That was a “hard book”? I fear for future of humanity.
Mate I’ve taught more than a thousand students and the level of engagement on reading … Anything … Is depressingly low.
I asked my students to read a chapter of a book over a term. We would read a section every week and Monday would be a reading group where we would discuss what we read and then present our groups findings. Each section was 10 to 20 pages. About 10% of the student body would read anything.
It made me sad
I was in advanced English classes throughout high school, and even in those most people just read the Cliff Notes and regurgitated them. Meanwhile I read not only the assigned works but also on my own. And those assigned works were almost all things I hated reading.
The worst part was when my teachers saw me reading a book for pleasure they would tell me it wasn’t “real” reading because apparently you have to hate what you’re reading for it to count.
Tbh I have loved reading my whole life and especially when I was a kid. But every single book I ever had to read for a class was a slog that I could not get motivated for. At least for me, the simple fact that it was assigned reading destroyed my interest, even if it was a book that I would have enjoyed otherwise. I’ve heard similar stories from many people who never enjoyed reading until they started doing it of their own volition.
For many people, reading is boring. And people have different attention spans and different types of brains.
Some people have internal monologues and some don’t.
Some people instantly conjure up rich visuals when given info, some don’t.
I suspect many readers who like reading tend to easily create visuals in their minds. I can visualize things but it’s not always automatic or detailed and so reading seems like an artform based on older less fun technology.
A lot of times kids are bored and annoyed with all the other subjects going on too. They have to memorize facts that could be easily googled, they have to take tests in different subjects. School was mostly excruciating when I did it and whenever I could i zoned out to give my brain a break from paying attention to boring things.
We should let students take more classes they want. Let science types do more science, let less intellectual kids learn to repair AC units, and let people who love to read be in classes with others like them.
If in my school I had done much harder science classes and more computer classes and less history and literature and other things that i mostly endured to get a good grade, i would have been happier. Also AP and Honors classes mess things up because if you are smart then not taking AP or Honors lowers your GPA and messes up your ability to just choose what you want
For many people, reading is boring.
And sometimes it’s the role of education to expose students to things they benefit from but wouldn’t necessarily seek out on their own. Reading comprehension and use of language is a vital skill to function as an adult in society, and to acquire that you need to read, a lot. Short texts, long texts, different styles, poetry, prose, etc. There’s really no way around it.
I can’t visualize nearly at all and when I was younger I would devour a novel daily. I have ADHD and a strong internal monologue.
I don’t read books very often now and I think the reason for this is that my need is somewhat met (and maybe partially overwhelmed) by reading things online, unfortunately the majority of the things I read online are lower quality and creativity than a book would be.
What if the visuals and monologues are trained and not gifted?
I hated reading for years and years, I read well above grade level in school but honestly hated it.
Decades later, I got into audio books, which kickstarted me reading.
The visuals I’ve gotten over the years went from almost nothing to vivid recreations.
An interesting thought… I was always a bookworm and absolutely devoured books as a child. But it’s definitely true that I have the full imagination suite running in my head. 3D environments and objects, picture, sound, even little echoes of smell, touch and taste…I probably wouldn’t find fiction as engaging without that trait. But is me having that because I was given the opportunity to develop that skill early? My parents read to me quite a lot when I was small after all… Or is it just entirely innate?
The whole thing about school is that it isn’t generally great at personal tailoring and in some instances there’s some ethics around kneecaping students by just funneling them into what’s easy and closing off avenues that they might find engaging or need to engage with later. If you decide to not learn language skills and you later decide you want to go to University you are just kind of screwed. A certain amount of basics is just training you to play the game. Brains are also a develop and use it or don’t have it and lose it situation. What is actually being asked when a kid is given a memorization task for instance is less about them being able to cough up that specific fact later and more about the mental process of forming that neural connection so you can apply it later. If you don’t train the ability to memorize a memory remains weak. It’s in part why different generations appear to have different mental strengths and weaknesses characteristically. A mind needs to train individual processes and tweaks in school programs are always trying to optimize. Some people have natural gifts in certain areas but if they never are given application to need them they underdevelop.
Your experience in school is also pretty typical. The average kid can only pay strict attention to something for about their age in minutes. Bored and annoyed is just sort of what happens regardless. More modern approaches factor this in and include more regular refresh breaks for young people… but the classical default is basically to just keep a class doing a thing for long periods while their student’s individual brains cycle in and off task and accept a certain amount of student unhappiness as just a casualty of the process.
Pretty much incapable of visualizing, even the simple apple experiment, but have loved reading since I was a kid. I’ve found myself when reading skimming a lot of the description sections and mostly following the dialogue, where most of the meat in books actually happens. I actually don’t think I’d be able to write a book for the reason that I couldn’t do the description section.
In my case I was read to sleep every night before bed when younger, so perhaps it was positive association that made it stick with me?
Not everyone likes to spend time reading and especially reading shit with antediluvian language.
I dont even know what “modern english” means. I feel like this is more book learning stuff that many don’t care about and it’s exactly why we need AI to circumvent all these terms and complexities.
