This article by Thomas Washington out of the Times Union really hit home for me. The article was titled, "Searchers, not readers, on overload." The main gist of the article was that the number of kids these days who read books regularly is decreasing steadily. Not only do I believe that this is a growing problem, but I have lived through this new Internet age, and am a prime example of these findings. Throughout my years in elementary school, middle school and high school, I hated reading. I would never have chose to read a book over watching TV or going on the internet. I remember in third grade my teacher gave out a "reading contract." This was a document that you had to sign saying what books you have been reading. This reading contract
used to give me freaking nightmares because I hated reading so much. I was in advanced english classes all through high school, and I barely ever finished the books that were assigned. I read half of Huck Finn before sparknoting the rest, and of course did very well on the test, (which of course is all that mattered to me). The summer before 11th grade I had to read the Great Gadsby and the Scarlett Letter and write a paper comparing them. I actually read the Great Gadsby in its entirety, but never even opened the Scarlett Letter for a second. I got an A on the paper. This brings me to the reason I did not read any more books in high school. PinkMonkey.com was brought to my attention when you had to start paying for Sparknotes. PinkMonkey was more indepth and almost always enough information for the test/paper. Thats how it was, when I got a book to read, instead of reading it I would let it sit on my desk gathering dust for a few weeks, then I would figure out how to know that book inside and out without reading a word of it. I was so good at this system no teacher ever knew the difference. Then I came to college. I played this little game freshmen year too. A's quickly turned to C's though, and my time faking to read books was over. Now, three years after that, I love to read. I get so much satisfaction from finishing a book. I still get that urge to turn on the TV or do something else while I'm reading though. I think this article brings up a very important problem in our society today. I think one way it can be solved is to take away all tests on reading in grade school. If teachers would spend more time talking about the books, and evaluating how well a student understands it, rather than just testing them on little pieces of information throughout the text, kids will be more likely to read the material. Kids in school have one agenda and one agenda only, and that's to get a good grade. Most kids aren't interested in learning, and to most its that letter grade that means everything.
2 comments:
I'm rediscovering my love for reading. I've been fortunate that my son has always loved reading and that continues to this day .
Great blog.
This is a good posting. Promise me that you will read all of Huckleberry Finn. No less a person than Ernest Hemingway proclaimed it the best American novel ever written and I think he could be right. In fact, I will excuse you from any assignment in this class (except the final one, of course) if instead you read the book and come talk to me about it.
You have some grammatical problems we need to work on. These blight your good writing, so it's time to fix them. See comment on your next posting.
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