bloodyrosemccoy (
bloodyrosemccoy) wrote2010-01-06 11:00 pm
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A Revelation
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.
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.
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(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...)
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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Surprisingly that went over no better than the reading had.
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Also, I think you need to convince everyone who commented here to come join