231–240 of 504 posts
Seems like there would be an easy way to test this - do we see the same decline in other countries with different educational systems?
> 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 th…
> 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.
> 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 th…
The defunding thing sounds like a bit of obligatory politics. "In some states, teachers can’t even keep a classroom library because they have to protect themselves from book bans" Yeah this sounds false.
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.
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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…
> 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 im…
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.
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Well, a singly linked list is actually one of the most important data structure I've found :). 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 abo…
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.
> crisis point for publishers Now there is something to care about: whether your kid reading or not is good for publishers. People reading old second-hand books, even if voraciously, is also bad for publishers.
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 home…
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 ama…
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.
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> rediscovered reading 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 universi…
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'Reill…
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.
I've never experienced this in my school life. Used to be the one guy who spends all of his time helping out and reading at the school library back in elementary school. Later in high-school, I stopped reading as much due to the appearance of the computer in my life, which had great things like the Internet and such.
If you spend all your time on TikTok, I feel like it's unlikely you'd read too much.
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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."