The most easy way to get a kid to hate reading for a good chunk of their life


Katapotato55's avatar
so when i was a little kid (2nd or 3rd grade in the US) once a week my class would go to the library to check out books. we could pick up to 3 at a time or so. 

so my school had this arbitrary system of labeling books as "candy books" and "vegetable books", where "candy books" were apparently fun but apparently "bad for you" and "vegetable books" were "good for you. the teachers never said "not fun but good for you" for obvious reasons, but i always thought of them that way. the one rule of this was that you could only get one candy book and your other two books had to be veg books. 

I didn't like this, but i can see why they had this in place so that kids at that age wouldn't read comic books all day. 

but thats not what did it. 

no, the true horror was that every time (which may i remind you is WEEKLY) we had to write a long as book on both our vegetable books in extricating detail to "prove" we read the book all the way through. if we just didn't like the book we still had to sit through it or get a failing grade.

Through that year in school i fucking loathed any book that was long and had no pictures. Eventually i picked the shortest books with the minimum required pages to be a "vegetable book" and then that book series that was way below my reading level and that was my books for the whole year. It definitely didn't help that teachers would often talk down to me for enjoying things other than chapter books like captain underpants and diary of a wimpy kid. 

the whole point of this rule in library time was to encourage kids to read out of their comfort zone, but in actuality it made me hate reading up until my late teens. 


long story short i am now a grown adult and i still love captain underpants AND i have grown to like some reading. your kids are going to GROW to love books, just because they enjoy captain underpants at age 10 doesnt mean they will ONLY read stuff like that a decade later. chill out to the teachers who do this. 
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Demnitate's avatar
Who the hell came up with that kind of system?
Reading "candy books" as a kid contributed to me reading much more complex things once I got older. Why? Because those fun books made me actually enjoy reading!
We never had to do a report, we just did questions on whatever book we read (which wasn't too bad in all honesty).

Yikes, I have no idea what they're doing in schools these days, but I hope they're not doing something dumb like this.

edit: I understand what they may have tried to do with this, but it sounds like it didn't really work
n3wmistak3's avatar
wow, i am very sorry to hear that happened to you. what an awful reading program you had in your childhood!
Adelgirl's avatar
That's a stupid system. how are you supposed to strengthen your reading ability when you are being forced to read books you don't have any interest in. I mean, you probably don't have to read the vegetable books you get, but that system just makes it so you can only get 1 book you were actually interested in. 

honestly, if I had been forced to read books in that way growing up I probably wouldn't have read as much as I did
Katapotato55's avatar

hit the nail on the head there. this essentially made me hate reading long into highschool

Mrgreen36's avatar
Due to being forced to read it over and over again in secondary school, I never wanna go near John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men again for as long as I live
GameTrek's avatar
What I mention is scientific. People of different sexes learns and accepts knowledge differently. We are talking about zeroing out the "What if's" and putting everything into an equal setting. The variables are too much but what I say is the norm.

It is like breathing air, not stereotypes.

............................................

Katapotato55 is not really taking the topic serious at all. They just want to hear the obvious response and not any real world examples.

"Mice and Men" ROTFL yes I have heard issues with that book but still funny
DesenhoExperiment's avatar
It is better if I say this right here and now, most people don't give a FUCK about such things.
Nothing personal, just think I should warm you about that.
GameTrek's avatar
Look trust me there are tons of boring things later on towards various studies and if you could randomly read about vegetables then you could read other things.

Grades K-12 is about proving you can actually go to

college
military
Take a city / state / federal job where a H.S. diploma is required.

Why?

Because of equality ( raising of standards due to racism )

Because your employer who holds money is so not sure about any of you they need some kind of proof to tell if your not a moron. That is why you see tons of retail spaces with nothing but girls because a pretty face, that is dressed up is far more engaging then some guy making enough money to pass on his genes to a millionaires daughter.
DesenhoExperiment's avatar

For a second I was afraid you were not going to answer.

Mrgreen36's avatar

Amazingly enough I don’t actually care about your ramblings and I think you’re a fucking idiot

GameTrek's avatar
Well for starters profanity is a sign of lack of intelligence.

There was never a "Grunge" era of rock and being born during whatever time does not make you special at all for it. In fact Grunge was the combination of various music specifically Africana + Metal + Reggae and was literally called "Black rock" for it's time because it could not be described as Metal or Electronica at all. In fact Grunge was literally like the down fall of Electrical instrumentation as most of the bands formed withered into rap music while that was a thing. Grunge in fact is literally like my aunt back when smooth Jazz was popular. 1991-1993. Again your not special guy.

Then you want to Publish comics? Oh great that is even worth something else to know. Sad part is that your not born into some kind of hipster art-whore family or do not have any resources but again maybe just maybe that is a pro for your life.

Even so Mr. Minecraft figurine if you did not care then why bother respond it must be your psychological dysfunction
Mrgreen36's avatar

What the fuck does any of that rambling bullshit have to do with this thread?

At any rate, you’re the last person to be able to accuse someone of being mentally unstable

GameTrek's avatar
Trust me the obvious usage of profanity is an obvious sign of lack of intelligence. By removing rising above that mental state only then can you have a normal active healthy lifestyle.

I knew a guy like that. He was upset because his mom had no game plan but the military and his dad even claim to wish he was never born. He love playing DDR, among other videogames his mother would carry him to therapists he claim to have molested him along with perscription drugs from these shrinks.

Ohhh gosherouties even god is cra cra in the mem bray
 
DesenhoExperiment's avatar
Honestly, when talking to people you think are crazy on the internet, simply let them have the last word.
sezzac155's avatar
This is completely different than your case, but Of Mice and Men is one of the few books I didn’t finish.
I think I just ran out of time, but then again it’s not a very long book.

It did get kinda annoying when other students said they enjoyed it though. Some of the other students hadn’t read/finished a single other school book. It was a weird sort of jealousy.
GameTrek's avatar
Your teacher was teaching the following.


1. How to use a library
2. Get you into the habit of researching
3. Your able to develop a sense of writing
( paragraph structure, essay formats, reports and thesis ( proven true reports ).
4. Understand different formats, art-forms, and usage.
5. All of that so when you get a job you can write paragraphs the lead somewhere stick to a point and reports that are proven true from results while marketing/conveying information to the reader in a way they can understand and enjoy.

That is what your teacher is trying to do.

The problem is that some books are difficult even if they are recommended and some authors are only there for income and not for our enjoyment or education.
It is like a tv program made for a certain viewing audience but you get bored way too easy.

With books it is a practice of mind and ability to function in terms of health.

in terms of the opposite sexes

Women read books because of words used over actions and they do not get certain ideas of being mislead.
Again with inside due to child-bearing and breeding.

Men prefer imagery over books as the same with space
being better outside learners then inside learners due to hunting, and gathering.

However that is not proven true for all people but the most people.
Katapotato55's avatar

wow i didnt know that people from the 1930's use deviantart! who knew that my inteligence is measured by what is between my legs!

ShinigamiOokamiRyuu's avatar
sounds like a cute idea to me.  I loved and love reading.  I used it to escape at times and didn't have issues later in life when I no longer had to escape.  but if a person doesn't like to read by default, no matter how the school system describes it, they aren't going to.  same goes for the book report, also teaches grammar and other skills.  so, at least the school/teacher was trying to educate, some schools don't even remotely try.
Katapotato55's avatar

i guess thats what the teachers thought when they thought of the idea. i dont think the teachers did it out of malice or anything. My issue growing up was just how forced about it and how strict they were about it to the point where it would discourage me more than anything.


honestly i feel like this would have been way better if the teachers were a little more lax on it.

SheWritesLovelyPoems's avatar
I was one of those kids who was told in high school that you had to pick a book from a specific list and it was usually one of those classic novels that for me were hard to comprehend not because they were difficult to read but because they were boring and not very interesting for a teenager but I can remember being much younger and being told that you could only read a book on your reading level not above or below it (Because a teacher did not know what to do with those kids who had learning disabilities and they did not know what to do with a smart kid either... just teach every kid the same thing because it was easier)  I had no interest in reading until I was in college when I could choose what I wanted to read for myself... When my son was growing up I let him read whatever he wanted... picture books, chapter books, comic books, I did not care as long as he was reading because I knew when he was in school he was like me being forced to read books he did not enjoy.
theabsintheart's avatar
hahaha I do that internally in my head all the time but I don't call them veg/candy, but  I judge myself for reading things I enjoy instead of things that may possibly benefit my life.

I liked diary of a wmpy kdd too.

Best motivator I knew of was the reading programs at the library in the summers. Maxed out library cards all summer long for those things. 
Katapotato55's avatar

i think what got me into reading DESPITE the painfulness of the teaching in elementary school was my dad. my dad loved country and fantasy books and he would gently encourage me to read them. He didn't mock me for liking silly books and respected my thoughts on the chapter books he lended me.


this ^^^ is how you get your kids to like reading.

CyiV's avatar
I think forcing a kid to do anything and giving them a quota filled with arbitrary rules is a one way street of making them hate something. I was a kid who loved reading, and had very high reading skills (high school-ish level in 5th and 6th grade, part of that was me wanting to be all edgy and adult, but I did at least comprehend the stuff I wanted to read), and my school somehow made me hate reading because we had to do something similar. I really wanted to read Catch 22 for a book report and was rejected because it was "too long", like, wtf? We were told we can't choose something "too easy" but "too long"? There were so many arbitrary rules on what you can and can't read it was infuriating.
sezzac155's avatar
Splitting the books between 'vegetable' and 'candy' is a new one. I'm surprised that that didn't make you loath reading tbh, because iv'e read/heard so many other folks say that they didn't like reading because they weren't allowed to read above or below the age demographic/intelligence level. 

I can understand you not liking long books- which the 'vegetable' books seem to be, and thus chose the shortest just to get it over and done with but i don't think the task that you did and 'proving' that you read it is bad, it's basically making a review of the book and it helps with recognising the messages/themes of the book as well as your particular likes and dislikes when it comes to reading. But i am saying this with hindsight as someone who always did want to read and who writes reviews on a regular basis mostly because so I can remember what happens in the book.

Also getting into Harry Potter first via the audiobooks was a milestone on getting me to read more complex books. Before, I did read 'chapter' books but ones that really only had 3-5 pages for a chapter afterwards it was more like 10-15 pages for a chapter and it helped me expand my vocabulary, so like i am an encourager of the mindset of you just need to find the right book and the rest will come and if that first book is something like 'Diary of a wimpy kid' or 'Captain Underpants' or even a comic (seriously more kids need to get into comics even though there isn't really many for them which is part of the reason why they should) then so be it.