You are talking about adults there.
Few children operate that way. You have to keep pushing them (in a balanced way of course) to learn new things.
If you are expecting your kids to magically learn things on their own, you are very likely to be disappointed with the outcome.
Thereās nothing wrong with ice cream and pizza either, but I donāt let my kids eat them all the time, and if I gave them ultimate freedom to eat wherever they wanted, they would make themselves sick.
Nothing wrong with a graphic novel or an easy read. But kids need to be introduced to other things, too, and it needs to be a variety, and when itās happening as a formal part of their education, it needs to sometimes be a stretch.
Hereās what my piano teacher does. When itās time for a new piece, he gives me a handful of suggestions at the next level of difficulty and I pick the one I like the most.
There can be guidance, but beating the Dickens into the kids because itās good for them isnāt the way to go.
Pretty much everybody here owes their paycheck to forcing themselves to read super boring shit for a couple thousand hours. So you might be preaching to the wrong choir.
I would say the best employees are the ones who have the ability to understand a lot of different points of view, make a decision about what is best, and then execute on them.
How does an employee know what is easiest or best without an understanding of all their options? Youāre advocating for people being allowed to get stuck in their ways.
So it sounds like your teacher isnāt letting you pick fur Elise every time because itās what you already know you like and because itās the easiest option.
I think there are two different interests here.
One is helping kids to find different kinds of books that they love to read. Letting them pick their own books is critical to that.
The other is stretching their reading and thinking skills. For piano playing, your teacher can help you with that while also letting you pick your own song. Reading and thinking are different, partly because due to practical time constraints from the teacher, who can know your piano song in several minutes, but still needs hours to days to read a book.
Oh, repetition. I watched Willy Wonka 60 times in a row over 2 months as a kid lol.
Theyāll grow out of it.
I donāt know what this means, but let me assure you, most kids donāt. Most kids donāt read another book after they graduate high school. Our education system fails almost everyone, but the solution isnāt to fail them harder.
The kids who are brilliant and self-motivated and unable to be challenged effectively in a classroom setting should not be placed in a mainstream school, they should be educated on an individual basis. But most kids arenāt that, and most families canāt dedicate those resources anyway.
I read Great Expectations as an adult, and it was a complete waste of time for me.
I wonder if I had read it in a classroom setting with a guide and others sharing their insight if I might have found something interesting in thereā¦
I would say Great Expectations is the perfect example of when a summary aka Cliffs Notes would suffice since the paid-by-word model meant that thereās just way too many extra words in there.
So the life lesson here would be, use summaries when needed.
This is where I disagree.
The best way to develop an expanded vocabulary is by reading. Summaries would not work here because you lose the context. The context and flavour of what you are reading is often lost when you simply ready the Coles Notes version of things.
i would argue focused study of vocab - like 20 new words a week w definitions, usage examples, etc. - are the best way to expand. reading reinforces it since it can be seen in the wild. some encounter new words in a book and guess (incorrectly) or donāt look up the real meaning
I have found a real advantage of digital books is the ability to easily look up the definitions of new words. this also applies to more technical words, or to specific people or events i may not be immediately familiar with as a reader. it makes it much easier to read stuff i am less familiar with.
The number of posters duped into replying here is stupefying.
And it is stupidfying all of you at the same time.
If I had paid more attention when discussing the books we read in high school I might be better at figuring out which type of irony (or maybe itās something else) is shown by you making that reply in this threadā¦
Itās the only way to stop good people from wasting their time.
Are you sure? Iām not sure that has ever really worked.
This is actually an interesting conversation, regardless of who started the thread.
No, it is not.
Letās just say that CS has a lot of ideas. A LOT.
I tended to read much better books than the ones we were forced to read
Dear lord, A Separate Peace was such dreck
and donāt get me started on:
Lord of the Flies
Great Gatsby
and that all-time boomer favorite
Catcher in the Rye
I didnāt get to read the GOOD stuff til senior year in high school during which I got to read:
and some other stuff, but those things stuck
I read a lot of stuff, and I read things like: Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984ā¦ on my own. In middle school ā because I knew about these books and sought them out. Not because we were forced to read them.
The only stuff I liked we were forced to read (other than senior year) was Shakespeare. That was good stuff.