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Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

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Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#111

Post by watwut »

lm28469 wrote: post #100
bgbntty2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should've used "archaic" instead of "outdated". As in, "incomprehensible to someone speaking proper modern $language". Without a dictionary, a normal student couldn't understand what was being said in many sentences throughout the book. Some books actually had a dictionary in the end, but not for all the archaic words and phrases.

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

I sometimes take pleasure at reading old language ... and still think that giving it to kids as introduction to reading is absurd.

If they read 10 interesting books a year adding one like that to the mix or offer them the option is great. If they did not encountered interesting bool after agw of 7 when parents stopped reading them, no.

And interesting books for kids are there. Plenty of them of all kind, including pure action/adventure stuff. Including those related to movies or games they play. It is not lack of resources.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#112

Post by beepbooptheory »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #107
corimaith wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writing quality and complexity of amateur content, even long-form is only around the level of a YA novel, truth be told alot of the stuff I was reading back in junior high in my school library had more depth than this. It's good that you can get people reading, but reading the equivalent of pulp is very different from real novel that isn't so bounded by tropes or genre limits.

How can I forget Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality [1]. HPMOR is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky to promote rationalist concepts, and is somewhat influential in startup and AI circles. Directly: Emmet Shear {co-founder of Twitch (YC S07)} is apparently superfan and gets a cameo. So for once I get to post something that's almost on-topic for yc. :-P [1] https://hpmor.com/ [2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/21/w…

Maybe not the best thing for kids to be reading!

https://www.thecut.com/article/milo-youngblut-max-snyder-ziv...

Even without the, you know, murder stuff, I think we can do better for kids than another generation of "rationalists", considering the track record here.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#113

Post by watwut »

gambiting wrote: post #22
thrwaway55 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you write in cursive? If you care about WPM key board toasts it. If you care about handwritten your receiver cares they got your letter at all not that it's cursive or not. Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.

>>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.

> How do you write if not in cursive?

I write with mix of cursive and sorta print letters. The sorta print letters are more readable, actually.

Based on what teachers said, kids use cursive while they are forced to and switch to sorta print when they can. But everyone invents their own "font", so it is a challenge to decipher them.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#114

Post by squigz »

eimrine wrote: post #85
frompdx wrote: post #58

When I was in high-school 20 plus years ago excerpt based reading assignments were fairly common in non-honors/advanced placement classes. Except there were whole textbooks full of excerpt based assignments instead of computer software for this purpose. Anecdotally I took honors and AP English and those classes destroyed my desire to read for years. I only read a few of the assigned books cover to cover because they…

> Sure there are lots of brainrot distractions available to kids today Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all? Reading thick books requires having some device with no distructions. In my young ages all computers and all smartphones used to have no distructions, but now all computers (except some Linux distros) used to be bombarded with distructions in such a way t…

> Take apart the distractions per se, how is it possible to read book for a kid in 2025 at all?

Literally buy books? What about ereaders? Install adblockers and de-shittify your OS? I don't have the problems you seem to have, and I'm on Windows.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#115

Post by spicyusername »

I never understand where these anecdotes come from.

I live in a rural Red State, a place you'd expect less reading, and my kids, and many of their friends, read full books all the time and have since they were quite young.

The curriculum in our public school regularly requires kids to read full books for class, and the kids you'd expect from the homes you'd expect read plenty.

So whatever the problem is, if there even is one, is less to do with school curriculums, english classes, screen time, or the availability of books, and more to do with the culture of many homes not prioritizing reading.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#116

Post by mfro »

jhanschoo wrote: post #76
tyleo wrote: post #40

Comments here are very strange, “Reading books should go the way of cursive! Education is more like childcare anyways.” It’s bizarre stuff to say. What would you have the education system do? Put iPads in front of kids all day?

Maybe literature is just a terrible medium for culture except for the relatively brief period in human history when they were extraordinarily cheap to produce and disseminate compared to other cultural products. Edit: but insofar as media criticism in education is bound to the book rather than the dominant forms of the day, I think children are being done a disservice.

It is still extraordinary cheap to produce and disseminate novels. If not more so, if you include ebooks or longform blogging.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#117

Post by cogman10 »

gambiting wrote: post #83
cogman10 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not linking the letters together then? Correct. > Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower? Probably yes to both counts. However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand…

>>Consider this, do you use shorthand? I have no idea how to write shorthand. I assume you know how to write cursive, so no I don't think the reasons are the same.

You could learn it. It would take some effort but it's not insurmountable and it's inarguably superior to cursive in terms of effort to write.

I can't write legible cursive. To do that would take time, effort, and practice. Much like it'd take that to learn shorthand.

That's my point. You and I write the way we do because writing in other ways would take more effort than we want to spend.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#118

Post by brightball »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #80
brightball wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you threatened me with 3+ hours a day of speed reading clocks instead of a normal summer I'd probably double down on effort too. And probably not in a way that's healthy long term.

Well, it wasn't a threat. He knew exactly what he'd been struggling with from 1st grade on (officially minor ADHD) and we were trying really hard to keep him off of medication. Since the program has finished he's asked to do it again several times (but we haven't because it's expensive). I've thought about teaching him programming by having him build his own clock trainer.

It's hard to explain to random people on the internet but here's the difference we saw.

- Went from doing homework everyday after school until 10pm to always being done by 6pm at the latest.

- Went from forgetting to turn in that same homework and sometimes major assignments frequently to rarely. 7th grade year he had over 20 zero's for assignments that he did and simply kept forgetting to turn in. 8th grade year he forgot two homeworks all year.

- Went from years of extreme disorganization to...still disorganized but a significant improvement.

- Went from uncertainty about whether he was going to be able to keep up with the workload in high school to, for lack of a better way of saying it, a star student. Teacher reports changed. GPA is a 3.7 (he's in 11th grade now). Juggling seasonal sports, Scouts, school, clubs, social life, honors/AP classes with no assistance from us at all.

It's hard for people to understand when you watch the same patterns and struggles for 6 or 7 years and then they just stop being a struggle. That 7th grade year, all that my wife and I did after we got home from work was try to make sure he would get his work done. It consumed our life to the point that, after me trying to convince my wife that this could help (because she was very skeptical too) that it was bad enough that she finally agreed it was worth a shot.

He and I were actually going to fly across the country to stay in Seattle for 7 weeks to have him do the program in person because I didn't think he would be able to pay attention to the virtual. The hotel that we had booked a couple of blocks from the school cancelled our reservation due to renovations and we ended up pivoting to the virtual program at the last minute. He did surprisingly well in the remote class format. The hotel was also close to Microsoft's campus and I got the impression that Microsoft had paid them to renovate to prepare for a lot of people they were going to have in town.

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#119

Post by Telaneo »

inimino wrote: post #109
Telaneo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs.…

> I convert that to digital time in my head What? They are the same thing.

Not to other people I've talked to.

I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.

[1] https://youtu.be/NeopkvAP-ag

Re: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class

#120

Post by squigz »

shoobiedoo wrote: post #30
thrwaway55 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you write in cursive? If you care about WPM key board toasts it. If you care about handwritten your receiver cares they got your letter at all not that it's cursive or not. Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.

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.

Can you link to some of that research? The last time I saw such research get shared on HN, the researchers were limiting the typists to 1 finger (per hand?), which is patently absurd.

More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting

Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.

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