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 homework?)
Once I was out of college, I rediscovered reading.
Another thing is the mandated reading comes with punishment attached. One goes into it knowing that they’ll have to puke out some key points, contort bullshit into an intro-body-conclusion format, or worse, overanalyze it for “meaning”.
Early in high school among other things I had to read was “The Veldt”. Of course I hated dealing with it like everything else. I couldn’t have even told you who the author was a few weeks after the assignment.
In late high school, I discovered Ray Bradbury as I began exploring my local library, branching out from comics (Calvin and Hobbes, pogo, bloom county) and nonfiction books into fiction. He quickly became one of my favorite authors due to the sheer volume of short stories he had. Many were good, some were bad, and some were great. It was a bit of a pleasant surprise to encounter “The Veldt” again without a teachers whip at my back. It was sad to finally work my way through the last of what he wrote knowing there would be no more.
You've almost certainly come across them by now, but his novels are fantastic. I started with The Martian Chronicles and then The Illustrated Man, but ended up loving Something Wicked This Way Comes and even Dandelion Wine.
There's something about good fiction and youth that just went together so well -- maybe people who did a lot of, say, swimming in their formative years feel that way about "good swimming" and youth, but I have to believe that good fiction would still trump most everything else for the time period.
For me, fiction was a way to explore my thoughts and dreams indirectly as a kid. I’ve never been one much for introspection, but reading tickles something in that part of my brain to reflect on my life and sometimes relate what happens to a character to what I’m feeling/have felt. In a story, the author has to tell you how the character feels explicitly (usually) in addition to the normal story beats. Occasionally I would notice a mismatch between my own gut reactions and that of the character which would make me stop for a second and try to dissect what the differences were between my interpretation and that of the author.
Not to even mention that reading is a way to escape and explore without leaving the comfort of your own home.
The only downside I find currently is that reading new things is quite expensive and I haven’t found a great digital solution yet. My phone is too small but carrying a book or a reader tablet is not practical every day.
8+ years ago I accepted an offer to join some family on an impromptu weekend trip. Plenty of pool time was expected so I brought the novel I was 3/4ths the way through, its sequel, and an unrelated book on the off-chance I wanted something different. Combined these books took up half my carry-on satchel (I enjoy long epic fantasy), turning it from a simple carry to a painful shoulder-biter and hip-digger.
I purchased a Kindle after that trip. I read a lot more than I used to because between my phone and the physical Kindle I always have my current book ready to go. Physical book purchases can now be hardcover-only because I'm buying for a permanent collection, not endless consumption.
Yea, I'm also a fan of epic fantasy! I largely find myself moving to audiobooks to get around carrying books everywhere.
Do you have experience with devices that aren't kindle? Not super thrilled about the Amazon ecosystem, though I know it's not terribly difficult to jailbreak them.
I loved the approach my “high school” (in The Netherlands) took around 2002: you had to pick a few books from a list of books the teacher read. Then read those books and have a 30 minute “free format” discussion with the teacher about them. She’d ask for shared themes between the books, or differences in the way the stories were told, what it showed about the approach or background of the authors etc. Basically a teacher-student one-time book club.
>>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 on one continent. That's exactly why it's one of the maybe 20 books that you read in full during your schooling.
> 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 to any meaningless detail and somehow connect it to the character or plot. The curtain is blue? It must signify the protagonists deep longing for love.
In short, 99% of it is indeed overanalysed bullshit.
I was always astonished at how much my literature teachers could seemingly hallucinate at-will on a piece of text and come with some hidden meaning for every word, comma, or rime.
I did not seem to be blessed with the accepted form of creativity for literature analysis, and, with every rebuttal, the pleasure of exploring those texts became less and less..
After many, many, many years, I'm slowly coming back to some of them to read on my own terms, and most books have been a pleasure to re-discover.
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.
Indeed. To me, a lot of stuff like this (the kind and color of a blooming flower) is basically a way for the author to create or maintain an atmosphere/background to the book. Mentioning flowers a lot makes it clear this is not an action packed plot driven thriller. Mentioning military ranks and insider jargon and abbreviations paints a military atmosphere.
Basically a lot of words are “set pieces”. Very important for the general atmosphere but not overflowing with meaning and significance per se.
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 it monstrous to put forward the option that you, as an audience member, are not a passive brainless drone, but you are collaborating in creating the meaning of what you experience? That your inner life and meaning and interpretation stemming from being exposed to art are actually interesting and worth talking about?
Why do we have to live in a world where we assume words written on a page or colors dripped on a canvas have a single truly objective interpretation? Why do we have to beat with a stick on the head of someone telling them "no, you're enjoying this work in the wrong way because the author said so"?
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 my delight how many of them are written with a beauty and a kind of humanity that verges on poetry. It moved me in ways that fiction never has, I think in part because of the purity and honesty of my discovery — so unlike the trudging hours I spent miming proundness in school until I could no longer recognize it.
I am truly glad that nonfiction analysis was neglected in school, because it otherwise would have been robbed of all its spirit and magic, too.
Why do we force students to analyze text in this manner at the cost of killing their love for recreational reading? So many children, who once loved story time best of all, grow up to hate books and poetry. Yet they still love the search for meaning in cinema and music which, as yet, still remain mostly beyond the killing touch of involuntary study.
Is it any wonder literary analysis feels fake to so many people?
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.
There isn’t any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is s*t.
I had a similar, but different, experience. My issue is that in school I approached reading as a task to be completed in the most efficient manner possible - consuming as much as I could, as rapidly as I could, while ensuring an ability to regurgitate on demand. So I never really got to experience the joy of actually reading; in many cases I never even actually thought about what I was reading. So many books have amazing moral tales, metaphors of major events, and so on - yet one can completely consume books and remain absolutely clueless to what you're really reading.
Then as I aged, at some point I ended up getting into classical literature somehow, and now that I actually "got it" and could see and understand what it was saying - beyond the words themselves, it became a complete joy to read. For instance reading "The Republic" in modern times can make one think Plato was a prophet more than a philosopher. Or reading Aristotle's "Politics" can give one such an incredible amount of insight into thinking in the past, society, and even into your own thoughts. Or reading Aurelius' "Meditations" while bearing in mind these were the inner thoughts, never meant to be published, of not only one of the greatest leaders in history, but also arguably the single most powerful man alive at the time. It makes reading feel amazing. Another less well known example would be The King's Mirror [1]. A Norwegian text from 1250 that was a training/philosophy manual, in the form of a Q&A, intended for King Magnus VI. Highly recommended.
Now I see things like middle schoolers being assigned Animal Farm and I just kind of sigh, though it's not like I can think of a better solution!
I fully agree with your point, and your experience is similar to mine in a sense.
I got lucky in never "bending" to the task of reading because I had to, just reading the school curriculum books if they were interesting to me. And I enjoyed reading greatly. But some books Ichose to read I slogged through and could not enjoy them because of my lack of maturity and perspective. Revisiting them revealed a lot more depth. And my reading of them grew with my understanding of the world. So I guess the experience is normal. And I wonder if I did not slug through those books at that time if I would have ever reached the insight I had on subsequent reading.
I am certain things from a good book stick with you, even if you don't recall it explicitly. It just lingers there in the back of your head, like bricks that are piled up on each other until you don't see them anymore but you do see the wall they form.
I agree as well and had a similar but slightly different experience. I think that some of the material that I read in high school was great; but not appropriate for my age. While reading that material in school, I was bored and frustrated because I did not have enough life experiences (and empathy) to understand the emotional delicacy that the piece was bringing to my mental palette.
When I grew up (just by a few years) and accidentally re - discovered a work that I hated in school, I found it extremely deep and thought provoking.
Maybe high school students are not a great audience for appreciating a lot of literature, at least I wasn't.
Any book or movie that I enjoy I end up doing a deep dive on it's author, their situation in life, what was going on in the world at the time it was written, etc just to get a context for what may have inspired the creation. Sometimes a single detail about someone's past can instantly click the meaning or moral or conflict they were trying to portray.
I never understand why we are forced to read so much of the literary canon. Most of it is so hard to read, and so unenjoyable. Many of them could be re-written in a more enjoyable way for young children, through teenagers. I am exactly like you: I hardly ever read for pleasure when I was younger unless there was a blatant bride ("award") awaiting me. Most of the time, I was underwater reading some garbage prose from 1850 that doesn't stay with me today.
As an alternative perspective, I am glad that my middle and high school curriculum included several works of Shakespeare, especially Macbeth and Hamlet, and several 19th century classics.
They really do require time, they’re hard to make time for, and while reading them wasn’t exactly fun, I’m glad that I did it. Many of the themes are timeless, the prose is elegant if difficult, and there are cultural references to these works everywhere.
They form a big part of the English speaking world’s cultural history. I think it’s worthwhile for children to be exposed to that history.
And if not then, when? I couldn’t make myself do the work now; I’m too busy and tired to read anything but easy/fun fiction after work. And I’m not sure I would have had the focus then if it hadn’t been assigned. Sometimes education isn’t fun or easy. That doesn’t make it less valuable.
My point is the prose is a huge turn-off for most people and serves very little purpose in a modern society. As I mentioned in my post, I recommend to re-write these titles using a prose that will be more appealing to the age group. You can keep all of the same lessons to be learned in the re-write. I do not support this idea that learning needs to be painful or needlessly difficult. For most people, success in education is a positive feedback loop: If you do average or well, you look forward to more of it. And vice versa: If you below average, you try to avoid it and see it as a chore. I'm not saying to dumb down everything, but this "pain == good learning" seems from the 1980s and before -- outdated.
I wouldn't use the term "garbage prose", but I do agree that many books from the literary canon aren't the greatest choice to assign to kids.
Steinbeck and Faulkner come to mind.
I understand that they're important, influential, and well-written. But I just didn't relate to them. There was almost nothing about the main characters' challenges or desires that I could understand.
My son was assigned "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton - he didn't mind reading it, but he said he just didn't really relate to any of the characters. Even though it's set just 50 years ago, the culture it describes bares basically no resemblance to modern-day life for a teenager.
The Great Gatsby is the one that comes to my mind. How exactly is a modern high school student supposed to relate to any of the characters in this book? Even when I was reading it in school I kept stopping and questioning just what these characters even were. It felt like reading about aliens, totally disconnected from reality. I not only lacked the historical context, I didn't have enough social context to grasp the character motivations or actions.
The whole book was like the allegory of the cave.
Steinbeck is a close second, though. I had to read three of the man's books (The Pearl, Of Mice and Men, and Grapes of Wrath) and I don't think I enjoyed a single page of it. I remember finding a copy of The Pearl as an adult and being shocked it was less than 100 pages. We somehow extracted 18 weeks of discussion and essays and tests on that book. No wonder I hated it. We tortured every word of it.
“ My son was assigned "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton - he didn't mind reading it, but he said he just didn't really relate to any of the characters. Even though it's set just 50 years ago, the culture it describes bares basically no resemblance to modern-day life for a teenager.”
Maybe that’s ok? I read the Outsiders when I was young (25 years ago or so) and although I thought it was a bit weird, it wasn’t bad. My life bears little resemblance to many current contemporary people’s lives the world over, but exploring those differences can be good. I am all for giving the kids a chance to see a different world and get a sense of how things can change.
> I am all for giving the kids a chance to see a different world and get a sense of how things can change.
Not if you're discouraging children from reading as a hobby by assigning the driest works there are. With the exception of Faust, all 'homework books' were horribly dry and frankly boring. For example, The Sorrows of Young Werther - utterly irrelevant. I would understand any child or teenager who gave up on reading if they were forced to read books like these - and even worse, spend endless hours discussing and being tested on them.
1) There's no way to have a set of readings that every Xth grader is going to enjoy. It's just impossible. There is a wide range of interests and predispositions and reading ability among people of the same age. It's obvious just from this sub-thread; everyone pipes up with a different set of books they disliked in school and they therefore think no one should have to read. I loved reading Julius Caeasar in high school and hated The Catcher in the Rye. I loved Dandelion Wine and hated Absalom, Absalom. Them's the breaks.
2) Part of the point of reading literature is to see things from a different perspective. i.e. to read things that are not necessarily "relatable", and thereby possibly expand your mind about the range of human experience. It's an opportunity to learn about history and learn about cultures other than your own.
I hated Romeo and Juliet. Teachers loved to explain how this was so relevant to us teenagers and yet it’s two people in a deeply concerning relationship who die for each other for pretty stupid reasons. Modern interpretations are far more interesting.
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.
Or more recently, the run on SVB last year where everyone started panicking that the bank was no longer able to hold its deposits, just because it announced that it had taken action to generate something like $40 billion in liquidity. And then the next day alone, customers withdrew $42 billion.
All of this was much worse during the Great Depression, before we had FDIC insurance guaranteeing deposits up to a certain threshold. If you've ever seen It's a Wonderful Life, it depicts a bank run during that era as George Bailey is about to go off on his honeymoon. (I remember my 6th grade history teacher describing this as we watched that movie around the holiday season.)
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.
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.
Shakespeare and Chaucer were fucking awful. They did nothing but make me hate reading and English class. It took me years to enjoy reading after the "classics". Many of my classmates were similar.
Out elementary and middle schools have a no to low homework policy. By high school the most they assign to non AP courses is 15 min per class.
Only assignment is reading 30 min a night, any book they want (including graphic novels). Yet that does not foster a love of reading.
I had a ton of homework, but still read a book a week (though I did not do sports, only band, so had way more time than most mainstream students in that regard).
My reading waned when I had kids, basically as working parents I am always too exhausted to read, I always doze off. So I can’t set a good example, which I wonder if that is part of the problem — my mom was always reading.
15 mins x 7 periods so 2 hours of work after working from 7-3, some light sport or after school activity until 5. Home, dinner, and more work? Absurdity.
This isn't really advice, because ymmv, but young me just ignored homework (with minor exceptions).
I started programming at age 12, and that was more interesting. School was mostly boring so I didn't feel the need to extend it at home.
Looking back I recognise I was fortunate. My teachers didn't seem to over-mind (perhaps because I was well behaved and engaged in class, and did ok in tests). My parents didn't seem to mind as long as my teachers didn't complain too much.
I also now recognise that I went to a school with progressive values, good teachers, and a focus on flexibility (to a point).
I used to joke afterwards that I had a "unspoken agreement" with my teachers. They could hand out as much homework as they liked, and I would quietly ignore it all.
Yeah, and the worst part is that 15 minutes per class isn't enough to actually do any useful learning. It's just going to be two hours of pointless busy work.
I wouldn’t expect it to be 15 minutes from each class each night - more like a weekly assignment from each class that means each night you do 1 hour of one class, half an hour each of two others, rotating.
For many classes though, 15 minutes/night would be very useful. Language learning, for instance, or music practice. Most kids would benefit from 15 minutes of writing prose for any reason, and I think even high school math topics could provide 15 minutes of worthwhile practice questions each evening. All of these are things that you get better at with repeated practice.
> My reading waned when I had kids, basically as working parents I am always too exhausted to read, I always doze off. So I can’t set a good example
I don't know if you want to set a good example so this advixe is certainly unsolicited, but in my case reading really took off after having children. First when they were tiny and needed to be carried/pushed around which is great for reading, and now that they're toddlers and I'm in the habit, I squeeze it in where I can.
I hope we can read together more as they get older. I'm really looking forward to re-reading some classics like the Hobbit and the books about Narnia. For every year, the space of literature they are capable of expands massively.
My 9 and 11 year olds have no real homework (primary school in Australia) which seems to be public school policy for this age group. Rarely, it's 10 minutes on one night in a week; they often ask for homework and are enthusiastic if given worksheets. They read for literally hours a day.
I read huge amounts as a kid but then lost the habit as an adult. It takes any number of habits and tricks to try and get it going again. Like someone upthread, I'm often fighting tiredness, and one trick that can work is prioritising reading in the morning and leaving news and social media for when I'm tired.
At the same age in southern California, my kids had what was supposed to be 1-2 hours of homework a night. Which was made worse by ADHD. And, additionally, I had to teach my son basic skills that school failed to teach him. Like spelling and his times table.
I attended school in Georgia (the US state) and it was similar for me at that age; their goal was to assign about an hour of homework each night.
By the time my sister reached that age (she is 10 years younger), it had gotten so much worse: they were aiming for about two hours of homework. It realistically took closer to 3 or 4, and with many tears shed, even with me and both our parents helping. (She has since been diagnosed with ADHD.)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, she and I have both decided to not have children. Being a kid really fucking sucked then, and it's probably even worse now.
I never really had any homework, or I never did it. I never read for pleasure either. I don't think it's that, but I get your point. Too busy = no time for reading for fun
Not just no time, but making even otherwise fun things mandatory with a volume that's overwhelming can suck the fun out of it and/or make it seem dull.
At one point I came to the realization that "reading is supposed to be fun". But it wasn't for me during school. At all. I hated every minute of it.
It made me wonder if children in the future will be forced to watch movies and play video games in their "literary education" and whether they will hate watching movies and playing games because of that.
Funnily enough I recently came across an online discussion asking why people used to like khan academy, when today “everyone hates it”. The poster was about 15, from memory, and apparently it was standard practice in their experience to use khan academy within classes or as assigned homework.
The thread seem to be missing even stronger case, that was true for me: making otherwise fun things mandatory, period. The volume doesn't matter; that a book was assigned as mandatory at all deterred me from reading it. Same with homework, which I was spectacularly good at avoiding.
Same here, absolutely. And the fact that that highly appraised literature seems to be mostly a fringey group of self-centered 'intellectuals' that think they're so important that their drivel must be spoon-fed to teenagers.
Yup. I initially thought that it would be a good idea for me to major in Computer Science.
For some reason I majored in Finance after a few years of electrical engineering courses.
I don't think I'd be programming today if I had to be force fed programming assignments.
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 who spent a decade working their way up the ranks of a machine shop from operator to foreman.
I can tell you the last time I had to write a singly-linked list implementation though. October 17th, Nineteen Ninety Never.
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.
I decided to jump on this bandwagon a while back and asked ChatGPT to do some tedious legwork for me with a bunch of geo-search primitives. I'll say the CS and general CS expertise came in very handy because boy this thing was wrong. Not obviously wrong but subtly and confidently wrong. :-)
Agreed. The things I look for most when hiring programmers (assuming they have a resume showing they have the skills) are attention to detail, empathy, and ability to communicate without feeling like I'm arguing all the time or pulling teeth.
Empathy tends to win here: you need to understand why people are using the software and how they are using it to make good decisions.
Communication tends to be better with people that have empathy.
> I can tell you the last time I had to write a singly-linked list implementation though. October 17th, Nineteen Ninety Never.
The point of writing (and working with) linked list implementations in a CS2 course is not because linked lists are something you'll have to implement yourself later (although there are certain areas of systems programming where return values of various system calls are, effectively, linked lists).
The point of working with LLs in CS2 is because they are an extremely simple data structure that you can inspect the entire implementation of; and their use of references/pointers gives practice with that concept before upgrading to the concepts of trees and (linked) graphs; and their fundamental structure and properties are so different from array-type list implementations that they provide a good first example of two different implementation strategies that can produce exactly the same output/result but with different space and time usage properties; and the parallel implementations are also a motivation for abstracting interface away from implementation and keeping data private and interface public.
So, that's why I teach linked lists in CS2. I try to be very up-front with my students about that; sorry to hear that your professors maybe weren't. I pretty solidly agree that a LinkedList per se is not particularly useful to a working software engineer; but that's not why we teach them.
Yes, I also find that physicists don't make the best auto mechanics. Mechanics never need to derive the equations of astronomical motion when repairing an engine block.
Why do you believe that Computer Science is less "critical thinking about abstract concepts and how to articulate ideas" than Journalism?
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 happens in practice, in my American experience). But high school has far more hours of class time.
For me as a kid who loved reading and fell out of it by the time I finished school (and then re-found that love decades later), the biggest contributing factor wasn't 30 minutes of reading for school. It was forced reading of books that were uninteresting to me in the first place, and then having to engage with those books in a wholly artificial way.
There's a lot of interesting things to be gleaned from books and certainly expanding students horizons is not in and of itself a bad idea. But school reading is painful, whether it's 10 minutes or 4 hours. You're given pre-selected material with pre-selected lessons to be taken from that material. You are expected to write summaries that explain why the curtains in the foyer of this book were blue (regardless of whether there's actually a reason the author did that or if the lesson planner just hallucinated some meaning out of thin air), and then discuss obvious lessons in non-fiction materials as if there was any other purpose to writing the book in question except to present that lesson. Sometimes you're given books to read that match whatever the current hot social topic is, again without regard to the quality of the books, and then expected to regurgitate the correct opinions on that topic as if the book presented those opinions, and again without regard to what the book actually said (or failed to say).
Reading in schools is presented and treated with the rigor of a mathematical proof, and the soullessness of dispassionate scientific observation of dying rats. It should be no wonder that what that is the experience of children with reading, so many fail to find a hobby or pleasure in it. We don't seem surprised when most students don't do mathematical formulas in their spare time after learning it in school, why should reading be any different?
Everyone always complains about the "blue curtains". Did everyone but be ready the same book, or are you just repeating a meme? (for what purpose?)
But I do analyze literature and study mathematical formulas in my free time, so maybe I'm built different.
It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
I can confirm, we ”analyzed” the color of the curtains in some novel I now forget. I believe they were, in fact, blue. The teacher was adamant details like that were always meaningful and certainly not just to paint a scene. It was far from the only instance of such “analysis”.
What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
>What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
I find it disappointing how poorly the lesson is taught. The question shouldn't be 'Why?' [The author did something] it should be "What?" [did the author do]. Whether they were colored for a purpose or not, what does the blueness of the curtains convey?[0]. The point then is to be able to generalize to 'what is this media conveying,' occasionally with intent[1], and 'how do I create media with my intended conveyance'.
[0]'Nothing in particular' is a valid answer, that the protagonist's favorite color was blue could be another.
[1]e.g. in a commercial: actors, wardrobe, setting, et al are all very intentionally selected to convey the message 'this product will make your life better' or similar.
> What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
Same in german. Die Leiden des jungen Werther - dry, boring, irrelevant.
It's certainly possible that "blue curtains" specifically is a memetic reference that I've absorbed via osmosis, but the experience of having to analyze minute details to a ridiculous extent was very much a true one, regardless of the specifics of the example.
I feel like the "blue curtains" problem with reading in schools is akin to the "shape -> rectangle -> square" problem that early OOP education has. It might be a very basic and simple attempt to explain a concept (inheritance in the case of OOP, symbolism in the case of books), but its simplicity and inoffensive genericness is so overwhelmingly devoid of any of the usefulness that the concept brings that its more harmful to the students than helpful.
I've long argued that programing courses are broken. They present a concept with a hugely simplified model, and then tell you when you don't understand why you'd want to do it that it will make more sense when you build a "real" program. I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced. A sort of "in medias res" method of teaching.
I think something similar applies to a lot of the way literature concepts are taught in schools. Boring books that don't connect with the readers and students are assigned, and then terrible examples that are either overly contrived (blue curtains) or blindingly obvious (the bad guy kicks the puppy which shows he's bad) that they just turn the students off. There's no excitement or interest nurtured into the concepts because the taught examples are so lifeless and far removed from what is actually possible.
>It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
My personal opinions on the matter are
1) "too much mandatory study". Yeah when they're adults, they'll need to work 8 hour jobs, but kids need time to be kids and they need time to let the things they're learning sink in and discover real world applicability in their own lives. 6-7 hours of schooling + 1-3 hours of homework + projects + "extra curricular" programs adds up to a lot of time where students don't have any time to find anything interesting in what they've learned before they're shuffled off to the next things. School is stressful enough when you're just learning, but all the other stuff that's piled on and the regimented testing just burns them out. I was turned off of math courses for half of my schooling because 2nd grade math was full of timed tests in which failures were punished by loss of recess time.
2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling. I had friends who were held back from advanced classes where they would have been challenged and engaged because early in elementary school they performed poorly on a handful of standardized tests and were locked forever in the "standard" track. So much of what you want to teach as a skill can be taught via multiple different avenues, and we should offer schooling that takes advantage of that. Literary concepts like foreshadowing, metaphor, symbolism etc can be taught via film, books, poetry, games and even music. Why does every student then need to go through the same literary courses with the same set of books to learn the material? Math concepts can be taught with money, or physics, or chemistry or computer programming or wood working. Why does everyone need to go through the same math textbook?
The most memorable teachers I ever had were the ones that stepped outside the books. The ones that explored teaching a concept from multiple angles, and who understood that often it was necessary to let the students see the deep end of the pool to get them interested in learning to swim at all. Those teachers worked well for me. They didn't work for others. And some teachers that I found staid and boring and that failed to leave me with any love for the subject they were teaching were ones that connected with other classmates. But we were all crammed into the same set of lessons with the same teacher and teaching styles.
Education smothered my love for reading by forcing me to read material that didn't connect with me and analyze and report on that material in a way that was unnatural for me. The ember that was able to be rekindled was only kept alive by the occasional tending of a teacher that would from time to time allow me to step outside the box to engage with books the way that worked for me. I was lucky in that regard. Many students aren't and that's a shame.
Disclaimer: I live in The Netherlands; perhaps the situation is different in the US. It would be great if it was.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on your wishes. I didn't necessarily have the same experiences, but that's mostly beside the point. But as a very junior university teacher:
> programing courses are broken [...] I think they would be better served in a lot of ways by having you write "real" code the hard way first, and then introducing the concepts that OOP (and other patterns) benefit from by showing how those things address the very real pain points the programers experienced.
There is no time. I want to teach what you say, and as a student I wanted to be taught what you say, but that takes more time, especially if you want to cater for the whole class — that "the hard way" programming is less efficient than doing it the right way, unsurprisingly, so it takes more time (not only that, you're asking them to do the same assignment twice, which is anathema — no time for that!), and the curriculum is already chock full.
> My personal opinions on the matter are: 1) "too much mandatory study".
Sure, but then you have even less time. You'll make the previous problem worse.
> 2) Related to that, recognize that education is highly individual and offer more tailored schooling.
Yes, everyone knows this would be good, but there is no money and there are no teachers. Skilled primary school and high school teachers are incredibly hard to find, and even if you'd find them, there is no money to pay for more teachers than we have now.
Yeah, I have family and friends who are teachers, definitely aware that there's no time. Fundamentally the modern way we deal with education is broken. It's not even mostly the funding, but the way we try to measure it, package it and distill it and spread it around equally. The only way to do that is the same way McDonalds does, strip it down to the barest essentials done by rote , crammed into as small a time unit as possible with as little variation as possible. It works, but it has all the same problems.
Education as a whole needs a re-work in how we approach it, for many reasons but also to make time for this sort of careful nurturing; even if it means we don't cover as many things. We can no more teach all the children all the things in 18 years than we could have them listen to all the music ever produced in that same time. And to my mind then we'd be better served doing everything we can to nurture and encourage children's natural curiosity and desire to learn and do on the absolutely necessary of the things necessary that will quash that curiosity.
How do we do that? I don't know. I have thoughts, but there are certainly going to be no easy answers, and decades of bureaucracy and infrastructure around the current system will not go quietly even if we had the answers in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
I would dissagree on the chemistry. A working knowledge of chemistry is quiet valuable in the kitchen. Understanding of the maillard reaction, or of caramelization is useful for making better tasting food. I keep pH strips in my kitchen for use in making ferments, understanding chemistry will make it intuitive which foods to cook on cast iron or not to because the acids will eat the pans seasoning. Knowledge of polymerization lets know you can wash the cast frying pan despite the folk wisdom to the contray.
I had AP classes in high school and a 20 hour a week part time job - easily 10 hours a day on the week days including homework and ongoing projects. So at 17 I was working 70 hours a week. College was more of the same - honors classes and projects.
I graduated college and was like "I only have to work 40 hours a week? What's the catch?"
One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo.
You know the same things that your neighbor knows, within a reasonable margin of error. Therefore, you have social compatibility with them.
You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth.
That's valuable, right?
To get that, you had to go through the same 12 years of history and bored idiot English teachers telling you about symbolism and metaphor and giving you terrible 5 paragraph essays to fill out with the same dumb rote formula.
If you look at the overall social outcome, for the majority, this is a good thing.
If, however, it turns out that you are special and of a rare breed, then for your own children you should hire private tutors or school them overseas or do something somehow to cultivate their greatness.
If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.
> One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo.
I’m not saying that we completely get rid of public education, just that we stop appending things to it and pretending they’re important.
Nobody remembers most of this alleged common ground anyways. Go ask around what the 5th amendment says, or what a high pH means, I’d be shocked if a quarter of people remembered.
> You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth.
Sure, if we’re talking about something covered in high school, but for any topic I’d be realistically interested in hearing them talk about, no. Why would me or Bill Gates want to discuss symbolism in Catcher in the Rye? I’m certainly not going to talk to Musk about chemistry; I’m doubtful he’s a through and through rocket engineer, but his tangential knowledge likely trumps my very limited recollection of valence bands and I have no idea how that relates to the energy density of rocket fuel.
This is just a veneer of equality we tell ourselves. Sure, we’re all equal in the sense that we’ve largely ignored our high school education and probably haven’t really advanced our biology knowledge.
That doesn’t imply that we’re all going to sit around and suddenly want to talk about that instead of rockets or operating systems or investment strategies; I am not on the same part of the bell curve for the topics that make them interesting.
> If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.
I don’t disagree there are pleasantries, but at what cost? We’re pushing children into working near-slavery workloads, with no recourse to change that, and our means of motivating them is primarily threatening their entire future if they don’t play along.
It’s like the worst job in the world; Amazons warehouses look like a vacation comparatively.
Children can’t switch schools on their own like adults can switch jobs. Children’s records follow them when they do switch, so they can’t escape even if they switch schools. I’ve never had HR records follow me across companies. And any employer that tried to control their employees by threatening to ruin the entire rest of their lives would have the NLRB crawl up their ass and build a branch office.
We’re trading the happiness of children for what? Me and my neighbor having equally shitty recall of the French and Indian war?
I still remember being in high school, and I still remember how miserable it was. I remember kids showing up with huge bags under their eyes because they had to go into “crunch time” and work til midnight because they got a bunch of big assignments at once.
I remember meeting most of my high school classmates and how bright eyed and cheery we were. I also remember senior year, and how many of those smiles had faded into blank, exhausted stares.
I remember the kids who had problems in their family lives whose personalities either disappeared or curdled into sour milk as they tried to cope with 60 hour weeks and just didn’t have the spare time and energy to try to process their parents divorce.
I remember the suicides and addiction the most though. The kids that had bottomed out so hard they would do anything they could to escape the loop of stress, failure, threats about their future, and back to the beginning. The only options we offer them are death or complete desperation, and some kids picked one because they just couldn’t do it anymore.
There were multiple suicides while I was in high school. 3 that I can recall, and one kid that ran away from home and overdosed while sleeping in a public park.
It’s awful for the kids that die, and it’s awful for the kids left behind who now have to figure out how to emotionally process a friend’s suicide while working 60 hour weeks knowing full well that college admissions won’t give 2 shits about why their GPA was low that quarter.
The highschool was ranked in the top 50 public schools in the US when I attended. This wasn’t a backwater dump wrecked by phasing out coal, this was a school held up as an example for other schools.
I don’t find nearly enough value in making a neat bell curve to put kids through that. I wouldn’t put adults through that, and the existence of unions tells me that others feel the same way. Unions would pitch a huge fit over the least egregious of our expectations of children.
There are enormous flaws in public education, some of which you have addressed, but eliminating the study of history and english is going to do bupkis to address any of that.
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, stated that living in a warbound society:
"In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Obviously, our governments are always in war. Our schools are always in war. Millions to the football stadiums and rarely even pennies for the arts. Churn out grist for the malady mill and milk the survivors of every drop of value. Every business and enterprise of man is but war in a capitalist society.
Taking away the seeds of the arts because they might not grow into more juice for the war machine is at best a shortsighted thought and at worst the hateful demands of a small and selfish person. They didn't benefit you, but others they do.
The flaw in public education that I'm trying to address is its tendency to grow to occupy any potential free time, largely because children are powerless to prevent that.
> Taking away the seeds of the arts because they might not grow into more juice for the war machine is at best a shortsighted thought and at worst the hateful demands of a small and selfish person. They didn't benefit you, but others they do.
I haven't the faintest interest in taking away access to art or English or history. I don't generally believe in removing access to things. I am interested in not forcing a vulnerable and powerless group to donate their time to the cause of "keeping art/English/history alive" if they don't want to.
There is some subset of knowledge that is a practical requirement for being able to navigate society. People need to know enough English to communicate, enough math to make change, enough science to have a basic understanding of the world we exist in. Those are basically untouchable if we want society to continue functioning.
Art knowledge is not a necessity for living a normal life. A person can pursue an immense number of paths in their life without ever encountering a requirement to know things about art. It's honestly notable for someone to have encountered a situation where they needed or were aided by having taken art classes. Creative writing and the analysis of creative writing are much the same.
If hours in the day were limitless, or children stayed children for longer, I'd agree with you. Knowledge of art has value, as does creative writing and history; I firmly believe that all knowledge has some degree of value.
I do not agree in light of what we're putting children through. Something has to give, and it's either going to be the school workload or children's mental health. The teen suicide rate has nearly doubled since 2000, and I don't feel like playing a game of chicken with rising suicide rates to preserve art or ancient history or creative writing or like a dozen other things.
Give the kids back their free time and I'm sure a lot of them will gravitate towards art or creative writing naturally. They naturally appeal to a lot of kids and people, if we'd just give them the room to get there themselves instead of force-feeding them a list of Baroque artists to make flashcards out of.
It seems like you would be better served in a Montessori or similar education system.
I had a lot of issues with public education in my life. I don't regret the information I learned, no matter how trivial, but I do regret the time wasted, being a student who easily absorbed the entirety of the semesters knowledge for all non-stem classes by reading the book in the gap before classes started.
I would have appreciated being able to go further faster rather than wait for my classmates to make it to the starting line.
That being said, school isn't just about knowledge. We live in a society and we have to have a standard by which to relate to one another. Like it or not, our fellow humans are dark forests with gaping maws yearning to devour us, and we are the same to them.
Without some trauma bonding, some common fountain from which we draw our waters, we would willingly or not destroy one another until only our little clans remained.
Modern society has blinded us to the travails of our forefathers, where the people who live a few miles away might rise up and slay us if they have a bad harvest one year.
That we have come so far as to reduce the occasional rampages down to traumatic school experiences is quite amazing from a neutral third party viewpoint, even though it definitely doesn't feel that way from someone who has experienced it firsthand, but compared to being murdered and eaten by the person who happened to be my classmate, getting picked on and feeling some long term anger over the situation is vastly preferable to me.
All of that aside, we can do better. That much is obvious. We could do better easily if we could get everyone on the same page and standard, and make the standard "Maximally educated according to your individual ability" so that it would adapt to the learners potential rather than being concerned with the easier to manage yet still brobdingnagianly difficult standard of "minimally viable high school graduate".
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 university.
Setting aside time for relaxation and leisure activities is highly productive, but unfortunately that isn't something that becomes obvious until your work visibly suffers from "all work and no play". The costs of overworking yourself truly are insidious. It really is akin to a rogue wave - you don't know how deep it runs until it finally hits.
It sounds like you enjoy books, the problem is convincing yourself you deserve to take time to read them. To quiet that anxiety:
> The habit of reading is a meaningful way to meditatively intake large portions of information. Reading helps with creativity, focus, and communication. Reading light-hearted, entertaining books increases these skills while preserving focus for work in a way that reading the latest O'Reilly book does not, while making reading non-fiction books in the future easier because you've been practicing reading.
Separately, humans are not machines. In general, we aren't wired to constantly be doing things, and taking time to play or to enjoy stories or to do absolutely nothing is an entirely necessary maintenance task.
Removing joy and rest from your life for productivity is the biological equivalent of accumulating technical debt. This debt can intensify until you need a complete rewrite; when this happens, it's called burn out, and it's kinda really bad.
> the problem is convincing yourself you deserve to take time to read them
This hits home in so many more ways than just reading. I find it hard to do any leisure activities because doing them means I have spare time to do any of a thousand items on my personal backlog. It's very stressful.
the average audio book is 10 hours long. let's say reading a book takes 10 hours. then you only need 20 minutes per day to read one book per month. it should not be hard to find that time.
what you say suggests that you have a backlog of non-leisure activities that you feel are more important.
i solved this by making leisure activities more important. call it work-life balance if that helps. leisure is part of a healthy day. i started going for a daily walk for exercise. i considered important for my well being. i watch one tv show per day. and only one. i simply decided that is part of a healthy routine. and i made a list of what i want to watch so i don't waste that hour on random stuff. i still do spend more time on random stuff, eg youtube, but that is a different problem. when i run out of time, i stop wasting time on youtube, but i don't stop that one tv episode. i figure i have earned the break after being busy for a day. i should do the same with listening to audiobooks/stories but i haven't been able to re-establish that routine yet.
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.
If you need shitty books to practice giving up on, I can autograph and send you some books written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author who shares my name and writes terrible books. Email in profile.
Here's a trick that helped me after a ten+ year hiatus and having my attention fried by social media:
A lot of people who have lost their attention span to technology will find themselves reading but not absorbing, their mind wandering, until they realize they'd "read" 3 pages and don't remember what happened.
So read slow and with purpose, but most importantly at the end of each page, ask yourself what you just read and have a conversation with yourself about it. This helped rebuild my comprehension and focus. This is similar to how English classes will read a book as a class: Reading then discussion, reading then discussion. But instead of as a group, do it as an internal dialogue.
One of the things that helped me was to have an actual dialog with the book.
For non-fiction books, this means pushing back against claims that appear to be unsupported. When I read in a paper book I do so with a pen to make notes in it (I don't sell my books, and I obviously don't do this with library books), but ebooks just get marked up in my ebook reader and it's very nice. It's also good when reviewing a book because I can see all of my thoughts and questions and often can answer them by the end of the chapter/section/unit.
For fiction books, this ends up being a "what would I do there/what would an ordinary person do?" It's very helpful to try and place yourself in the character's shoes and see how you may have reacted differently or if you agree with the character understanding _why_ you agree with them.
it takes some practice. and i find it's more difficult with short stories because there every detail counts. if you miss a few details from a longer book, it tends to matter less.
and then while listening i need to do an activity that doesn't require mental focus.
so i can't sit in front of the computer, unless it is mundane photo editing or some other repetitive task that doesn't make me think.
going for a walk and housework work for me. especially housework. there is nothing else i can do while washing dishes, cooking, doing laundry or cleaning. the work doesn't require much focus, and is quite repetitive. that makes listening easy.
I would up vote trying audiobooks.
They are great for traveling, also cleaning up and other chores.
Classic narrators make everything fun to listen to. There are voices for lulling you to sleep. Others to make the stories exciting.
The Harry Potter books have two narrators -they are both great, in different ways.
Lord of the rings is much more fun in audiobook format.
Try to find audiobooks read by Simon Vance, for example - he reads the Master and Commander series, and the original James Bond series.
Have fun.
Oh yeah, I've listened to all of this and some of Dennis E. Taylor's other stuff, as well. I've also listened to all of ExFor and everything Andy Weir, almost everything narrated by Travis Baldree, too.
Its the next blockbuster series. If my mother, who claimed murderbot was too complicated and has never played video games loved it... the series has legs.
General change to my habits has been that if I’m not feeling a story, it’s okay to put it down. The amount of reading I have trudged through because I was afraid of quitting…
I suggest Stephen King as a reintroduction for general audiences (since a lot of people have a hard time vibing with high fantasy, I know I do).
He's not the greatest writer of all time, but he's enjoyable while not feeling like you're reading YA or something age inappropriate. And his classics are classics for a reason.
Can't go wrong with Carrie, The Stand, Misery, The Shining or Salem's Lot.
> The last book I was able to devour and actually enjoyed was the Harry Potter series
Actually, it was Harry Potter that got me back into reading. I read the first 5 books over the course of 2 weeks the summer after I graduated college.
In some cases I'd see an interview on late night television and read the book the guest was promoting. More recently I read a book that was discussed on the radio during my commute.
In other cases, there was a subject I wanted to learn about, so I'd read books about the subject, or biographies on people who were known in the subject matter.
Sometimes I'll see a movie / TV show based on the book, and like it enough to read the book.
And: J. K. Rowling's new series about Coroman Strike (written under a pseudonym) is excellent. Read it slowly, though. I'm also slowly re-reading Harry Potter to my kids and it's a lot more enjoyable in bits instead of as a binge.
Seconding the "audiobooks count" that Imzadi said, I'd like to note that the Martian audiobook is exceptional, and I've heard that others by Weir are excellent as well.
You might enjoy reading _short_ novels. I really liked the "All Systems Red" series, each of them feels short enough to read in a day. If you enjoyed Harry Potter, you might also enjoy the Invisible Library series, or maybe the Harry Dresden novels. They both felt like fun-pulpy romps through magical worlds.
Maybe you can convince your brain that reading at bedtime is a good use of time because it promotes healthy sleeping by not being on a screen. ;) (It hasn't worked for me, I still have a backlog two shelves long.)
I'm not an avid reader, but I've rediscovered reading in the past couple years. A few tips that help me:
1) Keep a list of book recommendations mentioned from HN, podcasts, friends, etc. Eventually, some will be recommended twice or more, and that may be enough to tell your brain "this will be worth it."
2) Try non-fiction if you're usually a fiction person, or vice versa. I grew up enjoying only fiction. But now I realize I enjoy non-fiction a lot more.
3) Don't stick with boring books for more than a couple chapters. I've been using thriftbooks.com, so it's affordable to toss a few dollars away and try again.
Maybe it's a problem of taste? Maybe you don't like the books you've tried to read because of the contents of the book?
From what's popular these days I think you should try reading: The Martian and Cradle. If you don't like it then stop reading and go for something else.
If you want to try a lot of different stuff I would recommend trying web novel on sites like RoyalRoad, Web novel, Scribblehub. Just pick something, read a bit. If you don't like it, find something new.
- Try something entertaining instead of something useful. Pick books out of interest, not out of pragmatism or obligation. If a book doesn't work for you, try another.
- Make it a special time. Start your bedtime routine early, light some candles, make tea and have a go at it. Or sit in a nice café, or after a nice picnic. I love reading myself to sleep, or with tea on the balcony in the morning.
- Remove distractions. I read on a disconnected iPad with no internet and no apps except for reading and notetaking.
If you want to put it in productivity-over-everything terms, reading before sleep is a really good way to wind down and get solid sleep. It's also a great way to build vocabulary, get different perspectives, and enjoy idle time without doomscrolling.
Read when you're fresh (set your alarm earlier and read before you get out of bed) rather than when you're tired at the end of the day. Use a habit tracking app (mine is Streaks on iOS). If tired, walking around the house while reading ticks off pages and steps. Read books you like; quit anything that you feel is a waste of time. Read while eating breakfast if it's not antisocial. Pick shorter books to get momentum (Old Man and the Sea, Into the Wild). Read on your phone, so it's always an option. Put your Books app prominently on the home screen and relegate social media apps out of view.
Regarding time reading is faster than listening. Also way more efficient than movies, series or video games. I can’t play story based video games anymore like Witcher 3 because at one point I’m like I’m wasting so much time compared if I was just reading the book.
Also books are less isolating than listening, for example if you are in a park with nature sounds.
If you enjoyed The Expanse you could try the last 3 books. If you haven’t read for a long time it’ll be hard at first to stay focused but by the middle of the book you should hopefully get the feeling of wanting to pick the book anytime like a new episode of the show just dropped.
I wouldn't call audiobook "settling", I enjoy them more than books with a great narrator.
What got me back into reading was Harry Potter. I hadn't read a book for fun since middle school and had grown to loathing reading of any kind from all the assigned reading. (just give me the cliff notes).
HP was new, all the rage, and wife convinced me to give it a try (she had always been an avid reader). I had maybe 3 books to catch up on and I read them all back to back and was eagerly awaiting the 4th. We'd do midnight releases and each buy our own book and didn't sleep till we were through.
i was an avid reader in my youth but stopped when i entered university (and got a computer (guess where i spend most of my time instead of reading books ;-))
about a decade ago i discovered audiodrama, short story audio magazines and finally whole audiobooks. i mostly listened to them on my commute. later when i had no commute i started going for walks (to get out of the house and move) and i also listen during housework or other mundane tasks. i tried listening before going to sleep, but that didn't work because i would doze away and miss sections while hearing others. that meant hi had to relisten the next day to catch what i missed.
i get about an hour of listening time on average, sometimes two, when i have a good daily routine, less otherwise.
one hour per day is enough to listen to 2-3 books per month. i alternate between all three types so i usually only get one book in a month, sometimes less. but that adds up too. my reading list has almost 80 titles. with an average of 10 hours per book you can finish a whole book in a month with only 20 minutes per day.
In my mid twenties I had a mundane 30 minute commute in a crowded London tube which meant no internet (maybe thats different now). I cranked through so many books in that ~2 year timespan.
It's not reasonable to do a cognitively demanding job all day and then expect to do cognitively demanding leisure at night. Unemployed people are great readers.
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.
Those chinese cultivation novels are my guilty pleasures. I still look for a good translation, but they what I reach for when I just want to pass the time (and they're really long).
If you're into fiction, can I suggest looking for short story magazines in your preferred genre. Look novels are great and all, and I love devouring a book that really hooks into me, but the modern publishing landscape is full of 500+ page books that are part 3 of a 48 book series. That can be overwhelming and certainly difficult to drag yourself into if you're not in the habit of reading.
Sort story magazines introduce you to multiple authors and multiple stories, most of which could be read in 30 minutes before bed, and give you a chance to enjoy reading for fun without committing to a who "extended universe" of material you feel like you have to know.
If SF&F is your preferred genre, "Asimov's", "Analog", and "Fantasy and Science Fiction" are old staples that are still being published. "Locus", "Lightspeed" and "Strange Horizons" are also options, with Lightspeed and Strange Horizons being relative newcomers to the field. weightlessbooks.com carries a couple of those and some magazine in other genres too if SF&F aren't your jam.
This was my experience as well. Loved reading when I was younger, but lots of assigned reading from elementary onward poisoned the well, so to speak.
In retrospect, it's surprising how rigid the required reading was at my school: no choice in the material whatsoever, so the most important engine that drives reading (curiosity) was held out of the equation.
I think a lot of it is what goes on at home (surprise, this is basically for all education). I know I did reading as part of my schoolwork and homework. The reading I most remember was during the summer. A few were summer work related and needed reports, but the book choice was open ended. Many were not school related but encouraged by my parents.
As an adult who does a gargantuan amount of reading for a living - while work is busy i cannot fathom reading for fun but during breaks I start up again. To me this is all quite sensible and a bit bit of support for the argument we need to slow everything down a bit. Fix work-life balance accross the board.
When can we change our education to promote better educational outcomes instead of training for the test or alternatively being devoid of fundamental knowledge/skills? It feels like we should be progressing in this area much faster then we are. Yes - i know - its way to broad of a question.
I'm sure it's more complicated than this but something that definitely has had an influence -- when budgets for a school district are determined by how many students pass vs being left behind, there is an outsized incentive to prepare students for the test instead of for more broadly reasoning or for enjoying the practice of learning.
Some of us determined that school is something to be avoided. To squeak through it with absolutely minimal effort. Never do the assigned reading. Never do the homework.
Which leaves mountains of free time (an irreplaceable commodity, you will agree) for reading whatever the heck you like.
I also went to a private college prep school, and the workload was practically abusive at times. I remember some days when I’d work on homework during class, get home, then continue working on homework clear until 3 or 4 AM. Then it was back up at 6 AM to go back to school. Some nights were light and I got to bed at 12p-1a. The weekends following the hard weeks were mostly nonexistent because I was unconscious for most of them.
I confess I mostly just read cliffsnotes and sparksnotes. Felt a little guilty about it at first, but it helped me ace the tests, and saved a ton of time.
>What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.
It’s not just homework it’s outside activities… but also the time spent at class is often wasted so there are not enough hours in the day to do everything.
> Take a closer look at how much homework children have, and how much assigned, mandatory reading children have.
Yeah. My nine years old goes to a school where there's no homework. She now reads a lot: kids at school all shares any cool book they read and then they all want to read it. Today she brought back a brick and started reading it. She devours book.
I stopped reading books because of mandatory reading.
When I graduated from high school one of the thoughts on my mind during the ceremony was "YES!! I will n e v e r have to read books again!!"
I also stopped reading around age 9-10 for fun.
My 'favorite' book during school was Crime and Punishment. I didn't like the book, but I knew the teachers liked it. So if it ever came up I 'liked it very much'.
Many years after school anime -> manga -> light novels -> web novels got me back into reading. Now I spend far too much time on reading, but I don't think I will ever read fiction in my native language again.
I had plenty of assigned reading and half-assed it because high school classwork was not hard l remotely hard. Writing an acceptable book report was trivial with only some brief scanning.
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 homework?)
Once I was out of college, I rediscovered reading.