Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

It is not just it being homework. It is not like I hated evything in school - I actually disvovered quite a few intersting stuff there.

It is that books everyone here is said that kids dont read anymore or brags they read ... are just not interesting books for a kid.

I graduated high school in '92 (S.F. Bay Area) and can recall several assigned books we read for class in either junior high or high school. I think there were more, but these are the ones I can recall easily today.

Pride and Prejudice. Last of the Mohicans. A Separate Peace. Tom Jones. Beowulf. Grendel. Crime and Punishment. Waiting for Godot. Tale of Two Cities.

Also, several Shakespeare plays, though I am no longer sure which were read when.

We also had other reading assignments where we chose our own books. The above were assigned to everyone.

The new skill to have would be figuring how to discern what you are reading dows not have an ulterior motive, such as advertising.

Probably a better question, atleast for a wide variety of books. Some authors however are very into writing detailed descriptions of places because that's how their brains work and what their readers enjoy, but 95% of those descriptions have nothing to do with anything that happens later in the book, other than hiding the one tiny detail that actually does become relevant.

If 'why are the curtains blue' were consistently explained together with Chekhov's gun, then maybe we wouldn't be here having this discussion.

Yes and literature is a pretty bad way to teach critical analysis. My high school did political speeches from history and that segment was infinitely more enjoyable than The Scarlet Letter.

You can just teach the thing you want to teach.

I was intrigued by the idea that it might be unreasonable for a book to include a glossary or dictionary to explain usages for made up or unfamiliar terms. I like that this list [1] exists because I was struggling to think of such a book. But then I thought about The Lord of the Rings, and it even includes an index of terms among its appendices, which is something I remember using to revisit parts of the story when I first read it. Another book with a glossary of terms is Dune, which I found fun and reasonable to avoid trying to explain hierarchy where doing so would break the narrative flow. But maybe that just means it's not as cleverly constructed or organized as it could have been--but the trade-off has to be how to engage a wide selection of readers...

Is the complaint about the dictionary at the end because it wasn't comprehensive? I'm unreasonably curious about the book and which phrases were included and which were not.

I think all written works occur in a context that should be taken into account when thinking critically about them. That context is temporal and linguistic and is more apparent when you consider something like Beowulf in Old English or The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Understanding it requires either a modern reinterpretation or consideration given to the sociolinguistic context in which it was written.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/180823.Novels_with_Gloss...

God forbid we learn new words or learn words form the past... Why even bother with history right? It's just old stuff anyways let's focus on new stuff, what could these old things teach us anyways

Meanwhile my grandma still knew how to speak Latin at 70+, which she learned in school as a teenager

get gud @ reeding

Yes! Art that's taught in school and that is "required" to know if you want to appear intelligent or fancy is just what GP posted.

But art is also:

* electronic music (if you're not aware, it's not just repetitive dum-dum-dum for 8 minutes, although I enjoy that style, as well);

* rap (it's not just guns, drugs and mysoginy);

* all the other music genres, of course, but I gave electronic music and rap as examples because they're usually treated badly by people who're not familiar with them;

* games (I've been emotionally moved by many flash games, let alone new immersive games);

* movies, series - live action or western animation or anime.

Yet, in school we either learned about classical composers, or about regional composers. Only once, around 10th grade, we had a cool music teacher who played other genres for us - Fat Boy Slim, random metal groups, even a few pretty out-there experimental things. Much better than learning about some composer who lived 50 years ago just because he is from the same country as you.

Same for paintings and similar art. What good does it do a 7th grader to look at Picasso? The context matters, but for people who don't care about such art, it's useless. I won't feel better if I can "intelligently" discuss the art scene in $nation in $year. I have, later in life, read interesting articles that actually mix politics and life in general with the art that was "allowed" to flourish. Like art in Soviet Russia. But that context, if it was given at all, didn't mean anything to a 7th grader, especially if they didn't learn about Soviet Russia in history before the art class. In my experience my education was all over the place.

> Avengers end game is also art. I engage with this type of art. I don’t consider opera the art of our modern culture. It is unfortunately a niche.

That's the thing, though - in English literature class, there is nothing stopping the teacher from using popular media to introduce things like tone, ambiance, character motivations, arcs, etc, and then ask for parallels to the set works.

They don't do it though, the system is not set up to produce a bunch of critical thinkers from English Lit.

>I would say most of the books I read were crap and written poorly.

So you've encountered Sturgeon's Law[0] in the wild. It applies to pretty much everything, so perhaps you might broaden your focus when considering that.

Were you aware that this is actually a thing?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

So what is your independent thinking doing for you? Are you happier then most?

This sounds like a very common sort of misanthropic attitude I see littered around the web.

You know how they say - like in making music - in order to break the rules you have understand them?

I don’t like the take directly, but as a person who makes music, what I realize, and I think this is what they meant, it if you don’t study music, most people are likely to naturally slide into the most simplistic forms of it, because that’s what naturally sounds good, so you’re like naturally more inclined to recreate a 1 4 5 progression, rather than Mozart.

Do you think that you may have accidentally slid into this position, or sort of thinking exactly like a like blase’ counter cultural sameness, copying all the self-defined independent thinkers?, or do you think you have some insight into what makes your perspective unique and clearly in some way spiritually valuable to you?

I'd love to see those exams redone on a selection of adults with nothing to lose if they fail or get a bad score. Maybe the not giving a fuck becomes apparent then.

Out of all of Žižek's writings, that article really isn't that bad. I agree it could do with some headings, but you shouldn't need ChatGPT to summarise it for you, but I'm not surprised some people do.

>>Why would you write in cursive?

I'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?

>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.

But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.

[delayed]

okay, but if you care about recall and activating regions of the brain that create a better understanding of what you're learning, handwriting wins according to research.

I don't comprehend your stance at all. Where I am from, handwriting IS cursive and the other thing is called print for a reason.

Neither writing nor typing must be exclusively utilitarian. I enjoy using a good mechanical keyboard or a good fountain PEN, WPM notwithstanding (although I find both of them to be easier on the wrist than I typical ballpoint pen or membrane keyboard).

> Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.

There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.

My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.

I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.

I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.

To the hundred millisecond?

That is the program, yes. I’m not trying to sell you on it, just sharing our experience.

I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.

I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.

All good points, particularly the control group piece. Scrutinizing control groups makes it easy to invalidate most studies about treatments in this space because control groups are so difficult to assemble. You should see the variance in autism spectrum.

It still worked for my son and my friend’s two children.

I have no affiliation with the program at all. I talk about it because it worked for us.

I latched onto it because I know the type of things that I have struggled with my entire life, but just learned a lot of coping mechanisms. I’m also very self aware. I pay a lot of attention to how my own brain works because of the need to develop those coping mechanisms. When I saw the full program, everything made perfect sense to me and I absolutely believe that it would have helped me when I was younger.

Had I been able to tolerate working half days for 7 weeks, I would have participated in the program myself.

Totally agree. I do the same.

The only reason we have analog clocks is because digital ones were much harder to build. That time is of course over for good. It was a compromise imposed by limited technology.