Sorry, I edited out some context there. What I meant is that _at school_ there's less literature on offer; instead, kids are burdened with reading "instructional texts" that are as terrible and lifeless as the name sounds.
I think parents have to counteract the negative effects of this by exposing their kids to the joys of words and reading. I agree with you 100% that there's an amazing diversity of texts out there now! Every so often when I grab an ereader I think about how blown away I would have been as a kid to think that I could take HUNDREDS of books with me on vacation.
I think the content of many books is much cooler than the crap on my timelines. There’s just higher entropy (or activation energy?) to get the book picked up and opened vs the serotonin lever in our pockets.
I’ve just strived to read like hell to my kids and make reading one of their most fun things around. Pretty much all we read is stuff they like, even if I hate it (I’m looking at you, Pokemon novels). If they like an author (in our house we love Daniel Pinkwater) I will go out of my way to find that authors books.
We write to authors, we talk about what we read (somehow I serialised a retelling of Killing Commendatore), my 8 yo listens to my audiobooks in the car with me, we are frickin bookworms.
And of course they still play Minecraft and animal crossing. It’s just that picking up a book is one of their default go-tos, and I think that’s enough. They’re building the habit and the understanding of what reading is about, and if we keep that up they will be ok.
FWIW my son went through the same sort of thing during emerging literacy and it drove me kind of crazy. He started with simple texts, then started coming home with “graphic novels”. I just let him do it. He was stuck on those for a bit, started getting interested in World Record books (which, again, lots of pictures and not much writing), and then…read a Roald Dahl book a day for two weeks. For whatever reason, the switch flipped.
Throughout it I continued reading to him daily, mostly stuff that he comprehends just find but find too difficult to read on his own.
I think it just comes in its own time if nurtured.
Edit: I really like what John Gotto (I think…he wrote a book called Dumbing Us Down) observed about literacy; for a long time it just developed naturally without much formal instruction. I had that in mind for our kid and am glad I did.
This is a result of living in homes where parents neither read to children nor model reading for pleasure.
Thanks to the various waves of “education reform”, there is less literature on offer and less time for pleasure reading. However, if you’re reading them exciting things at home (and telling them about the exciting stuff you’re reading), they will love to read.
I’ve been using Little Snitch on my Mac for years now because I want to be aware of (and be able to turn off) the connections programs make. Probably the weirdest one I’ve caught was a new seagate hdd that required you to run an executable file to be able to format the drive, which then tried to connect to baidu.
Somehow its target user group includes my father, who is 90 years old. As far as I can recall, we got him using Firefox years ago and he became a committed user.
I wish more browsers would target seniors. Accessibility and usability is universally a nightmare.
There's really interesting research about children/people learning to read without formal instruction; as John Taylor Gatto points out in Dumbing Us Down, back when Thomas Paine was writing, there were ~600,000 copies of Common Sense printed for a population of three million. People learned to read on their own or with very little instruction because they were interested in reading.
There's a convincing body of evidence that the way you get kids to read books is pretty simple: read them books that interest them and then give them access to more interesting books as well as time to read to self. Unfortunately, the lethal combo of Common Core and No Child Left Behind has left teachers at best too time-strapped (or, at worst, uninterested) in doing so because of mandatory curriculum and testing.
I read to my kids, make sure they see me reading, and talk to them about both what I'm reading and what they're reading. They've done fine despite awful reading instruction at school.
Losing the museum was a real heartbreaker. To me it was a really special place because it captured that special feeling of getting access to hardware that isn't widely available and just fiddling with it. It's what I remember loving about computers as a kid.
I ordered one to use secretly. My dad’s 90 and was a working musician since he was 15 or so. He’s always wanted to make recordings of his playing but gets distracted by the technology, even something relatively plug and play like Garage Band. I’m looking forward to plugging this in and just capturing his playing without distraction.
I think parents have to counteract the negative effects of this by exposing their kids to the joys of words and reading. I agree with you 100% that there's an amazing diversity of texts out there now! Every so often when I grab an ereader I think about how blown away I would have been as a kid to think that I could take HUNDREDS of books with me on vacation.