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

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

#481

Post by sovnwnt »

allturtles wrote: post #453
sovnwnt wrote: post #326

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.

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 me…

Yeah I wasn't sure if the "run on the bank" had actually happened or not.

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

#482

Post by gregjor »

squigz wrote: post #464
gregjor wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not "whatever I want." I described taking my daughter out of a public school and legally homeschooling her. I didn't see any reason to explain that or discuss it with the school administration. If I quit a job I don't have to go to an exit interview. Same thing. As I mentioned we moved to Oregon soon after taking our daughter out of public school. Oregon legalized homeschooling in 1985, before my daughter was bor…

> I think parents will generally choose to do whatever they think will best protect their child, or help their child succeed And society does the same at large, because "whatever they think best" doesn't always equal "what is actually best" for the children

No one knows the future so as a parent you have to make decisions now with limited information.

Society as an abstraction doesn’t decide anything about individual children. Governments and school systems have policies and procedures and rules that may represent what’s “the best,” but I think you will have a hard time showing that schools specifically accomplish their stated goals, or do the best thing for any individual child. Or for “society” in general if you look at the dismal results of American public schools.

Forcing a child to stop reading and shaming a six year old in front of their classmates didn’t happen because of “society,” it happened because of one teacher who had the backing of a bureaucracy that will protect its own existence and workers at the expense of children.

Decisions made by teachers and school administrators affect thousands of children. Our decision to take our daughter out of school only affected us — none of the other kids at that school suffered as a result.

If you look at outcomes you will find that homeschooled children statistically do better than kids who go through the public school system. I attribute most of that to the additional parental time and attention, but as Maria Montessori documented children learn more and for longer in life when not subjected to rigid (and scientifically questionable) pedagogy from professional “educators.”

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

#483

Post by klyrs »

sonicanatidae wrote: post #447
klyrs wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure it's worth engaging with such toxic commentary regardless of political affiliation.

Shall we wait for the factual rebuttal or just assume this offhand dismissal is all of it? I have yet to hear a word about the content being inaccurate, just people like you, that didn't like the presentation. My apologies for not refraining from charged words when my country is being stolen out from under me, by some of the worst people in the world, that keep getting elected by the "fuck your feelings" crowd. Also,…

Believe it or not, I feel the same way. But writing angry screed on the internet accomplishes literally nothing. Worse, it further entreches the people you disagree with.

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

#484

Post by quirk »

sonicanatidae wrote: post #466
quirk wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to see your sources showing the data to support that books are being banned in “all libraries”. This is mostly a conversation about morality and I dont think we’re going to convince one another to change our principles here so my instinct is to say “you win” and move on. But for context, I personally despise Donald Trump and think he’s a symbol of the downfall of our country. And I mostly think the governmen…

Sources: The internet and news. If you look, you'll find it easily. This isn't really about morality alone, imo. This is about attempting to legislate morality with a hammer, which is just as bad. There is no basis for many of the books being banned, other than Republican horse shit. For the record, I'm not seeing Dems line up to ban books. It's activist clowns with an axe to grind. It's all wrapped up in Jesus and F…

So did you read that USA Today article? I did not see a single example of a book being banned from a non-school library. In fact, every example in the article was about a book being removed from taught curriculum, or a state passing a law requiring schools to notify parents when a book contains a sexual content.

Your last point makes me think maybe you don’t have kids? Because yes of course every parents knows that they can’t control every aspect of their child’s experience. This discussion is specifically about what should and shouldn’t be in children’s libraries. I think parents should have a say in that. Kids are like sponges. If you tell them it’s totally normal to kill puppies, some not-insignificant percentage of them are gonna kill puppies.

I loved the book Middlesex, and have nothing against transgender people. My concern is that a “movement” has started around this naturally rare phenomenon and it has become increasingly trendy to cut off your penis or breasts. This is not what sane parents want for their children.

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

#485

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

lupire wrote: post #314
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several high school teachers I know don't assign long reading sessions because their students are dealing with some kind of unstable home life (or are homeless) and don't have an appropriate setting for it outside of class. That is, they avoid it because it injects a class bias into their grades. Given that, making space within the school day for such things seems like a good idea.

That's quite the cartwheel in front of the horse! I suggest removing the competitive grading system, and adding more hours to the school day, not removing the educational opportunity.

It's not so much about competition between the students as it is about competition between the schools.

If your curriculum puts economically disadvantaged students at an academic disadvantage, and your school has many of such students, then your school ends up with less funding because your students do poorly on tests compared with the well off schools. So if you want to help the students you've got, you come up with curriculum that doesn't penalize them for having jobs, kids, or other outside-of-class reasons that they can't sit down and read at length.

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

#486

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

freilanzer wrote: post #393
knallfrosch wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>overanalyze it for “meaning”.<< I doubt overanalyzing actually happens. But pupils, including younger me, just don't understand how much more work and thought have gone into the legends they are reading. Yes, it's a 500 page tome. No, neither the blooming flower nor its color on page 356, line 38 are "random" and them symbolizing the meaning of life isn't "bullshit." Yes, a work like this happens only once a decade…

> No, neither the blooming flower nor its color on page 356, line 38 are "random" and them symbolizing the meaning of life isn't "bullshit." I firmly believe that most of this stuff in schools is massive over-analysis and that most authors, whose works are analysed in this way, have not planned all of this ridiculous nonsense we had to invent on the spot during a test. And that's exactly what we did - assign meaning…

I remember Kurt Vonnegut being interviewed and clearly saying that he did not have any hidden meanings in his writings. Yet, I remember how my English teacher would go on about x passage as a metaphor for y. I think we were discussing a short story of his. We would spend hours finding the hidden meanings in authors' writings. I'm sure that's the case for many of the books we read in school. I'm sure many authors are more philosophical than others but definitely not all of them. True, overanalyzing authors' writings is a thing. It's a shame because reading becomes a chore rather than a joy.

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

#487

Post by conductr »

bjornsing wrote: post #405
gregjor wrote: post #347

My oldest daughter could read at age four. By second grade, in a Texas public school, she liked to read Nancy Drew mysteries on her own. One day she came home from school crying and told us she didn't want to go back -- she said she had got in trouble for reading her book. Her mom and I went to talk to the teacher. Our daughter had got "caught" reading a Nancy Drew book at her desk while the other kids -- many of who…

Interesting. Having grown up in Sweden during the 80-ties and 90-ties I’m very familiar with this attitude. Here and back then it was almost policy to hold gifted students back, to promote “equality”. But I thought the US would have a higher tolerance for ability. What do you think is the driving psychological force behind this attitude in US schools? In Sweden I’ve always thought it’s mainly a sort of crab mentality…

> What do you think is the driving psychological force behind this attitude in US schools?

The curriculum is so prescriptive that it is really helpful if everyone progresses at the same pace.

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

#488

Post by abenga »

goblin89 wrote: post #329
coffeebeqn wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same - except many of my friends were reading for fun. Oh this has a skeleton on the cover? Guess I’ll read everything this guy/gal ever wrote. All the libraries I’ve been to recently are very well set up for discoverability. Especially the kids section. There are hundreds of books on display with some indication of what it’s like and themed sections and all kinds of stuff

Everyone seems to say children should go to libraries more. At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate. I suppose the fact that books were physical and I did not have something like TikTok on my phone when I was 9 helped me read whatever was lying…

Going to the library means you pick what you want to read from a much wider variety of available books, not just the ones the adults in your life deemed worthy of purchase.

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

#489

Post by pasc1878 »

everforward wrote: post #458
pasc1878 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Not really the media were covering it a lot in 2008 - Front page headlines in newspapers and first story on TV news.

Ok people did not lose money directly. But they were withdrawing from some banks (e.g. Northern Rock) and it made massive economic and political issues.

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

#490

Post by sonicanatidae »

klyrs wrote: post #483
sonicanatidae wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shall we wait for the factual rebuttal or just assume this offhand dismissal is all of it? I have yet to hear a word about the content being inaccurate, just people like you, that didn't like the presentation. My apologies for not refraining from charged words when my country is being stolen out from under me, by some of the worst people in the world, that keep getting elected by the "fuck your feelings" crowd. Also,…

Believe it or not, I feel the same way. But writing angry screed on the internet accomplishes literally nothing. Worse, it further entreches the people you disagree with.

That's bullshit. The people I disagree with spent the last decade yelling, "Fuck your feelings", and you think discourse is going to pull their heads out of their asses?

My rant won't either, but I feel better, and if any of them happen to read it, I hope they enjoy it.

Good luck with your campfire and mallows. I'll even send over an .mp3 of Kumbaya and you can hold hands with them, and discuss whatever you like.

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