Thanks for that. In FL, they have been posting the example mentioned above and others.
Putting this back on slow mode.
I deleted a number of flagged posts. When I delete posts, I often delete replies to those posts because they are then out of context.
A good suggestion is to not post stuff that is likely to get flagged. We all agreed to the TOS and Forum Rules when we joined. If your post doesn’t abide by those Rules, it’s going to be removed and sometimes other posts will be removed along with it. Thanks for your understanding.
When I taught HS before retiring, my pet peeve was always the “summer reading program”. My snide remark was that the English teachers who always chose the books seemed hellbent on making kids hate reading. Books always had to be “serious” and “have an important message”. What criteria was never mentioned? FUN.
Finally we tried offering a wide variety of books, many popular, many not from the “great works of literature”, but fun to read (ex: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer, for one of many).
Even that couldn’t get kids to read. The last gasp attempt was: “Read. Anything. Just read; a blog, sports columns, anime, video game tip sites, ANYTHING—PLEASE, JUST READ!!!”
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I suppose that could be one motive for the inclusion of some of these books in schools-better to read 50 Shades than nothing at all? Seems problematic.
I will never forget when my rising 9th grader, an excellent student, was given the assignment to read “The Great Gatsby” during the summer and write a paper on it. That was it, no more guidance or instruction. What a disaster.
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I really question whether it was on a shelf. Besides, they don’t need the book, they can just watch the movie!
It may have been one of the most checked out books on the list. Many copies were sold.
Given how rarely students use school libraries for anything other than computer access or a quiet place to do homework, I expect this entire issue doesn’t matter much anymore anyway.
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I remember when the Harry Potter series got kids to read who were not readers beforehand. Even then there were some who feared all those kids would become Wiccans and/or Satan worshippers.
At my HS, and among my daughters and their friends, DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons were popular. One of my girls was in Confirmation classes in Grade 10 and the priest was amazed how much the kids knew about the process of selecting a new pope—they got it all from the Dan Brown book!
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Yes, those were popular. Percy Jackson for younger readers too. I suppose kids just watch the movies now.
Those series were all released before smartphones.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter much. But for the same reason that math problems are not the best vehicle for making sociopolitical statements to students (I agree with you on this), choice of books is very much a vehicle for passing our value system down to the next generation: whether kids read the books or not, our decisions are recorded forever. The next generation will understand what we were shaping them to become. Were our aspirations that they embrace one another as fellow humans? Or were we covering their eyes up in an attempt to stop progress? Are American values freedom and tolerance, or are they proto-theocratic? Library shelves may collect dust but the evidence of intent will be there for anyone who looks.
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Based upon the Littlestown, PA news article, I agree.
And I’ll bet more have read the banned books since it became an issue than ever would have read them if no one had drawn attention to them.
There’s nothing I know of that’s more appealing to kids than telling them they shouldn’t see something. I recall joking around our lunch table a few years back wondering if we could get more to read their science chapters by telling them we weren’t going to cover what was in them because they were too young to know about it. We all thought it was a great idea, but knew it would only work the first time we tried it.
I suspect you’re right that no one in your peer group read them if they weren’t assigned. Many students want “just the basics” and nothing else. It’s similar to wanting to study only “what’s on the test.” But there are students out there who love to learn and read as much as they can. They’re often the ones who spend extra time talking about those side articles - or other things they’ve come across - with us teachers during non-class time. Teachers I know really enjoy those students. When I’ve written LORs for them, I’ve yet to see a rejection.
There are “average” students (any academic level), and then there are those who love to learn (as well as those who hate to learn). The peer groups tend to find each other, so if you didn’t read them, it makes sense that your peers didn’t either. You just shouldn’t go further and say, “Nobody reads these,” because I’d place a really high bet that you’re wrong. The high school where I work is a statistically average high school.
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No, kids today are actually reading the books.
I see little evidence of that, but perhaps you do. Many kids in our public schools won’t even read the required books, much less literature for fun. There are always exceptions, of course, but that group seems to dwindle every year. It is interesting to learn how few books are checked out of school libraries anymore.
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The math skills of USA students have never been very good. That is because the primary education style is memorization of facts and templates. The changes just reduced some of the memorization of facts, and replaced them with memorization of templates, which are more difficult to retain.
The SAT scores dropped because the SATs test the memorization skills of the students, and, as I wrote, memorization of templates is more difficult.
I think that Catholic schools have an advantage in that, in general, the administration supports the teachers more, and the schools are more interested in educating the kids than in keeping the parents happy.
My kid’s public school district has a philosophy of education is more important than keeping parents happy, and that, if you are paying well-trained professionals to do a job, you don’t allow untrained people to micromanage them. As a result, the education outcomes of the local Catholic schools were inferior to those of the local public schools which taught the same population. This was actually noted by people who taught the high school, which had a good number of kids who had gone through the Catholic elementary schools. The kids who had gone through the Catholic schools system were less prepared for high school than their peers from the public school system.
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Maybe in comes down to this: some kids are readers, and others are not, and converting non-readers into readers may be almost impossible. Our daughter, a true reader and now a librarian, taught herself to read in the summer before kindergarten by just sounding out words in simple chapter books were were given “for when she was ready”. She found them in a box in the basement and went to town!
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Do kids read or not read books? As it’s been throughout history, it depends upon the kid. I’ve had to cover in our library some days when the librarian wasn’t there. There are students who will check out 3-6 books at a time and return them for more well before their due date. Then there are kids who have never checked out a book.
Assuming all kids are the same is akin to assuming any other stereotypical group is the same. It’s never been that way.
Among my own kids I had one terrific reader - and he’s the one who had trouble learning to read/speak when he was young (up until 2nd grade). When it clicked, it clicked. Then I had one average reader who reads far more now than he did in his youth, but it’s usually history books as that’s his interest. And I had one I had to force to read just to get his assignments done. He reads tons of flora/fauna things now, but little else.
Go back 50 years and I was the reader similar to my own terrific reader and my sister wasn’t.
There’s nothing new under the sun as far as that goes.
One difference is those who choose to read have a lot more options than paper books now. As someone else said earlier, our school doesn’t really even have text"books" now. It’s almost all online and what isn’t is printed out for kids. (Each kid is given a laptop from the school.)
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That is interesting; it doesn’t reflect my experience at all. I saw middle school kids excitedly sharing books and discussing them through about 2011-12. When my youngest reached that middle school age, most classmates were distracted by cellphones, videogames, or online entertainment.
I only work in the high school. I have no idea what middle school kids are doing on their own, but I know our school requires middle school kids to be reading books (they have a time in their day set aside for reading), so teachers take them to their school library once per week to get books. What they are reading during that time can’t be required reading for a class of any sort. That ends after 8th grade.
My experience has been somewhere in between. Some kids are, I guess I would say, “natural readers”. They teach themselves to read, or, when taught, they constantly find books to read, and constantly push their reading level up. There are some kids who, no matter what the incentive, just never really want to read something, unless they need that info, and it is not available in any other format. But there are a very good number of kids who will pick up and enjoy reading, once they get over the difficulty of learning to read. They will read the books that are “trendy”, or read books in topics which interest them, etc. They may not look up new books to read, but will read books assigned to them, or those recommended to them by friends, etc.
@Creekland I think that in many high schools, students have so much reading assigned to them that reading starts to feel like a burden, or they are simply so occupied doing other things that they do not feel that they have time to read.
I remember back in the dim past, when I was in the army, kids who are the same age as college students here, would read a lot more during the periods where we were out somewhere, where there was no TV, and there was a lot of down time. The majority of the soldiers were reading anything they could get their hands on. It was something of a joke “Is the book good?”, “Yes, it has lots and lots of words, so many words”. Not American kids, but I think that American college kids and high school kids are similar. Some will rather stare off into space than read, while others will manage to fit leisure reading into even the tightest of schedules, but most will read when they have an incentive, whether it is social, school related, or simply boredom.
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