Hacker News Reader

Comment by janmo | Hacker News Reader

At school we had a teacher who tried to make us read 10 books a year. You could choose whatever book you wanted, and you had to write a small summary. So every one headed to the school library and looked for the smallest books available. The most popular book that every one read was called something like: "Collection of letters from from my Grandfather" and had around 50 to 70 pages and was very boring. Many also cheated by watching movie adaptations of books.

Edit: This was back in the time when you could not go online and find dozens of book summaries within minutes.

View on HN

This exact phenomenon is discussed in "Punished by Rewards." It's probably one of the best possible ways to train kids that reading is no fun, of no benefit to them, and should only be done if promised some kind of prize.

In elementary school we had something like this - we had to read a book from a different genre every month in order to earn a food item for the end of year picnic. I was constantly reading just science fiction, and ended up with only pickle relish, despite reading more than most of the other students. I don’t think the exercise convinced anyone who wasn’t already into it that reading is good and fun.

That's just... strange.

The correct approach would have been to either leave a student reading a lot alone, or to steer him toward other genres that are similar to Sci-Fi ("Hey gbrown, this other author has a similar style to X I see you enjoy, but it's not true sci-fi... you'll see").

It was long enough ago that I honestly don’t recall whether or not the teacher tried that. I may have just been stubborn lol.

A smart friend of mine proudly stated how little he read in high school, and that he has not read a single book since. He is 26.

Whenever people say that, I feel a little bad because I suspect their education failed them. But I also think of this Otto von Bismarck quote:

"Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others."

I read a lot of novels in school and not many after. Reading is a vital skill but reading novels is not; a separation that was never conveyed to me to in school. For every great novel I have read, I've read countless more terrible novels and there is no greater waste of time than reading something terrible. Not reading artfully constructed prose has definitely taken a toll on my own writing though, as evidenced by this comment!

The emphasis on literature is definitely part of the problem. I was lucky enough to take an AP English Language class my senior year of high school, where the focus was on short essays and other nonfiction. That's what really ignited my love of reading. Before that I did enjoy my sci-fi novels, but I was much more of a TV/movies/video games person.

Throw a bad book in the trash.

Don't read books you hate, just like you shouldn't converse with people that frustrate and anger you.

That being said, a novel is one of the most intimate conversations you can have, so don't give up on them because you have had bad experiences in the past, find a new partner to talk to!

I find that pretty interesting. I've read a decent number of books of being lengths in my life; I'm no great reader, but I'm not a particular slouch either. And almost every book I've read I found very enjoyable; if I didn't, I usually put it down and not pick it up again.

But then, I tend to read stories by authors I already know I like, or those that are recommended or otherwise considered to be worthwhile reads.

> Many also cheated by watching movie adaptations of books.

This sounds risky as movie adaptations sometimes wildly differ from the original material.

When I was in high school in the early 2000s Wikipedia was entirely off limits and “unreliable”. When we had to read a book that had been translated the teacher quickly caught half the class cheating because the Wikipedia article spelled the main character’s name slightly differently than the translation we had been assigned to read.

I remember sitting in the library later that day telling a friend what had happened in class. I pulled up the Wikipedia article only to see it had been updated to say something along the lines of “John Doe (or Joe Doe in some translations)” and I knew immediately it must have been someone from my class who’d made the edit in an effort to save other kids from the same fate they had suffered.

Now you can search online for the differences between the movie adaptation and the book.

At least they got exposure to culture out of it, so it's not all bad.

Same deal with me, starting from my second year (8yo): write a short summary of a book of your choice every school month. On my third year however they tweaked the rules slightly, so the books must be from different series.

More than a decade later, chatting with one of my former teachers, I discovered why they tweaked the rules: because some lazy jerkass would pick a book from The Bored Witch illustrated series, read it in five minutes, write down the summary, then spend the rest of the day reading stuff he wasn't "supposed" to read on his own, like Heart of a Dog and The Metamorphosis. Because he knew that he wouldn't be able to summary those books.

...in my own defence I really enjoyed The Bored Witch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com