A Revelation

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I think I’ve finally put my finger on just what, exactly, feels so wrong about my having joined a liberry teen-focus group: lack of understanding of the basic goal of getting teenagers to read.

All I’m saying is, I was the teenager who inspired whole panels of teachers, counselors, and parents to convene in order to figure out how to get me to stop reading.

I may be out of my depth here.

Comments

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Ha! Did you ever have parents or teachers forbid you to read over various periods of time, too?

(I once spent an entire recess period sitting on a bench by the playground, arms folded, glaring, and distinctly Refusing To Have Fun, because I had been told I couldn't read during recess. The teacher gave up after that...)

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

A teacher tried to pull that stunt on me once. The other children, sensing I was Not Like Them, beat the crap out of me. I was left to my books after that.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

...wow. Okay. Not the type of school I went to!

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

Oh, it was a small town public school. Barely controlled anarchy.

The thing with this is that the teachers thought my social development was being impaired by my not running around with the little thugs. I have yet to encounter in my adult life a situation where a punch to the stomach is the best means of settling an argument.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I went to various private missionary schools. I saw exactly one physical altercation in my K-12 career, and, uh, I started it. Different culture, I guess.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I got THREATS, but never the actual forbidding. When I was a bit younger the school librarian didn't know I wasn't allowed to sneak into the library at recess. Good times.

[igntethestars.livejournal.com]

Why in the world would they make you STOP reading? o.O

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Often because it was 3 a.m. and I had to get up for school in the morning.

Also, there were fears that my social life was suffering. Somehow having scores of characters, both my own and other people's, populating my head didn't strike them as a healthy peer group.

[daiq.livejournal.com]

I had an issue with getting actual school work done cause i would read instead ;)

[placetohide.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I suffer from the same illness.

I was the only kid in school to get in trouble for reading too much, like in English class where they say "reach to chapter 3" and I come back with the finished book, ruining all of the "what do you think happens next" discussion. You can't just give me a book and tell me not to read the whole thing!

[baby-rissa-chan.livejournal.com]

Oh, I HATED the way they always told us to stop at a certain point. I'm not good at stopping reading >_>

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I also identify rather strongly with Tiffany Aching: She'd read the dictionary all the way through. No one told her you weren't supposed to. Both because of her tendency to read anything that gets in her way, and her later difficulty in pronouncing the words she'd only read.

[hrhleia.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have that problem all the time. There are tons of words I know the meaning and use of, but the way I would pronounce them in my head is not correct. Unfortunately, I usually only discover this when I say them wrongly in front of people. If they are feeling generous, I only get a funny look and correction instead of laughter. It would happen more often, but most of them aren't used in daily conversation.

I didn't usually get caught up in the dictionary, but I did in the encyclopedia every time. The only reason I haven't fulfilled my goal of reading the whole thing is a lack of time, and that they aren't as portable as most novels.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention "island"--that's one I learned from video games, actually. I was very small when I started playing Super Mario World, and in charge of reading the text to my smaller siblings. Mom happened to walk by just as I authoritatively read, "Yoshi's Is-land," and she explained to me that it was "island," which is spelled funny.

I took a college freshman seminar on science fiction once, and we spent the first week on the subject of How To Pick Up What A Sci-Fi Word Means Using Contextual clues. I was surprised that this needed explaining, but then I treat sci-fi words like any word I don't understand--and it's something that doesn't even happen consciously at this point.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It's like handing a starving kid a sandwich and saying, "Here is your sandwich. Only take one bite today."

[daiq.livejournal.com]

Once as punishment for something (since grounding etc didn't work), my mother EMPTIED my bookcases of everything resembling a novel or work of fiction (and most of the non-fiction). I lost all my books (apart from those that were hidden, and the encyclopeadias) for at least a term for whatever it was i did. 10+ weeks of hiding library books!

[baby-rissa-chan.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's HORRIBLE! My Mom stuck to grounding me from the library, which was bad enough.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

My mom threatened to do that once. However, since our entire house is filled with books, it would have been way too much work.

[sofish-sasha.livejournal.com]

Luckily, when I had a teacher who thought I read too much, and should be playing with the other girls instead, my mama agreed with me that said teacher was an idiot. :D

On the other hand, I have fond memories of playing dinosaurs with the girls (I was always a velociraptor), so that wasn't too bad either.

[redbird57.livejournal.com]

Wow, you hung out with some awesome little girls. I wish I had gone to your school.

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

I suggest you go in there with the notes from the stop-reading panels, and tell those well-meaning folks, "Okay. Just do everything they did here, because obviously it did nothing to stop my reading."

I was one of those teenagers, too. My teachers hated me. One particular librarian was awful and refused to let me in to the school library for a time. I didn't get it - wasn't it a bigger problem that so many of my classmates considered "Calvin and Hobbes" mentally taxing? (Not that there's anything wrong with Calvin and Hobbes. I love them. But do they really fit the criteria for "chapter book"?)

Fortunately my parents agreed with me and told the librarian she was a moron, and got me access to the local university library.

[kitlizzy.livejournal.com]

I think I was about 10 when I had a teacher that was just furious anytime I read when I wasn't supposed to. I eventually figured out that the problem wasn't that I was reading - it was that my non conformity was making more work for HER, because she had to check up on me instead of assuming I was doing what I was told like a good little child thing, and she seriously resented it! To which my reaction was, well if you hate paying attention to kids, and you don't like it when they're exceeding the stated learning goals when your job is to HELP THEM LEARN, then why in the world are you teaching?!

I developed a remarkably bad attitude towards school after that (and other like experiences), which I'm sad to say I still haven't gotten over. Which might explain why I'm currently finishing the last 8 credits of a BA in Theatre at the age of 30....

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I suggest you go in there with the notes from the stop-reading panels, and tell those well-meaning folks, "Okay. Just do everything they did here, because obviously it did nothing to stop my reading."

I like it!

Unfortunately, I'm beginning to suspect there's some fundamental difference between me and the teenagers they're working with. Seems other people don't automatically slam into books at a certain proximity like they're two opposing magnets.

I will say that Calvin and Hobbes took on whole new dimensions when I went back to read it after a few college courses in popular culture. But I can see how they aren't quite the same as a chapter book.

And yeah, when I think back on it I'm always stunned that they worked so hard to slow me down. I keep thinking it would probably have been better to just try to aim kids like me at some Larnin' and go back to helping the kids who struggled to read core vocabulary.

[daiq.livejournal.com]

Reading doesn't have to be fluent for it to be a passion, either
Hear hear! My case of Dyslexia (love Helen Irlan, love her) wasn't diagnosed until i was 22! Two university degrees, and mid way through my second year of a teacher career later!!! I had the guys at the Irlan centre asking me how on earth i ever finished high school and all i could say was "well, i really like to read". But i was also reading at 4.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I think immersion is the key, really--it's how both the under-5 and the over-5 groups best learn language.

I honestly don't remember not being able to read--I remember figuring out hard words, but I don't remember the whole process of learning to decode words--my family was the kind who would get their three-year-old daughter a dry-erase board with letters printed on it so she could trace them. (Good times.)

I like the idea of stealth reading, actually--I feel that kids can learn a lot about reading from things like comics and video games (YES I SAID IT) without even realizing it. I think in this case it'd be more like "READING: NOT JUST ABOUT HUGE SCARY TOMES"--a much less frightening approach.

[mooncat75.livejournal.com]

When I was a child my mom would often take my books away as punishment...but that was sometimes ok....I had secret stashes of books all over my room....even a 'secret stash that was meant to be found', so when mom said, "AND the ones you have hidden somewhere, I KNOW you have some hidden, hand them over." I could go to the bed and remove a few from under the mattress, so she would think she 'got them all'....HA!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* Ooh, you clever little sneak, you! ;)

[kitlizzy.livejournal.com]

I was infamous for reading in class in grade school when I was supposed to be listening to the teacher. We had desks that didn't close all the way, but left a 6" or so gap open, so it was quite easy to put a book in there and lean back just so so I could peer in and read, while looking like I was studying my worksheet instead. :D

And the reading section of classes were laughable - I had usually read the whole reading textbook by the first week of class, including the extra stories in the back. Obviously this did nothing to help me pay attention or participate during the actual reading lessons for the rest of the year!


I feel kind of sorry for my teachers now that I look back on it, heh.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I always liked the reading comprehension questions after the story, because they were tremendously stupid. You'd get a story like Bob's mother frowned. Her eyes became narrow. "Bob, I am so angry with you right now for digging up my flowerbed!" she shouted, veins popping in her forehead. "You are in SUCH TROUBLE, mister!" and then questions like, "How did Bob's mom feel about him digging up her flowers?"

[hrhleia.livejournal.com]

I always had a book with me in middle school, and held it under the desk to read whenever I could get away with it, especially math class. When they started teaching us algebra in 7th grade, with little balances and pieces to represent numbers and variables to set on them, and I finished the entire packet the first night because I had already learned it in the SEED classes, the teacher didn't make much of a fuss about me reading instead of playing with the toys.

[marioncrane.livejournal.com]

Ha, I wasn't quite as voracious as that (partly due to the fact that quite early on I started to prefer the fantasy genre, in English, and most libraries had a limited supply of either. Trying to find fantasy in the school library was a lost cause) but I did not see the point of encouraging us to read, either. Reading was fun, how could I not read?

Also, I got sent to the head of the school once for 'disrupting' class when the teacher was reading a story about Sinterklaas to us, way below our level and boring as hell, and we were required to read along as well. I've always read three times faster than anyone could read aloud, so I completely failed to see the point of the excercise...

[shadesofmauve]

Oh, I feel your pain. Not just because I was often told to "Put the book DOWN", but because of a recent experience at *my* library job.

We have a grant to share a whole bunch of financial information, to get people who normally don't save and would never think about investing to find it all a little less mystifying. We've run ads ("featuring real people, real stories"!) to get people to pick up the info.

Our first ad was aimed at "teens and twenties" with their "overwhelming credit card debt" and they kept asking me to talk about it and give my story, because I'm one of only two under-thirties in the building. It gets really awkward telling your boss for the third time "No, I can't talk about my debt, because I'm actually pretty damn good with money." I was in the process of buying a HOUSE at the time! I can' relate to the poor student who 'suddenly' finds themselves in over their head with credit debt -- I never, ever grokked them. Clearly they missed the part of the math lesson about compound interest.

Admittedly, I also have a hard time selling the product because as a voracious reader and the designer who laid it out, I know that the whole 200 pages of info is written like CRAP. It's not going to demystify anyone, and like so much financial info, most of it's not really helpful until you have at least a start at savings. My boss is much better about being a gung-ho promoter, because he never read the damn thing.

[lookingforwater.livejournal.com]

Oh ye gods, the Book Wars.

I suppose, looking back, that they may have had a legitimate objection - I was reading through all my classes. I still feel the solution was to make the other classes more interesting. For example, that year I had the Awesome Math Teacher, who was a folky geek who taught us how to built satellites and chaos theory and knew who Harlan Ellison was and generally made an effort to engage each student with the subject by linking it to things they were already interested in? I got my first ever (and so far only) A in math. He was also the first math teacher to realize that no one had ever properly explained negative numbers to me.

When he left next year and we went back to rote memorization and busy work? Right back to Ds and Cs and reading Stephen King.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Oh, me too. And I'm still using books as a coping mechanism!

[renshai.livejournal.com]

Ha, I had a teacher once who forbade me from reading in class - it was a math class, and I think she was under the impression that I was neglecting my math work so that I could read....so instead, I decided to take a nap once I'd finished my assigned worksheet.

Surprisingly that went over no better than the reading had.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

*grins* I infuriated several French teachers by reading through their classes... and they couldn't say anything about it, because I was always reading something in French, and above our current level!

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

*nods* I hear you on this. I just plain do not understand how anyone could /not want/ to read!!

Also, I think you need to convince everyone who commented here to come join bookaddiction.