school libraries for younger children.)
> Schools should be safe places to learn without having to worry about your kid coming home wanting to transition into an asexual raccoon or whatever the hell is trendy that year.
Gender identity differing from gender assigned at birth is a low-rate but widely observed phenomenon across times and cultures. Stripped to this from what is either hyperbolic or driven by propaganda designed to obscure real issues in your description, no, its not something parents should be protected from in their children.
Trump is the symptom made public.
It’s a little like reading an article before commenting. Most people don’t. You will get a lot more out of the conversation if you do though.
Libraries already have thousands, if not millions, of books on hand. I don't think it's a funding issue.
"In some states, teachers can’t even keep a classroom library because they have to protect themselves from book bans"
Yeah this sounds false.
I have quite a few teacher friends in Georgia and NYC, and I can tell you that this is the case for them. Organizations that represent teachers have said so themselves. Hard evidence is best though. Do you have numbers to dismiss their claims?
There is a lot of book banning occurring and the rate seems to be increasing fast (see links below).
There are penalties in some jurisdictions and zero teachers want to face the kind of shit that has gone on with parents and politicians, churches and local body meetings.
So rather than search out each book they have and keep track of its status, then recheck a few weeks later, just remove the lot. Teachers do not have time for this crap, and why risk their jobs?
It’s chilling and it’s hard to see how this isn’t the aim. ‘Who ever needed more than a bible?’
https://pen.org/report/narrating-the-crisis/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/books/book-bans-public-sc...
That doesn't pass the smell test. The only way I can see that being even remotely true is if the teacher's goal is mainly to push up against someone's line, politically.
Even in the most hostile environment, I doubt you'd run afoul of anyone with a well-stocked library of widely beloved classic children's books.
But I guess in their words:
> the teacher's goal is mainly to push up against someone's line, politically
Look, Narnia has witchcraft in it and depicts Christ as a lion. It's probably blasphemous (though, yes, I get that it is intended as a regular Christian allegory and is not supposed to be blasphemous). It is not universally loved in the evangelical community and is a possible target for a book ban. It's also got racially insensitive stereotypes depicted and that's a target for complaints from a different direction.
The Hobbit is indeed a popular book, that has repeatedly been the subject of book bans, again for the magic/wizardry/witchcraft thing.
The point is, if your job is to be an elementary school teacher and people try to get you fired for having a book they find objectionable, it's a lot keep on top of. The books people object to vary wildly.
Additionally, when people make these classic book lists, they suffer from what I think of as "classic books that adults believe children ought to like" syndrome. Sometimes these books overlap with what kids actually like, sometimes not.
Doesn’t this swing both ways? Surely banning books is seen as a fairly extreme and intended to impose your views on someone else. What other interpretation is there?
No. I was only responding to the false hyperbole that teachers can't keep books in their classrooms anymore.
Also, the whole controversy around "banning books" is stupid and full of dumb propaganda. That extends to the term "book ban" itself, which is a bit of manipulative, misleading spin that rivals "death tax." If anyone was really against "book bans," they should demonstrate their commitment by fighting for a Hustler subscription and some "gender critical" books for every classroom. It's really a fight about who gets to do the banning.
It also avoids discussing which age is appropriate for these topics. Most of the support for including explicit sexual violence seems to be about high school, and even there it's not clear that explicit content is necessary to these purposes (I'm not familiar with the books in question).
Then there are the books by Kendi etc. and an example where that was required reading in an AP course (college-level). Sure, that's debatable but isn't of much relevance to reading, reading for enjoyment in particular, by young kids, which is the topic of this HN post.
The pen.org article says "books aren’t harmful—censorship is." So it gives no credence to any kind of concern about age-appropriate topics.
A professional with training and some sort of certification could decide this, based on the child’s age and development level. A teacher for example.
This sounds like nonsense.
Sure, they may have to do this for books that are close to crossing the line, or they could simply leave out any controversial book.
Does that mean that the school library won't have some books? Well, yes, but they already don't stock "every book ever written".
My school, back in the 80s, did not keep Nabakov's Lolita. The public library had it, though.
School's aren't there to "teach the controversy". I said it back when the controversy not being taught was Intelligent Design, I stand by it in 202x when the controversy not being taught is LGBT.
Teacher unions list book bans as one of the primary reasons for leaving. They have data and testimony backing that up. We see legislation and organizations all over America.
Here is a quick article describing the number of books being banned and the effects it has on teachers [1]. It list numbers. There are numerous articles all over the internet from well respected organizations like the NYT saying the same stuff.
The numbers are already presented by them. We see the teachers leaving. We know education is suffering from systematic national pressures from both political sides. Feel free to look it up. hell on first principles, book banning has a direct effect on libraries teachers can have when they include such classics. Again, what numbers do you have? Or just first principles logic to dismiss them at all?
[1] : https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/educators-fi...
It appears that most of the handwringing is about politically disagreeing with the bans, not hardships of obeying bans. There are always bans. But they want this material (sexuality, gender, "race theory") available even to pretty young children because of their societal goals/agenda. Others do not want that. Fight.
This recent WSJ article mentions primarily reasons of salary and student behavior, as any layman would guess from first principles. It did mention "political battles over issues such as how race and gender are discussed". Well, this is not going away -- the battle is fought from multiple directions. Another direction is the industry profits from institutions being morally obligated to buy a lot of new diversity-related books.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/teachers-leaving-quitt...
Sure.
> It appears that most of the handwringing is about politically disagreeing with the bans, not hardships of obeying bans
That is not true. The ban list is overly broad. The hobbit is banned in some locations. Harry potter and asoiaf... Maybe high schoolers and middle schoolers shouldn't be reading that stuff. Multiple teachers in multiple districts have been disciplined over books they did not expect. It is far more sustainable for teachers to avoid this issue.
> But they want this material (sexuality, gender, "race theory") available even to pretty young children because of their societal goals/agenda
I am not going to judge this statement's veracity. Let's take it as true. As I mentioned before, the issue would then be that they are also banning other books that have nothing to do with this, and that still makes the jobs of teachers difficult. It is not feasible to have this much overhead on book bans because of political battles and also expect teachers to manage this overhead.
Thanks for sharing your first principles argument. If you have the time, please share some numbers.
A (very straightforward) search surfaced this article https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmq54/florida-teachers-are-...
The emphasis on "taking away libraries" appears to be partly politically motivated.
This isn't about censorship per se since we have a baseline expectation of censorship. We already don't allow teachers to stock racist material or porn in classrooms. This new thing seems to that there are LGBT books which veer close to the edge with stuff like explicit sex scenes.
It mentions other "proposed" laws, some of which seemingly setting a lower bar. But "proposed" laws aren't banning libraries now.
In any case, how can this possibly be an important and relevant issue today contributing to an already-observed decline in reading in 9-year olds nationally?
[0]https://apnews.com/article/lgbtq-florida-dont-say-gay-books-...
Also, do you think these laws have been important regarding the "decline by 9" of 9-year olds reading for enjoyment?
One possible issue on the contrary side is promotion of kids' books involving racial diversity themes. Often such moralizing books are not very interesting for pure entertainment value. They are there to meet a market trend, some may be better than others but in general have not stood the test of time.
It says the teachers have to remove or cover up their classroom libraries until their books can be approved by the school. I don't know how you can honestly argue that that doesn't constitute removal, even if it might be temporary.
> In any case, how can this possibly be an important and relevant issue today contributing to an already-observed decline in reading in 9-year olds nationally?
I don't know enough about the subject to comment, which is why I didn't say anything about such a relationship. I only responded to you because you were saying someone else was wrong and I didn't think you were right
The article cited a particular school district directive which seems to be a temporary review procedure for its high schools. It would be disingenuous to say that means teachers can't keep a library, full stop, and even in that case it seems it was immediately backtracked. The law in question has since been clarified.
It should tell you something that these “concerned parents” never pressured Amazon to stop selling the books they complain about. It was never about the books.
Sure. The next step is helping them making a decision on which book to read and provide a social environment for doing that. Libraries do not really do that and haven't done that even in the early 90s.
It's also basically useless at classifying works of fiction, to the extent that most libraries don't even bother using it for that purpose. Standard practice is to group all fiction into a few broad categories (like "mystery" or "fantasy", as well as a catch-all for general fiction) and shelve them alphabetically by author. Needless to say, this isn't conducive to browsing.
i am struggling with this as i keep looking for new books to read. being in a book club helps a lot.
Tell them what you like to read and they'll email you a list of 10 books to try next.
At 9 I had no idea how to go into a massive thing like a library and make a selection for myself. "Word of mouth" made a lot of choices for me when I was young.
There was no "word of mouth" because I was the only kid in my class who read for pleasure.
As a kid who already hated school, and used reading as an escape from a pretty shit childhood, I was clocking in 5 books a week.
The teacher first accused my parents of lying that I read that many books, because it quickly got to double digits, but I was able to summarize all of them off the top of my head, so instead I was just forbidden from doing it altogether.
Not sure what the lesson is there, lol.
> Not sure what the lesson is there, lol.
Lessons learned:
a) Incentives matter (economy 101)
b) If a market offers possibilities for arbitrage, market participants will attempt to make use of them.
c) By market laws, arbitrage opportunities will close very fast, so in the long term, markets can be assumed to be arbitrage-free.
d) Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
e) Authorities (or those in power) will attempt to cheat you. Don't trust them.
Don't try to cheat the system. Follow the spirit of rules obediently instead of attempting to use the wording of the rules to your advantage.
In high school we had to make a list of 12 books we read in the year. I was reading a few a week. My list contained 12 books.
(Side note, we lived some distance from the library in elementary school, but we got through the books -fast- so the librarians gave us extra library cards to reduce visits to like once a week. I also got adult-cards pretty young (like 10) because I'd read all the kids books and was already reading older fare. This was in the days before YA was a genre :)
Of course you had a poor teacher because they obviously desired to teach you something, but forgot to tell you what the lesson was. Other than they were a bad teacher, but i guess you may already have known that.
the lesson is that overachievers are often not welcome.
All the libraries I’ve been to recently are very well set up for discoverability. Especially the kids section. There are hundreds of books on display with some indication of what it’s like and themed sections and all kinds of stuff
At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.
I suppose the fact that books were physical and I did not have something like TikTok on my phone when I was 9 helped me read whatever was lying around.
As adult I used Kindle for a while but got back to sourcing physical books, even though I have no permanent place and books are difficult to travel with.
You know what isn't cheap in the 2020s? Space.
My grandparents had a full-ass room just for books. I can't even fit my modest blu-ray collection in my apartment, they sit in storage along with my DVDs and physical books.
I've got a Kindle and Calibre with hundreds of books and they don't take any space.
I'm still trying to get my first proper apartment instead of renting =) And know I make more in a year than both of them combined in 2-3 years.
Another factor is that web fictions are targeted at people that just want to read for a short moment, so you're basically only gonna read for 5-10 minutes before the chapter is over and you're done until the next publication.
IMHO the biggest danger to the medium (written fiction) are LLMs. Since they've become well known, the amount of content has skyrocketed and most of it is without any point. No coherent story that develops with characters growing over the months/years you're following them.
Agreed, LLMs are an issue and will probably reduce the amount of written content published in the open (or at all).
I specifically remember that when the first Harry Potter (I was a child cut me some slack) came out I bounced off it because I didn't like it, and then one of my friends at school couldn't stop talking about it and got me interested enough to pick it back up.
And don't even get me STARTED on the LotR books. Or Star Trek novelizations (which I still consider books).
If they did, they didn't tell me about it. That might tell you how much the other kids talked to me. Not much of a brag now is it? :-D
However, I have good reason to believe it. I went to the public library every weekend when I was in elementary school. I never, ever ran into anyone from my class there in all those years. If the other kids in my class at age 9 read for pleasure, they weren't anywhere close to me in volume.
It's not a brag, and not a real achievement. The tallest kid in a class at age 14 might only be of average height in a crowd 10 years later. This is the same thing.
Crazy gender stereotype based on just anecdotes (nothing wrong with saying it tho, its always awesome to hear about different experiences)
Most of the books that changed my life, got me into tech, programming, got me into business, entrepreneurship, hustle, etc.
All the books, podcasts, etc were either shared directly to me by my male friends (im male too) who insisted i read those books for my betterment cuz those books were acc. to them : “Awesome” , or books that i discovered while exchange discussions about what books are we reading right now, exchanging reading lists, etc.
There are tons of girls out there who hate reading books, (my mom included, she always has hated books, outside of school homework and exams),
I do not like reading fiction books much, nor do my peers, we’ve exchanged book suggestions since childhood, now even more with more and more internet friends.
Ive had great books on gardening, or agriculture, or history, etc recommended to me either inside books by authors, or by random telegram groups consisting mostly of nerd men.
99% of the books recommended to me were by men, and im a man.
So i dont think its a girl only thing, plenty of people exchanging book, just go to any major reddit forum on reading and booksuggestions (like r/suggestmeabook) and you’ll find tons of men who are more than happy to give you suggestions, if you cannot find classmates or neighbours to share with
An interpretation is book cos have cut physical benefit advertising for cents on the dollar internet advertisements.
I'm not saying the library doesn't have exceptional value, or that 9 year olds shouldn't be in it, but maybe for younger patrons a "concierge" type service or "first timer group experience" being available would help a lot.
As the article notes, school libraries are getting defunded and politicized, which is extremely sad to me, and disproportionately worrying for the future.
I think I can conclude reasonably from this is that the lowest efficiency lever one can pull is funding. Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance. That's because the people there only know one answer to every problem: "funding".
It could also be because the schools with the most special / high needs children need the most funding.
Schools in poor neighborhoods need more help just to achieve median results. They need to contend with issues like teen pregnancies, drug use, violence, and kids who don't even have food at home.
Compare those challenges to rich suburban kids and of course the schools in poor areas need more funding.
Spills with the most paper towels are the messiest. Why does everyone think they need paper towels to clean up spills!?
Elon Musk received plenty of government funding for his companies as well. And guess what? BYD sells more cars than Tesla now (a few years ago Elon said he wasn’t worried about them and now they’re suddenly a problem) because of what? Government funding. Governments have also funded the majority of fundamental research which made present day technologies possible. Even today NIST, DARPA, NHS, NSF etc continue to fund science and technology research.
it's not good for stuff.....something's....but it's not a panacea.... Meta and Google and Tiktok all claim otherwise.....but the cultural effects show.
advertising in the modern age is not good .....
it's not sticky.....
it's vapid and forgotten faster than the fly you accidentally swallowed at some point in your life...
When I was 9, our school had a small library with a librarian (or at least an on-duty teacher), and if you wanted to read something you could always go and ask her what she thought you'd enjoy - and that was on the off chance you couldn't find something that looked appealing.
There are also public libraries where you could do the same thing with your parents in tow.
When did that stop?
Also, society has changed so much.
I grew up in a time when there was no such thing as "children's books". My first reading was some pulp fiction, then some bestsellers, then Dracula. I got to Wuthering Heights when I was n. I found it gripping, but I understood almost nothing. Luckily - crazy luckily - I have a friend, a n-year-old girl, who also read Wuthering and introduced me to it. So I read it again.
It ends up just being the same thing over and over again. The author explaining minute details about the day they interviewed someone, what the weather was like, extreme details of the interviewee's facial expressions. The author somehow managing to fit the Stanford Prison Experiment in the book. The author going into excruciating detail about the scientific method. The author giving an unnecessary history of the topic back to when humans were hunter gatherers.
It has been a very long time since I came across a non-fiction book that didn't feel like it could've been 50 pages long. I end up giving up a few chapters in.
How we sleep, the secret to business blabla, consulting tricks, the life of tech visionary, or lifehacks for the 21st century: filler,filler, filler.
> My office is ten by fourteen feet, with two windows, a desk with a computer, a sideboard covered with books, and a low table between the chairs. The desk, the sideboard, and the low table are all made of matching reddish-brown wood. The desk is a hand-me-down from my former department chair. It’s cracked down the middle on the inside, where no one else can see it, an apt metaphor for the work I do.
> On top of the desk are ten separate piles of paper, perfectly aligned, like an accordion. I am told this gives the appearance of organized efficiency.
I do agree that 90% of self-help books are better left as blog posts, though. To be honest, all of these "how to fix your attention span" books have been repeating the same thing for nearly 2 decades now. They don't really say anything new about how to do it; they package the same repeated things in new packaging.
Just skim past the umpteenth telling of Abraham Wald and the bulleted bombers and get to the meaningful parts. Even Thomas Jefferson condensed the New Testament down to 84 pages. [0]
0. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-thomas-jeffe...
I love an endless series of giant fantasy novels, but I've read so so many SF short stories that really stick with you and make you think. As long as you're not going back to the old pulps, any decent collection is probably really good.
I’ve also been hearing for a long time how novellas are the future of books and people simply don’t buy them and they remain a niche format and I don’t see that changing.
The worst offenders, in my opinion, are the self-help/business books that aspire to long form journalism but are probably better off left as a bullet list on a blogpost. These ones are also infected by the idea that everyone of their bullet points needs a vague connection to some elaborate neuroscientific explanation and a "case study" that is usually some oversimplification. Cal Newport is painfully guilty of this, for an example; but it's everywhere in the self-help genre and especially in "airport" books. (I actually think Newport is a better blogger and occasional NewYorker writer than a book writer. His "insights" aren't that grand.)
Fiction, well, I think a long work of fiction is fine as long as the story can handle it. My tastes tend toward florid, "purple", and quite dense prose and descriptions. I like when an author "paints a scene". On the other hand, I find the recent trend of extremely "to the point", stripped down "minimalist" writing that is very common in a lot of contemporary literature (Rooney, for example) and fantasy writing (Sanderson, for example) to be downright boring and comes off as half-baked. There are probably too many 500+pg books because of publishers though. Fantasy has its own obsession with "epics". 200-250pgs is actually a great goldilocks zone that doesn't get published so often nowadays, but should make a comeback. The big publishers hate them though.
"Book people" know why 9-year-olds stop reading. "We have met the enemy and he is us.” [0] (which my child read from the reissue [1]).
0. https://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2022/04/we-have-met-the-enem...
1. https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/walt-kelly
I went to a private "college prep" high school, and the amount of assigned, mandatory reading was insane. I spent so much time reading assigned novels that I just didn't have time to read for pleasure. (And why read for pleasure if I already spent 30+ minutes reading a boring / awful novel as part of my homework?)
Once I was out of college, I rediscovered reading.
In retrospect, it's surprising how rigid the required reading was at my school: no choice in the material whatsoever, so the most important engine that drives reading (curiosity) was held out of the equation.
Any tips? I didn't, somehow. After leaving high school, then university, my brain went into full on "be productive all the time" mode. My brain somehow doesn't think reading is a good use of my time, so I've settled for audiobooks when falling asleep or on long drives.
The last book I was able to devour and actually enjoyed was the Harry Potter series, which ended just before I went to university.
Have you tried Dungeon Crawler Carl?
You might enjoy reading _short_ novels. I really liked the "All Systems Red" series, each of them feels short enough to read in a day. If you enjoyed Harry Potter, you might also enjoy the Invisible Library series, or maybe the Harry Dresden novels. They both felt like fun-pulpy romps through magical worlds.
Maybe you can convince your brain that reading at bedtime is a good use of time because it promotes healthy sleeping by not being on a screen. ;) (It hasn't worked for me, I still have a backlog two shelves long.)
reading at bedtime doesn't work for me because i fall asleep in the middle and then i have to figure out what i missed.
> The habit of reading is a meaningful way to meditatively intake large portions of information. Reading helps with creativity, focus, and communication. Reading light-hearted, entertaining books increases these skills while preserving focus for work in a way that reading the latest O'Reilly book does not, while making reading non-fiction books in the future easier because you've been practicing reading.
Separately, humans are not machines. In general, we aren't wired to constantly be doing things, and taking time to play or to enjoy stories or to do absolutely nothing is an entirely necessary maintenance task.
Removing joy and rest from your life for productivity is the biological equivalent of accumulating technical debt. This debt can intensify until you need a complete rewrite; when this happens, it's called burn out, and it's kinda really bad.
This hits home in so many more ways than just reading. I find it hard to do any leisure activities because doing them means I have spare time to do any of a thousand items on my personal backlog. It's very stressful.
what you say suggests that you have a backlog of non-leisure activities that you feel are more important.
i solved this by making leisure activities more important. call it work-life balance if that helps. leisure is part of a healthy day. i started going for a daily walk for exercise. i considered important for my well being. i watch one tv show per day. and only one. i simply decided that is part of a healthy routine. and i made a list of what i want to watch so i don't waste that hour on random stuff. i still do spend more time on random stuff, eg youtube, but that is a different problem. when i run out of time, i stop wasting time on youtube, but i don't stop that one tv episode. i figure i have earned the break after being busy for a day. i should do the same with listening to audiobooks/stories but i haven't been able to re-establish that routine yet.
General change to my habits has been that if I’m not feeling a story, it’s okay to put it down. The amount of reading I have trudged through because I was afraid of quitting…
Although nowadays I read more manuals and research papers.
Or the occasional online xuanhuan novel.
He's not the greatest writer of all time, but he's enjoyable while not feeling like you're reading YA or something age inappropriate. And his classics are classics for a reason.
Can't go wrong with Carrie, The Stand, Misery, The Shining or Salem's Lot.
What got me back into reading was Harry Potter. I hadn't read a book for fun since middle school and had grown to loathing reading of any kind from all the assigned reading. (just give me the cliff notes).
HP was new, all the rage, and wife convinced me to give it a try (she had always been an avid reader). I had maybe 3 books to catch up on and I read them all back to back and was eagerly awaiting the 4th. We'd do midnight releases and each buy our own book and didn't sleep till we were through.
> Any tips?
> The last book I was able to devour and actually enjoyed was the Harry Potter series
Actually, it was Harry Potter that got me back into reading. I read the first 5 books over the course of 2 weeks the summer after I graduated college.
In some cases I'd see an interview on late night television and read the book the guest was promoting. More recently I read a book that was discussed on the radio during my commute.
In other cases, there was a subject I wanted to learn about, so I'd read books about the subject, or biographies on people who were known in the subject matter.
Sometimes I'll see a movie / TV show based on the book, and like it enough to read the book.
And: J. K. Rowling's new series about Coroman Strike (written under a pseudonym) is excellent. Read it slowly, though. I'm also slowly re-reading Harry Potter to my kids and it's a lot more enjoyable in bits instead of as a binge.
1) Keep a list of book recommendations mentioned from HN, podcasts, friends, etc. Eventually, some will be recommended twice or more, and that may be enough to tell your brain "this will be worth it."
2) Try non-fiction if you're usually a fiction person, or vice versa. I grew up enjoying only fiction. But now I realize I enjoy non-fiction a lot more.
3) Don't stick with boring books for more than a couple chapters. I've been using thriftbooks.com, so it's affordable to toss a few dollars away and try again.
- Make it a special time. Start your bedtime routine early, light some candles, make tea and have a go at it. Or sit in a nice café, or after a nice picnic. I love reading myself to sleep, or with tea on the balcony in the morning.
- Remove distractions. I read on a disconnected iPad with no internet and no apps except for reading and notetaking.
If you want to put it in productivity-over-everything terms, reading before sleep is a really good way to wind down and get solid sleep. It's also a great way to build vocabulary, get different perspectives, and enjoy idle time without doomscrolling.
I recommend bad litrpg and progression fantasy personally. Mother of Learning is a good one to start, it's free on royalroad.com or available on Kindle.
Here's a trick that helped me after a ten+ year hiatus and having my attention fried by social media:
A lot of people who have lost their attention span to technology will find themselves reading but not absorbing, their mind wandering, until they realize they'd "read" 3 pages and don't remember what happened.
So read slow and with purpose, but most importantly at the end of each page, ask yourself what you just read and have a conversation with yourself about it. This helped rebuild my comprehension and focus. This is similar to how English classes will read a book as a class: Reading then discussion, reading then discussion. But instead of as a group, do it as an internal dialogue.
it does depend on the writing style though. it happens more when the story is difficult to understand.
and then while listening i need to do an activity that doesn't require mental focus.
so i can't sit in front of the computer, unless it is mundane photo editing or some other repetitive task that doesn't make me think.
going for a walk and housework work for me. especially housework. there is nothing else i can do while washing dishes, cooking, doing laundry or cleaning. the work doesn't require much focus, and is quite repetitive. that makes listening easy.
For non-fiction books, this means pushing back against claims that appear to be unsupported. When I read in a paper book I do so with a pen to make notes in it (I don't sell my books, and I obviously don't do this with library books), but ebooks just get marked up in my ebook reader and it's very nice. It's also good when reviewing a book because I can see all of my thoughts and questions and often can answer them by the end of the chapter/section/unit.
For fiction books, this ends up being a "what would I do there/what would an ordinary person do?" It's very helpful to try and place yourself in the character's shoes and see how you may have reacted differently or if you agree with the character understanding _why_ you agree with them.
i was an avid reader in my youth but stopped when i entered university (and got a computer (guess where i spend most of my time instead of reading books ;-))
about a decade ago i discovered audiodrama, short story audio magazines and finally whole audiobooks. i mostly listened to them on my commute. later when i had no commute i started going for walks (to get out of the house and move) and i also listen during housework or other mundane tasks. i tried listening before going to sleep, but that didn't work because i would doze away and miss sections while hearing others. that meant hi had to relisten the next day to catch what i missed.
i get about an hour of listening time on average, sometimes two, when i have a good daily routine, less otherwise.
one hour per day is enough to listen to 2-3 books per month. i alternate between all three types so i usually only get one book in a month, sometimes less. but that adds up too. my reading list has almost 80 titles. with an average of 10 hours per book you can finish a whole book in a month with only 20 minutes per day.
Sort story magazines introduce you to multiple authors and multiple stories, most of which could be read in 30 minutes before bed, and give you a chance to enjoy reading for fun without committing to a who "extended universe" of material you feel like you have to know.
If SF&F is your preferred genre, "Asimov's", "Analog", and "Fantasy and Science Fiction" are old staples that are still being published. "Locus", "Lightspeed" and "Strange Horizons" are also options, with Lightspeed and Strange Horizons being relative newcomers to the field. weightlessbooks.com carries a couple of those and some magazine in other genres too if SF&F aren't your jam.
It's not reasonable to do a cognitively demanding job all day and then expect to do cognitively demanding leisure at night. Unemployed people are great readers.
From what's popular these days I think you should try reading: The Martian and Cradle. If you don't like it then stop reading and go for something else.
If you want to try a lot of different stuff I would recommend trying web novel on sites like RoyalRoad, Web novel, Scribblehub. Just pick something, read a bit. If you don't like it, find something new.
Also books are less isolating than listening, for example if you are in a park with nature sounds.
If you enjoyed The Expanse you could try the last 3 books. If you haven’t read for a long time it’ll be hard at first to stay focused but by the middle of the book you should hopefully get the feeling of wanting to pick the book anytime like a new episode of the show just dropped.
I can tell you the last time I had to write a singly-linked list implementation though. October 17th, Nineteen Ninety Never.
From there, one can modify it to implement tries.
And then one can understand trees, arborescences etc.
The rest is about algorithmic complexity (speed and size) which I never remember but that's easy to look it up.
It's true that someone who does simple frontend engineering (for example) might not need to know too much about that.
But for instance, it was just a couple weeks ago that I've realized a markov chain is just a bunch of linked lists (a DAG, Directed Acyclic Graph).
I've found Computer Science to be a very nice framework to think about the world.
Empathy tends to win here: you need to understand why people are using the software and how they are using it to make good decisions.
Communication tends to be better with people that have empathy.
Why do you believe that Computer Science is less "critical thinking about abstract concepts and how to articulate ideas" than Journalism?
The point of writing (and working with) linked list implementations in a CS2 course is not because linked lists are something you'll have to implement yourself later (although there are certain areas of systems programming where return values of various system calls are, effectively, linked lists).
The point of working with LLs in CS2 is because they are an extremely simple data structure that you can inspect the entire implementation of; and their use of references/pointers gives practice with that concept before upgrading to the concepts of trees and (linked) graphs; and their fundamental structure and properties are so different from array-type list implementations that they provide a good first example of two different implementation strategies that can produce exactly the same output/result but with different space and time usage properties; and the parallel implementations are also a motivation for abstracting interface away from implementation and keeping data private and interface public.
So, that's why I teach linked lists in CS2. I try to be very up-front with my students about that; sorry to hear that your professors maybe weren't. I pretty solidly agree that a LinkedList per se is not particularly useful to a working software engineer; but that's not why we teach them.
It made me wonder if children in the future will be forced to watch movies and play video games in their "literary education" and whether they will hate watching movies and playing games because of that.
Which leaves mountains of free time (an irreplaceable commodity, you will agree) for reading whatever the heck you like.
I like science fiction.
I still read for fun, but stuck to fiction.
Then as I aged, at some point I ended up getting into classical literature somehow, and now that I actually "got it" and could see and understand what it was saying - beyond the words themselves, it became a complete joy to read. For instance reading "The Republic" in modern times can make one think Plato was a prophet more than a philosopher. Or reading Aristotle's "Politics" can give one such an incredible amount of insight into thinking in the past, society, and even into your own thoughts. Or reading Aurelius' "Meditations" while bearing in mind these were the inner thoughts, never meant to be published, of not only one of the greatest leaders in history, but also arguably the single most powerful man alive at the time. It makes reading feel amazing. Another less well known example would be The King's Mirror [1]. A Norwegian text from 1250 that was a training/philosophy manual, in the form of a Q&A, intended for King Magnus VI. Highly recommended.
Now I see things like middle schoolers being assigned Animal Farm and I just kind of sigh, though it's not like I can think of a better solution!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konungs_skuggsj%C3%A1
I got lucky in never "bending" to the task of reading because I had to, just reading the school curriculum books if they were interesting to me. And I enjoyed reading greatly. But some books Ichose to read I slogged through and could not enjoy them because of my lack of maturity and perspective. Revisiting them revealed a lot more depth. And my reading of them grew with my understanding of the world. So I guess the experience is normal. And I wonder if I did not slug through those books at that time if I would have ever reached the insight I had on subsequent reading.
I am certain things from a good book stick with you, even if you don't recall it explicitly. It just lingers there in the back of your head, like bricks that are piled up on each other until you don't see them anymore but you do see the wall they form.
When I grew up (just by a few years) and accidentally re - discovered a work that I hated in school, I found it extremely deep and thought provoking.
Maybe high school students are not a great audience for appreciating a lot of literature, at least I wasn't.
Not to mention that we're reading right now...
Yeah. My nine years old goes to a school where there's no homework. She now reads a lot: kids at school all shares any cool book they read and then they all want to read it. Today she brought back a brick and started reading it. She devours book.
Only assignment is reading 30 min a night, any book they want (including graphic novels). Yet that does not foster a love of reading.
I had a ton of homework, but still read a book a week (though I did not do sports, only band, so had way more time than most mainstream students in that regard).
My reading waned when I had kids, basically as working parents I am always too exhausted to read, I always doze off. So I can’t set a good example, which I wonder if that is part of the problem — my mom was always reading.
My kids had far more than that.
I read huge amounts as a kid but then lost the habit as an adult. It takes any number of habits and tricks to try and get it going again. Like someone upthread, I'm often fighting tiredness, and one trick that can work is prioritising reading in the morning and leaving news and social media for when I'm tired.
It was a disaster.
By the time my sister reached that age (she is 10 years younger), it had gotten so much worse: they were aiming for about two hours of homework. It realistically took closer to 3 or 4, and with many tears shed, even with me and both our parents helping. (She has since been diagnosed with ADHD.)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, she and I have both decided to not have children. Being a kid really fucking sucked then, and it's probably even worse now.
For many classes though, 15 minutes/night would be very useful. Language learning, for instance, or music practice. Most kids would benefit from 15 minutes of writing prose for any reason, and I think even high school math topics could provide 15 minutes of worthwhile practice questions each evening. All of these are things that you get better at with repeated practice.
I started programming at age 12, and that was more interesting. School was mostly boring so I didn't feel the need to extend it at home.
Looking back I recognise I was fortunate. My teachers didn't seem to over-mind (perhaps because I was well behaved and engaged in class, and did ok in tests). My parents didn't seem to mind as long as my teachers didn't complain too much.
I also now recognise that I went to a school with progressive values, good teachers, and a focus on flexibility (to a point).
I used to joke afterwards that I had a "unspoken agreement" with my teachers. They could hand out as much homework as they liked, and I would quietly ignore it all.
I don't know if you want to set a good example so this advixe is certainly unsolicited, but in my case reading really took off after having children. First when they were tiny and needed to be carried/pushed around which is great for reading, and now that they're toddlers and I'm in the habit, I squeeze it in where I can.
I hope we can read together more as they get older. I'm really looking forward to re-reading some classics like the Hobbit and the books about Narnia. For every year, the space of literature they are capable of expands massively.
Do you think the problem would be alleviated if the hours of class time were shorter and (maybe) handed over to a study hall period or even to just being sent home? In college I know the theory is supposed to be that one hour of class time equals two hours of homework (though that rarely happens in practice, in my American experience). But high school has far more hours of class time.
There's a lot of interesting things to be gleaned from books and certainly expanding students horizons is not in and of itself a bad idea. But school reading is painful, whether it's 10 minutes or 4 hours. You're given pre-selected material with pre-selected lessons to be taken from that material. You are expected to write summaries that explain why the curtains in the foyer of this book were blue (regardless of whether there's actually a reason the author did that or if the lesson planner just hallucinated some meaning out of thin air), and then discuss obvious lessons in non-fiction materials as if there was any other purpose to writing the book in question except to present that lesson. Sometimes you're given books to read that match whatever the current hot social topic is, again without regard to the quality of the books, and then expected to regurgitate the correct opinions on that topic as if the book presented those opinions, and again without regard to what the book actually said (or failed to say).
Reading in schools is presented and treated with the rigor of a mathematical proof, and the soullessness of dispassionate scientific observation of dying rats. It should be no wonder that what that is the experience of children with reading, so many fail to find a hobby or pleasure in it. We don't seem surprised when most students don't do mathematical formulas in their spare time after learning it in school, why should reading be any different?
But I do analyze literature and study mathematical formulas in my free time, so maybe I'm built different.
It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
I find it disappointing how poorly the lesson is taught. The question shouldn't be 'Why?' [The author did something] it should be "What?" [did the author do]. Whether they were colored for a purpose or not, what does the blueness of the curtains convey?[0]. The point then is to be able to generalize to 'what is this media conveying,' occasionally with intent[1], and 'how do I create media with my intended conveyance'.
[0]'Nothing in particular' is a valid answer, that the protagonist's favorite color was blue could be another.
[1]e.g. in a commercial: actors, wardrobe, setting, et al are all very intentionally selected to convey the message 'this product will make your life better' or similar.
and now we have chatgpt to do that!
Same in german. Die Leiden des jungen Werther - dry, boring, irrelevant.
I feel like the "blue curtains" problem with reading in schools is akin to the "shape -> rectangle -> square" problem that early OOP education has. It might be a very basic and simple attempt to explain a concept (inheritance in the case of OOP, symbolism in the case of books), but its simplicity and inoffensive genericness is so overwhelmingly devoid of any of the usefulness that the concept brings that its more harmful to the students than helpful.
I've long argued that programing courses are broken. They present a concept with a hugely simplified model, and then tell you when you don't understand why you'd want to do it that it will make more sense when you build a "real" program. I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced. A sort of "in medias res" method of teaching.
I think something similar applies to a lot of the way literature concepts are taught in schools. Boring books that don't connect with the readers and students are assigned, and then terrible examples that are either overly contrived (blue curtains) or blindingly obvious (the bad guy kicks the puppy which shows he's bad) that they just turn the students off. There's no excitement or interest nurtured into the concepts because the taught examples are so lifeless and far removed from what is actually possible.
>It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
My personal opinions on the matter are
1) "too much mandatory study". Yeah when they're adults, they'll need to work 8 hour jobs, but kids need time to be kids and they need time to let the things they're learning sink in and discover real world applicability in their own lives. 6-7 hours of schooling + 1-3 hours of homework + projects + "extra curricular" programs adds up to a lot of time where students don't have any time to find anything interesting in what they've learned before they're shuffled off to the next things. School is stressful enough when you're just learning, but all the other stuff that's piled on and the regimented testing just burns them out. I was turned off of math courses for half of my schooling because 2nd grade math was full of timed tests in which failures were punished by loss of recess time.
2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling. I had friends who were held back from advanced classes where they would have been challenged and engaged because early in elementary school they performed poorly on a handful of standardized tests and were locked forever in the "standard" track. So much of what you want to teach as a skill can be taught via multiple different avenues, and we should offer schooling that takes advantage of that. Literary concepts like foreshadowing, metaphor, symbolism etc can be taught via film, books, poetry, games and even music. Why does every student then need to go through the same literary courses with the same set of books to learn the material? Math concepts can be taught with money, or physics, or chemistry or computer programming or wood working. Why does everyone need to go through the same math textbook?
The most memorable teachers I ever had were the ones that stepped outside the books. The ones that explored teaching a concept from multiple angles, and who understood that often it was necessary to let ...
I wholeheartedly agree with you on your wishes. I didn't necessarily have the same experiences, but that's mostly beside the point. But as a very junior university teacher:
> programing courses are broken [...] I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced.
There is no time. I want to teach what you say, and as a student I wanted to be taught what you say, but that takes more time, especially if you want to cater for the whole class — that "the hard way" programming is less efficient than doing it the right way, unsurprisingly, so it takes more time (not only that, you're asking them to do the same assignment twice, which is anathema — no time for that!), and the curriculum is already chock full.
> My personal opinions on the matter are: 1) "too much mandatory study".
Sure, but then you have even less time. You'll make the previous problem worse.
> 2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling.
Yes, everyone knows this would be good, but there is no money and there are no teachers. Skilled primary school and high school teachers are incredibly hard to find, and even if you'd find them, there is no money to pay for more teachers than we have now.
Education as a whole needs a re-work in how we approach it, for many reasons but also to make time for this sort of careful nurturing; even if it means we don't cover as many things. We can no more teach all the children all the things in 18 years than we could have them listen to all the music ever produced in that same time. And to my mind then we'd be better served doing everything we can to nurture and encourage children's natural curiosity and desire to learn and do on the absolutely necessary of the things necessary that will quash that curiosity.
How do we do that? I don't know. I have thoughts, but there are certainly going to be no easy answers, and decades of bureaucracy and infrastructure around the current system will not go quietly even if we had the answers in the first place.
Given that, making space within the school day for such things seems like a good idea.
I suggest removing the competitive grading system, and adding more hours to the school day, not removing the educational opportunity.
If your curriculum puts economically disadvantaged students at an academic disadvantage, and your school has many of such students, then your school ends up with less funding because your students do poorly on tests compared with the well off schools. So if you want to help the students you've got, you come up with curriculum that doesn't penalize them for having jobs, kids, or other outside-of-class reasons that they can't sit down and read at length.
That would be concerning for adults, it’s well into burnout territory. Then we want to act surprised when kids don’t want to read on their own and only want to play video games, as if all us adults are working 60 hour weeks and then excited to keep doing our job in our free time.
My novel approach would be to cut out a bunch of shit that kids don’t strictly need and hope that gives them the time and freedom to explore those things on their own.
We do not need 12 years of history classes. They’re nice to know, but widely forgotten anyways. That could probably be cut to like 4; I do not and will never need to know about Sumerian burial rites.
We do not need most of the flowery English classes. Reading comprehension is important, identifying symbolism is not. No one has ever asked me to check if an email contains a motif.
Much of our science classes are generally useless; chemistry comes to mind. I have never, even once, used anything I learned in chemistry. I know too little to do anything practical with it, and yet it was a year long class.
The other option would be to just kill summer break and use that time for teaching instead of homework. I don’t care for that, though. In a decade we’ll be back to having homework and summer break isn’t going to come back.
One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo.
You know the same things that your neighbor knows, within a reasonable margin of error. Therefore, you have social compatibility with them.
You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth.
That's valuable, right?
To get that, you had to go through the same 12 years of history and bored idiot English teachers telling you about symbolism and metaphor and giving you terrible 5 paragraph essays to fill out with the same dumb rote formula.
If you look at the overall social outcome, for the majority, this is a good thing.
If, however, it turns out that you are special and of a rare breed, then for your own children you should hire private tutors or school them overseas or do something somehow to cultivate their greatness.
If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.
I’m not saying that we completely get rid of public education, just that we stop appending things to it and pretending they’re important.
Nobody remembers most of this alleged common ground anyways. Go ask around what the 5th amendment says, or what a high pH means, I’d be shocked if a quarter of people remembered.
> You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth.
Sure, if we’re talking about something covered in high school, but for any topic I’d be realistically interested in hearing them talk about, no. Why would me or Bill Gates want to discuss symbolism in Catcher in the Rye? I’m certainly not going to talk to Musk about chemistry; I’m doubtful he’s a through and through rocket engineer, but his tangential knowledge likely trumps my very limited recollection of valence bands and I have no idea how that relates to the energy density of rocket fuel.
This is just a veneer of equality we tell ourselves. Sure, we’re all equal in the sense that we’ve largely ignored our high school education and probably haven’t really advanced our biology knowledge.
That doesn’t imply that we’re all going to sit around and suddenly want to talk about that instead of rockets or operating systems or investment strategies; I am not on the same part of the bell curve for the topics that make them interesting.
> If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.
I don’t disagree there are pleasantries, but at what cost? We’re pushing children into working near-slavery workloads, with no recourse to change that, and our means of motivating them is primarily threatening their entire future if they don’t play along.
It’s like the worst job in the world; Amazons warehouses look like a vacation comparatively.
Children can’t switch schools on their own like adults can switch jobs. Children’s records follow them when they do switch, so they can’t escape even if they switch schools. I’ve never had HR records follow me across companies. And any employer that tried to control their employees by threatening to ruin the entire rest of their lives would have the NLRB crawl up their ass and build a branch office.
We’re trading the happiness of children for what? Me and my neighbor having equally shitty recall of the French and Indian war?
I still remember being in high school, and I still remember how miserable it was. I remember kids showing up with huge bags under their eyes because they had to go into “crunch time” and work til midnight because they got a bunch of big assignments at once.
I remember meeting most of my high school classmates and how bright eyed and cheery we were. I also remember senior year, and how many of those smiles had faded into blank, exhausted stares.
I remember the kids who had problems in their family lives whose personalities either disappeared or curdled into sour milk as they tried to cope with 60 hour weeks and just didn’t have the spare time and energy to try to process their parents divorce.
I remember the suicides and addiction the most though. The kids that had bottomed out so hard they would do anything they could to escape the loop of stress, failure, threats about their future, and back to the beginning. The only options we offer them are death or complete desperation, and some kids picked one because they just couldn’t do it anymore.
There were multiple suicides while I was in high school. 3 that I can recall, and one kid that ran away from home and overdosed while sleeping in a public park.
There are enormous flaws in public education, some of which you have addressed, but eliminating the study of history and english is going to do bupkis to address any of that.
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, stated that living in a warbound society:
"In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Obviously, our governments are always in war. Our schools are always in war. Millions to the football stadiums and rarely even pennies for the arts. Churn out grist for the malady mill and milk the survivors of every drop of value. Every business and enterprise of man is but war in a capitalist society.
Taking away the seeds of the arts because they might not grow into more juice for the war machine is at best a shortsighted thought and at worst the hateful demands of a small and selfish person. They didn't benefit you, but others they do.
> Taking away the seeds of the arts because they might not grow into more juice for the war machine is at best a shortsighted thought and at worst the hateful demands of a small and selfish person. They didn't benefit you, but others they do.
I haven't the faintest interest in taking away access to art or English or history. I don't generally believe in removing access to things. I am interested in not forcing a vulnerable and powerless group to donate their time to the cause of "keeping art/English/history alive" if they don't want to.
There is some subset of knowledge that is a practical requirement for being able to navigate society. People need to know enough English to communicate, enough math to make change, enough science to have a basic understanding of the world we exist in. Those are basically untouchable if we want society to continue functioning.
Art knowledge is not a necessity for living a normal life. A person can pursue an immense number of paths in their life without ever encountering a requirement to know things about art. It's honestly notable for someone to have encountered a situation where they needed or were aided by having taken art classes. Creative writing and the analysis of creative writing are much the same.
If hours in the day were limitless, or children stayed children for longer, I'd agree with you. Knowledge of art has value, as does creative writing and history; I firmly believe that all knowledge has some degree of value.
I do not agree in light of what we're putting children through. Something has to give, and it's either going to be the school workload or children's mental health. The teen suicide rate has nearly doubled since 2000, and I don't feel like playing a game of chicken with rising suicide rates to preserve art or ancient history or creative writing or like a dozen other things.
Give the kids back their free time and I'm sure a lot of them will gravitate towards art or creative writing naturally. They naturally appeal to a lot of kids and people, if we'd just give them the room to get there themselves instead of force-feeding them a list of Baroque artists to make flashcards out of.
I had a lot of issues with public education in my life. I don't regret the information I learned, no matter how trivial, but I do regret the time wasted, being a student who easily absorbed the entirety of the semesters knowledge for all non-stem classes by reading the book in the gap before classes started.
I would have appreciated being able to go further faster rather than wait for my classmates to make it to the starting line.
That being said, school isn't just about knowledge. We live in a society and we have to have a standard by which to relate to one another. Like it or not, our fellow humans are dark forests with gaping maws yearning to devour us, and we are the same to them.
Without some trauma bonding, some common fountain from which we draw our waters, we would willingly or not destroy one another until only our little clans remained.
Modern society has blinded us to the travails of our forefathers, where the people who live a few miles away might rise up and slay us if they have a bad harvest one year.
That we have come so far as to reduce the occasional rampages down to traumatic school experiences is quite amazing from a neutral third party viewpoint, even though it definitely doesn't feel that way from someone who has experienced it firsthand, but compared to being murdered and eaten by the person who happened to be my classmate, getting picked on and feeling some long term anger over the situation is vastly preferable to me.
All of that aside, we can do better. That much is obvious. We could do better easily if we could get everyone on the same page and standard, and make the standard "Maximally educated according to your individual ability" so that it would adapt to the learners potential rather than being concerned with the easier to manage yet still brobdingnagianly difficult standard of "minimally viable high school graduate".
I graduated college and was like "I only have to work 40 hours a week? What's the catch?"
Close to zero! A lot of the time it is done wrong, which just cements wrong ideas that need to be unlearned.
It's only jobs are to be PR about how rigorous school is, and to hurt underprivileged kids whose parents can't help with homework. :(
I'm still struggling to understand what "Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail." means.
This isn't obscure.
All of this was much worse during the Great Depression, before we had FDIC insurance guaranteeing deposits up to a certain threshold. If you've ever seen It's a Wonderful Life, it depicts a bank run during that era as George Bailey is about to go off on his honeymoon. (I remember my 6th grade history teacher describing this as we watched that movie around the holiday season.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban...
You have to have a metric shit ton of cash laying around before you can’t be fully covered by FDIC stripes across a few banks.
Bank runs haven’t been a “normal person problem” in nearly 100 years (FDIC started in 1933 after the Great Depression bank runs).
Ok people did not lose money directly. But they were withdrawing from some banks (e.g. Northern Rock) and it made massive economic and political issues.
> While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out of HER private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.
> What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.
> Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger—with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.
I actually think it's a really neat passage, it invokes the surreal more than I would expect from 19th century prose. Also, this part just before is very vivid and quite funny:
> Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.
Steinbeck and Faulkner come to mind.
I understand that they're important, influential, and well-written. But I just didn't relate to them. There was almost nothing about the main characters' challenges or desires that I could understand.
My son was assigned "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton - he didn't mind reading it, but he said he just didn't really relate to any of the characters. Even though it's set just 50 years ago, the culture it describes bares basically no resemblance to modern-day life for a teenager.
Maybe that’s ok? I read the Outsiders when I was young (25 years ago or so) and although I thought it was a bit weird, it wasn’t bad. My life bears little resemblance to many current contemporary people’s lives the world over, but exploring those differences can be good. I am all for giving the kids a chance to see a different world and get a sense of how things can change.
Not if you're discouraging children from reading as a hobby by assigning the driest works there are. With the exception of Faust, all 'homework books' were horribly dry and frankly boring. For example, The Sorrows of Young Werther - utterly irrelevant. I would understand any child or teenager who gave up on reading if they were forced to read books like these - and even worse, spend endless hours discussing and being tested on them.
The whole book was like the allegory of the cave.
Steinbeck is a close second, though. I had to read three of the man's books (The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, and Grapes of Wrath) and I don't think I enjoyed a single page of it. I remember finding a copy of The Pearl as an adult and being shocked it was less than 100 pages. We somehow extracted 18 weeks of discussion and essays and tests on that book. No wonder I hated it. We tortured every word of it.
2) Part of the point of reading literature is to see things from a different perspective. i.e. to read things that are not necessarily "relatable", and thereby possibly expand your mind about the range of human experience. It's an opportunity to learn about history and learn about cultures other than your own.
They really do require time, they’re hard to make time for, and while reading them wasn’t exactly fun, I’m glad that I did it. Many of the themes are timeless, the prose is elegant if difficult, and there are cultural references to these works everywhere.
They form a big part of the English speaking world’s cultural history. I think it’s worthwhile for children to be exposed to that history.
And if not then, when? I couldn’t make myself do the work now; I’m too busy and tired to read anything but easy/fun fiction after work. And I’m not sure I would have had the focus then if it hadn’t been assigned. Sometimes education isn’t fun or easy. That doesn’t make it less valuable.
The commenter doth protest too much, methinks.
>What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.
Early in high school among other things I had to read was “The Veldt”. Of course I hated dealing with it like everything else. I couldn’t have even told you who the author was a few weeks after the assignment.
In late high school, I discovered Ray Bradbury as I began exploring my local library, branching out from comics (Calvin and Hobbes, pogo, bloom county) and nonfiction books into fiction. He quickly became one of my favorite authors due to the sheer volume of short stories he had. Many were good, some were bad, and some were great. It was a bit of a pleasant surprise to encounter “The Veldt” again without a teachers whip at my back. It was sad to finally work my way through the last of what he wrote knowing there would be no more.
There's something about good fiction and youth that just went together so well -- maybe people who did a lot of, say, swimming in their formative years feel that way about "good swimming" and youth, but I have to believe that good fiction would still trump most everything else for the time period.
Not to even mention that reading is a way to escape and explore without leaving the comfort of your own home.
The only downside I find currently is that reading new things is quite expensive and I haven’t found a great digital solution yet. My phone is too small but carrying a book or a reader tablet is not practical every day.
I purchased a Kindle after that trip. I read a lot more than I used to because between my phone and the physical Kindle I always have my current book ready to go. Physical book purchases can now be hardcover-only because I'm buying for a permanent collection, not endless consumption.
Do you have experience with devices that aren't kindle? Not super thrilled about the Amazon ecosystem, though I know it's not terribly difficult to jailbreak them.
I firmly believe that most of this stuff in schools is massive over-analysis and that most authors, whose works are analysed in this way, have not planned all of this ridiculous nonsense we had to invent on the spot during a test. And that's exactly what we did - assign meaning to any meaningless detail and somehow connect it to the character or plot. The curtain is blue? It must signify the protagonists deep longing for love.
In short, 99% of it is indeed overanalysed bullshit.
you're absolutely right and they even doubled down on that https://www.oxfordhomeschooling.co.uk/blog/the-death-of-the-....
I did not seem to be blessed with the accepted form of creativity for literature analysis, and, with every rebuttal, the pleasure of exploring those texts became less and less..
After many, many, many years, I'm slowly coming back to some of them to read on my own terms, and most books have been a pleasure to re-discover.
At the same time, is it monstrous to put forward the option that you, as an audience member, are not a passive brainless drone, but you are collaborating in creating the meaning of what you experience? That your inner life and meaning and interpretation stemming from being exposed to art are actually interesting and worth talking about?
Why do we have to live in a world where we assume words written on a page or colors dripped on a canvas have a single truly objective interpretation? Why do we have to beat with a stick on the head of someone telling them "no, you're enjoying this work in the wrong way because the author said so"?
It wasn't until the tertiary level that I first analyzed science writings and related philosophy writings to a similar depth (albeit for a different purpose), and discovered to my delight how many of them are written with a beauty and a kind of humanity that verges on poetry. It moved me in ways that fiction never has, I think in part because of the purity and honesty of my discovery — so unlike the trudging hours I spent miming proundness in school until I could no longer recognize it.
I am truly glad that nonfiction analysis was neglected in school, because it otherwise would have been robbed of all its spirit and magic, too.
Why do we force students to analyze text in this manner at the cost of killing their love for recreational reading? So many children, who once loved story time best of all, grow up to hate books and poetry. Yet they still love the search for meaning in cinema and music which, as yet, still remain mostly beyond the killing touch of involuntary study.
Is it any wonder literary analysis feels fake to so many people?
But I broadly share the sentiment of your message, and I personally blame some sort of variation of Goodhart's law. School curricula take an unquestionably good thing ("the critical search of meaning is an important skill to have") and have to pigeonhole it into something standardized and quantifiable (otherwise, how can you stitch a grade number to it? The horror!). The result is this desolate widespread contempt for everything that is not a literal interpretation.
Basically a lot of words are “set pieces”. Very important for the general atmosphere but not overflowing with meaning and significance per se.
- Ernest Hemingway
When I graduated from high school one of the thoughts on my mind during the ceremony was "YES!! I will n e v e r have to read books again!!"
I also stopped reading around age 9-10 for fun.
My 'favorite' book during school was Crime and Punishment. I didn't like the book, but I knew the teachers liked it. So if it ever came up I 'liked it very much'.
Many years after school anime -> manga -> light novels -> web novels got me back into reading. Now I spend far too much time on reading, but I don't think I will ever read fiction in my native language again.
Probably this, but also this. Kids don't even show up for school post-pandemic
36% of NYC public school students were chronically absent last school year
https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2023/9/6/23862246/nyc-publ...
If I were a 9 year old today I'd probably pick YouTube over reading. When I built my house I found myself learning way faster watching tradesmen and listening to them on YouTube than having to suck that information through a tiny straw that is reading a book . I find myself truly hating reading now, far too inefficient.
A lot of it comes down to context: my parents were and remain voracious readers. They read all the time and have strong opinions about books, and I wanted to read what they did and have strong opinions about books in the way that they do. That sensibility was something they taught and which I grew up in. I could just as well see the absence of that having an effect.