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We parents complain that kids aren't taught the way we were taught (memorization, sitting quietly, diagramming sentences, handwriting, etc.) and than we complain that the books they have to read aren't enjoyable enough.
Don't speak for everyone there. I certainly don't complain about kids not learning in a traditionally poor way.
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Originally Posted by toobusytoday
I'm sure all of us have jobs that are not 100% enjoyable. That's life.
This is a strawman argument, as is the argument some people will make about "expecting everything to be fun." I rarely see anyone saying that everything has to be fun and enjoyable. The argument I (and others) will continue to make -- for the sake of students -- is that we should put more effort into improving the learning environment, learning dispositions, and individuality. One way to do this is by giving students more choice in what they read, and making the curriculum more relevant. One way to work AGAINST an improvement is by mandating that all students read the same thing, and then having a good portion of those students lose interest because of it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by toobusytoday
Just because kids have to read books that they might ordinarily choose doesn't mean they can't go out and read a book for fun. At my library I see kids every day pick up their required reading books AND another book or two or five.
I agree that people CAN read on their own despite school pressures, but many students are less likely to do so. Even if it didn't happen to you or everyone you know, there are a lot of students who are turned off by the books they are "forced" to read in school. And there are many students who would have read a book of their choice, given the chance -- but never read the assigned books, either out of disinterest, or out of principle. It's not a matter of "expecting everything to be fun and enjoyable," it's a matter of people enjoying what they are doing in general, and feeling like they are learning and not wasting their time.
This is true. I don't understand how certain people can deny this... it seems so obvious?
Making reading (or learning, or anything) a chore is how most peoples' desire to read (or learn, or do whatever) gets destroyed or diminished. This happens to most students (some more, some less) when they grow up through our schools. Students, for years and years, go through an endless amount of "tasks" that are imposed upon them. As someone who has been carefully observing and working with students and adults for many years, I am absolutely, 100% sure that this strongly affects how most people turn out.
And anyone who doesn't "believe" me, can go take a glimpse at the modern literature in educational psychology -- which strongly supports this view.
Also, I think schools very subtly impose upon students what is proper reading.
Have you ever noticed that comic books are never assigned in class? That's not "proper". I think through years and years of lugging heavy textbooks around, students begin to think that, "heavy textbooks" are proper.
The emphasis isn't on the written word in school. More emphasis is on the type of book used.
I feel lucky that I had really great literature choices in high school, as well as college. No loss of enthusiasm, here!
If I were presented with a choice (which I wasn't) my reading would never had included the deadly bores from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, and Shakespeare. Instead, all of that literary bilge was required, with extensive class discussions and written reports which darn well better include praise for those authors.
My English teachers very effectively taught me and my classmates to hate English literature.
It's good that yours didn't.
I don't think my experience is exceptional, though.
Again, this depends on personal taste. I detest Hemingway...but I loved Nathanial Hawthorne and Mark Twain and O'Henry and Gone With the Wind.
I disliked Ray Bradbury, but it was good to have read some of his work because the cultural references to it are everywhere.
Being exposed to a wide range of works helped me figure out what I liked and what I didn't. Some of it surprised me.
Yep. So much is a matter of taste.
Hated Twain...until I read it in college, and if I want to be totally honest, didn't like him much until I taught him for the first time as a student teacher at age 22 to a group of 11th graders. It took a while, (and about a half-dozen assigned readings) for me to be in an appreciative place.
Conversely, I liked Catcher in the Rye when I was a freshman in high school, but that was the only age where it appealed to me.
Really dislike reading Shakespeare, but love seeing it performed well, especially the comedies. Mostly, I prefer American lit, anyway.
Love Fitzgerald, always did.
Never liked Hemingway.
Liked Hawthorne, both The Scarlet Letter and his short stories, notably The Minister's Black Veil and Young Goodman Brown, but I always found repressed Puritan culture and things like witchcraft fascinating.
Found Willa Cather hit and miss.
Despise Faulkner, the least enjoyable book I was ever assigned was Absalom, Absalom!, better known as Crapsalom, Crapsalom!
The best books I read in high school were Siddhartha, The Stranger, The Awakening, The Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird (also read in middle school), Of Mice and Men, Little Women, The House on Mango Street. I also always liked the much-maligned Great Expectations. Victorian melodrama, convicts hiding out in mist-enshrouded swamps, crazy ancient jilted brides running amok with veils and rotted wedding cake? Yes, please. I also loved creepy short stories like Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
The best book I've ever taught (to a classroom of middle and high school boys with emotional disturbance)was Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (also a frequently banned book, as it happens). They absolutely loved it, and these were kids who had always been in special education, and were almost never given anything to read that was age-appropriate. I didn't get a ton of contemporary literature assigned when I was a student, so I am careful to work in solid contemporary offerings now, myself, along with my favorite classics.
If I were presented with a choice (which I wasn't) my reading would never had included the deadly bores from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, and Shakespeare. Instead, all of that literary bilge was required, with extensive class discussions and written reports which darn well better include praise for those authors.
My English teachers very effectively taught me and my classmates to hate English literature.
It's good that yours didn't.
I don't think my experience is exceptional, though.
Something similar happened with me. These are not rare experiences, I hear different people talk about it all the time.
Thankfully, I could eventually realize that what I did in school didn't represent reading itself. Some people are not so lucky though -- they have permanently decided that reading is boring or pointless. So many students have looked at me like I'm crazy when I tell them that I read for fun. It's like they can't even fathom the idea. For me, it took at least 6 years after I graduated high school to start reading again and learning to appreciate literature. And I had to do that on my own.
I also had a very difficult time convincing college students to read things, even if these things related to their own interests and careers. This was often directly a result of peoples' middle school or high school experiences.
Even more sad, nowadays students are being force-fed stale chalk at progressively younger ages. I cringe when I think about what the testing, standards, and accountability movement is doing to peoples' attitudes about learning and reading and exploring.
Just a thought I had to reinforce my theory that schools are to blame.
Toddlers and young kids love books. They love being read to, they love reading on their own.
Older folks (65+) are also big readers in general.
Toddlers/Young kids have only been in school through kindergarten (and reading since then) for a very short time, older people have been out for 40 years. They are the two age groups most removed by time from school, one not having gone and one having gone very long ago.
The further people are from school, the more they like reading.
Just a thought I had to reinforce my theory that schools are to blame.
Toddlers and young kids love books. They love being read to, they love reading on their own.
Older folks (65+) are also big readers in general.
Toddlers/Young kids have only been in school through kindergarten (and reading since then) for a very short time, older people have been out for 40 years. They are the two age groups most removed by time from school, one not having gone and one having gone very long ago.
The further people are from school, the more they like reading.
Just a thought I had to reinforce my theory that schools are to blame.
Toddlers and young kids love books. They love being read to, they love reading on their own.
Older folks (65+) are also big readers in general.
Toddlers/Young kids have only been in school through kindergarten (and reading since then) for a very short time, older people have been out for 40 years. They are the two age groups most removed by time from school, one not having gone and one having gone very long ago.
The further people are from school, the more they like reading.
They're also ones with the fewest demands on their time. It's not school that discourages us from reading for pleasure, it's life in general.
Toddlers and young kids love books. They love being read to, they love reading on their own.
No, not really. This is a false assumption. Working in a preschool setting, my experience is that some toddlers and young children love books and love being read to, and others have developed no attention span for it and couldn't care less. I can spend a couple of days in a preschool classroom doing developmentally appropriate reading and other literacy activities with toddlers through 3-4 year-olds, and tell you with dead on accuracy which are regularly read to as recreation in the home, and which are not.
Toddlers and young kids DON'T just magically "love books." They form positive associations with reading at this age when their primary caregivers use reading to them as a fun, caring, bonding activity regularly. This doesn't happen when "entertaining your kid" means letting your toddler sit in a stroller playing Angry Birds on your phone.
No, not really. This is a false assumption. Working in a preschool setting, my experience is that some toddlers and young children love books and love being read to, and others have developed no attention span for it and couldn't care less. I can spend a couple of days in a preschool classroom doing developmentally appropriate reading and other literacy activities with toddlers through 3-4 year-olds, and tell you with dead on accuracy which are regularly read to as recreation in the home, and which are not.
Toddlers and young kids DON'T just magically "love books." They form positive associations with reading at this age when their primary caregivers use reading to them as a fun, caring, bonding activity regularly. This doesn't happen when "entertaining your kid" means letting your toddler sit in a stroller playing Angry Birds on your phone.
You spoke of attention span. Perhaps it's not reading per se, but development of attention span by lengthy early activities.
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