Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun • Hacker News Board

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#221

Post by xhkkffbf » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:10 PM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #212

bluerooibos wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah, don't read "worthy" stuff, or things to enlighten yourself, find your particular brand of entertaining trash and mindlessly consume it. I recommend bad litrpg and progression fantasy personally. Mother of Learning is a good one to start, it's free on royalroad.com or available on Kindle.

Absolutely agree. The definition of "worthy" comes from a narrow group of haughty English majors. That may be your thing, but there's a huge world of non-worthy stuff out there.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#222

Post by tylersmith » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:11 PM UTC

akira2501 wrote: post #114

janalsncm wrote: post #56

> 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.

There will always be people unable to figure out basic skills but that's not a reason to handicap the entire system.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#223

Post by devbent » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:13 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #116

janalsncm wrote: post #56

> 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…

It's interesting that all problems in America are due to "funding". It's actually quite curious because funding was a problem for electric vehicles, funding was a problem for space, funding was a problem for literally everything. But then sometimes people come up and succeed at things that others have described as a funding problem for ages. I think I can conclude reasonably from this is that the lowest efficiency le…

> Schools with the highest funding have the worst performance.

It could also be because the schools with the most special / high needs children need the most funding.

Schools in poor neighborhoods need more help just to achieve median results. They need to contend with issues like teen pregnancies, drug use, violence, and kids who don't even have food at home.

Compare those challenges to rich suburban kids and of course the schools in poor areas need more funding.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#224

Post by janalsncm » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:13 PM UTC

faeriechangling wrote: post #112

janalsncm wrote: post #56

> 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…

If you don’t need TikTok to find good books, how would you recommend finding good books? Even if you’re at a library that doesn’t narrow things down all that much, I’ve been to libraries with several floors filled with bookshelves.

Long before TikTok and YouTube and even Google there was the Dewey Decimal System. We use it to categorize books into a hierarchical tree structure. So I think what most people do is to find a category they’re interested in and look inside that category for either subcategories or books they find interesting.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#225

Post by devbent » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:14 PM UTC

faeriechangling wrote: post #112

janalsncm wrote: post #56

> 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…

If you don’t need TikTok to find good books, how would you recommend finding good books? Even if you’re at a library that doesn’t narrow things down all that much, I’ve been to libraries with several floors filled with bookshelves.

My local library has an "ask the librarian" program.

Tell them what you like to read and they'll email you a list of 10 books to try next.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#226

Post by TylerE » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:15 PM UTC

aatd86 wrote: post #220

TylerE wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer Science is actually kinda of lousy for teaching the things most programmers can do. To the point where if I was hiring, I'd rather hire someone who's less experienced and self-taught, but with some sort of "interesting" background, where "interesting" is almost anything that teach's critical thinking about abstract concepts and how to articulate ideas. Could be anything from a Journalism degree to someone wh…

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.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#227

Post by an_aparallel » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

people give up reading the same reason they give up anything "hard". The combination of "prescribed texts" and "bad pedagogy". When i self teach...i start a book...downloaded immediately from libgen, if it sucks, i trash it, and download another immediately...if the author is not a time wasting hack, guess what? I'll buy that book immediately, having found the correct resource. It pains me to read what the most recommended books are for learning most hard subjects - they are generally on the poor side...they are generally not written as simply as possible. Yes - this is a hugely opinionated response.

Onto method - If the method in which it's taught is garbage/pedagogically horseshit...of course they will hate it. Learn maths with Paul Lockhart, or computer science from the ground up playing Turing Complete (on Steam)...or learning ANYTHING from someone like Brett Victor..and you'll see precisely the issue is with not just reading for fun, but doing any socially uncool thing like exercising the intellect.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#228

Post by eslaught » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

How many people here are commenting based on their kids' experiences and not based on their own? Nothing in a 4 year-old trend (or whatever it is at this point) is going to be anticipated by people who were that age 10, 20, 30 years ago. (Sorry folks.)

My kids are just short of this age, so this article is very topical for me. I'm trying to encourage them to read, and they do, but it's also been difficult (in my experience) to make the transition to "big" books (i.e., anything other than a graphic novel). Books that I am 99% sure I read by their age, they don't seem to be responding to---and not just those books specifically, but anything in that class. And my kids have very low screen time.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#229

Post by dehugger » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:22 PM UTC

pie_flavor wrote: post #138

Anime is an extremely lucrative market, and Westerners spend an absurd amount of money on it, with Hollywood missing out. It's not because it's Japanese, or its weirder quirks, it's just because Japan is making it and Hollywood isn't, because Hollywood is institutionally incapable of believing people want (a) weird fantasy (b) that takes itself seriously (c) in quantity over quality, or even that adult media can be a…

Weird stuff in the west exists, but lives as amateur/fan fiction online, with patreon being the big funding method. I believe this is directly due to publishers hesitance to touch anything "weird", just like you said with Hollywood.

Re: Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun

#230

Post by feoren » Tue, May 07, 2024, 9:23 PM UTC

nullhole wrote: post #130

bluerooibos wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One key thing is: don't feel like you have to suffer through reading an entire book if you don't like it. If it's a chore to read it, find something else - different author, or different type of book.

I would add: don't try to convince yourself that you actually like this book because it has great reviews or your friends recommended it. Plenty of novels with great reviews are actually trash (IMO, of course, but also in yours, which is the point). Admit to yourself that you don't actually like it and that's OK.