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

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451–460 of 504 posts

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

#451
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The teacher took the book away from our daughter and shamed her in front of the other kids. The teacher told us that "policy" prohibited students reading "non-assigned" books at school. That’s a bad policy, but a worse teacher. They could’ve turned a blind eye. > We didn't make our daughter go back, we withdrew her from school the next day and told the principal we had to move. Why the lie? Was homeschooling prohib…

Simpler to lie about moving than deal with the bureaucracy. Every state has mandatory schooling and truancy laws. We planned to move out of Texas anyway. Easier to say we’re moving than try to get permission to homeschool my own child.

> my own child.

I've never quite understood this focus. Do you think that because it's your child you should be able to do whatever you want?

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

#452
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it so hard to accept the fact that an author might not be completely 100% conscious of all the things influencing them when creating a work of art? That some choices they made because they just felt right in the moment come from somewhere else? And that someone else can see this happening from an external perspective and propose that way of reading the text that the author didn't think about? At the same time, is…

If such things influence works of fiction, they must surely influence works of nonfiction just as much, if not more so — yet I never had a schoolteacher ask me to analyze nonfiction writings anywhere close to the depth I had to analyze novels. It wasn't until the tertiary level that I first analyzed science writings and related philosophy writings to a similar depth (albeit for a different purpose), and discovered to…

If you look at it, I'm sure you'll find equally plenty of people rolling their eyes at film critics for "making that up".

But I broadly share the sentiment of your message, and I personally blame some sort of variation of Goodhart's law. School curricula take an unquestionably good thing ("the critical search of meaning is an important skill to have") and have to pigeonhole it into something standardized and quantifiable (otherwise, how can you stitch a grade number to it? The horror!). The result is this desolate widespread contempt for everything that is not a literal interpretation.

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

#453
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which books of the canon did you read that you found to be garbage prose?

I wouldn't say it's "garbage prose" but I read A Tale of Two Cities in school and found it impossible to form a mental image from the text in some parts. I'm still struggling to understand what "Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail." means.

I wasn't familiar with the passage but having read it I think it means that the sounds and sights of the nighttime mail carriage ride made the bank messenger fantasize a run (i.e. an excess of customer withdrawals) upon his bank. The wider context is that the shadows of the night are cast as various phantoms in the minds of the people on the carriage, and even the horse pulling it:

> While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out of HER private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.

> What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.

> Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger—with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.

I actually think it's a really neat passage, it invokes the surreal more than I would expect from 19th century prose. Also, this part just before is very vivid and quite funny:

> Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.

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

#454

I'm 40 but I think I know, from personal experience, why kids stop reading. A video game in the 90s was 10x more exciting and immersive than most books, to me. Today it's at insane levels of over-stimulation. A 30 second tiktok clip can give you the same type of knowledge that a 300 page book can, but it cuts to the chase, and doesn't bury the lead. Not only life-lessons or hacks either, teenagers are producing entir…

>A 30 second tiktok clip can give you the same type of knowledge that a 300 page book can, but it cuts to the chase, and doesn't bury the lead.

I'm sorry, this isn't just wrong, it's laughably wrong, and if this view is popular I can see why there's so little nuance in most people's understanding

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

#455
post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simpler to lie about moving than deal with the bureaucracy. Every state has mandatory schooling and truancy laws. We planned to move out of Texas anyway. Easier to say we’re moving than try to get permission to homeschool my own child.

> my own child. I've never quite understood this focus. Do you think that because it's your child you should be able to do whatever you want?

Actually, yes.

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

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Dewey Decimal Classification is terrible. It's an incredibly dated system with serious flaws like an pervasive European/Christian bias - for instance, notice that class 200 ("Religion") is almost entirely devoted to Christian topics, with a single subclass 290 for all "other religions" - and a lack of effective classifications for modern technical topics. It's also basically useless at classifying works of fictio…

i was going to say that a detailed classification of fiction would not really help finding interesting stuff. apart from the broad categories as you mention, interesting books are more defined by writing style, characters, etc.

i am struggling with this as i keep looking for new books to read. being in a book club helps a lot.

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

#457
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read more than a little, it's much faster compared to other media. True about eyes getting tired, though: I try to take a break every few hours. > If I wanted to read, I'd go to school —B-H

Seriously. This is why I don't like how much knowledge is being locked up in video platforms. I can get what I need to know from text so much faster than video unless the knowledge in question is inherently 3d/visual.

video has the advantage that it still works when i am tired/exhausted, or rather when i want to prevent getting tired, because reading is active and takes more concentration. video makes it easier to focus because it is more passive but all your senses are activated at once.

if i am in a deep flow, the reading to solve a problem is the right approach. but when i have to fight distraction, a video helps me to focus and eventually get into the flow.

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's "garbage prose" but I read A Tale of Two Cities in school and found it impossible to form a mental image from the text in some parts. I'm still struggling to understand what "Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail." means.

Look at what happened in 2008 with banks collapsing - by having runs upon them. This is being done via postal withdrawals here. This isn't obscure.

This is incredibly obscure for normal people. FDIC covers up to $250k, I believe per bank but don’t hold me to that.

You have to have a metric shit ton of cash laying around before you can’t be fully covered by FDIC stripes across a few banks.

Bank runs haven’t been a “normal person problem” in nearly 100 years (FDIC started in 1933 after the Great Depression bank runs).

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

#459
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a good question, but reading 400 pages of content is not the same as reading a book. Books are (usually) the product of intentional long-form writing along with heavy editing and review. The ideas per unit of a book are usually more polished than the ideas in a similar sized unit of online content. (not criticizing your kid btw, sounds like he is doing great).

> The ideas per unit of a book are usually more polished than the ideas in a similar sized unit of online content. Is there any objective measure of this? Books have to be 300+ pages because that's the size you can sell them in, I've seen plenty of books that feel padded out because, well, they've been padded out.

That is a fair counterpoint -- there is certainly a fair amount of padding going on.

However I worry about our culture of "just give me the main idea". It is very rare for someone to get as much out of the cliff notes as they would out of the full text. They may be able to recite the thesis, but that is not the same as _understanding_ what the author is trying to say.

Sometimes a book needs to cover the same topic from multiple angles just to force your brain to marinate in the ideas for a longer period of time. Yes, the thesis is repeated, but it is unlikely you fully understood it the first n-1 times.

I think there is something to be said for how most religions teach important texts. Not only are the summaries not good enough, but you engage with the same text over and over. You memorize it. You read related sections in topical groupings. You listen to sermons on multiple themes within the same passage.

Reading is not just about the ingestion of individual facts. You need to connect those facts to other ideas in your head (array them on a latticework [0]) and re-reading or a (seemingly) drawn-out explanation can be a good way increase the odds of making a connection.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9622640

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

#460
post #88

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…

Is 30 minutes really the amount of novel reading we find unacceptable these days? I’m not asking quite as snarkily as that sounds. Do you think the problem would be alleviated if the hours of class time were shorter and (maybe) handed over to a study hall period or even to just being sent home? In college I know the theory is supposed to be that one hour of class time equals two hours of homework (though that rarely…

Half an hour is fine, it’s really the cumulative volume. If a kid has 7 classes and each gives half an hour of homework, that’s 3.5 hours of homework. Add on the classes and they’re “working” 11.5 hours a day or 57.5 hours per week, every week.

That would be concerning for adults, it’s well into burnout territory. Then we want to act surprised when kids don’t want to read on their own and only want to play video games, as if all us adults are working 60 hour weeks and then excited to keep doing our job in our free time.

My novel approach would be to cut out a bunch of shit that kids don’t strictly need and hope that gives them the time and freedom to explore those things on their own.

We do not need 12 years of history classes. They’re nice to know, but widely forgotten anyways. That could probably be cut to like 4; I do not and will never need to know about Sumerian burial rites.

We do not need most of the flowery English classes. Reading comprehension is important, identifying symbolism is not. No one has ever asked me to check if an email contains a motif.

Much of our science classes are generally useless; chemistry comes to mind. I have never, even once, used anything I learned in chemistry. I know too little to do anything practical with it, and yet it was a year long class.

The other option would be to just kill summer break and use that time for teaching instead of homework. I don’t care for that, though. In a decade we’ll be back to having homework and summer break isn’t going to come back.

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