Good morning,
THE SUMMER DINOSAUR READING CLUB
When was a kid in elementary school, summer was a time for riding bikes, playing in the street, following baseball, and being a kid. One of the things we did beyond all of the wonders a kid can pursue during the long hot days of a Southern California summer is read.
That’s right. People read, sometimes a lot.
The Anaheim Public Library had a program where you would get a stamp on a card for each book you read. At the end of the summer, you would receive a book mark of a dinosaur. Getting the Triceritops was easy, at five books. Tyrannosaurus was just a few more, at 10. But the gold standard from the Brontosaurus, awarded for reading 15 books.
Reading was a game. We were encouraged to read for pleasure and, at the Sonnenberg house, Gale and I had the advantage of parents who had earned their Brontosaurus award several times over, year after year!
Now, we as a society are reading less. But in our most prestigious schools, kids still are reading, but not for fun and purpose.
THE DILEMMA
Social media doesn’t help. No doubt children these days are consuming more than a healthy amount of useless material on their phones. Everything happens fast and people expect immediate gratification. A book? My goodness, there often is a fair bit of description of place and character development before anything exciting happens. By then, attention spans are stressed.
But there’s another thing that’s happening. Reading skills are taught and geared toward standardized tests. And students are spending more time “close reading” passages, so as to investigate and interpret the narrowest of an author’s intent. Reading has become work toward a goal. And that goal today isn’t measured by what was deemed important in the “old days”—namely, in the effect on the reader, the emotion elicited, the expansion of perspective, or the joy in the experience. Instead, the goal seems to be the ability to regurgitate minutiae on a multiple choice exam.
It is through stories that one gains and maintains the interest of children. The more one reads, the more one learns. The more ideas one confronts, the more one’s ideas are challenged and expanded. I wouldn’t trade a minute that I spent dreaming about the Admiral Benbow Inn near Kitt’s Cove for any amount of close readings of a passage from an obscure piece of poetry. Reading opens up a world, an era, and/or an idea to a kid. It’s how one travels around the world and through time. But it often feels like our preoccupation with form is killing the substance of reading and learning.
One of the best treatments about this phenomenon that I’ve read is this article from The Atlantic: “Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading”: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/03/children-reading-books-english-middle-grade/673457/?utm_medium=social&utm_term=2023-03-22T15:53:38&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=edit-promo&fbclid=IwAR0XZFKTMpJkHBu8KG-CHnFzMK5ApNH1y8VOKxez_DwUBzf8tRjxQv_eHd8&mibextid=Zxz2cZ
BOOK CORNER—MUIR AND NATURE
Leslie Mayer suggests the book Guardians of the Valley, by Dean King. It is the story of the environmentalist John Muir and the journalist who spread his gospel throughout the country.
Lyndsie Bourgon’s review of the book is beautifully written and worth quoting in part:
“… Muir shaped his words into piercing, lyrical prose about everything from wildflower meadows to pack burros to San Francisco. More than a century later, his writing is still transporting: When he arrived in California, after leaving his home and timber mill work in Wisconsin, Muir wrote that his walk across the Yosemite Valley was “all one sea of golden and purple bloom, so deep and dense that in walking through it you would press more than a hundred flowers at every step.”
Thankfully, Dean King’s poetry is a match for Muir’s: ‘He saw God in the fragmentation of the stream and in rays of the sun passing through to make vivid rainbow beads,’ he writes of Muir. ‘He saw God in the rebirth of the stream suddenly expelled from earth, as death and a new life, a new journey, were simultaneously manifest.’
…Through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Muir wrote about the Yosemite Valley and Johnson delivered that work to the (mostly Eastern, urban) readers of his magazine, Century. It is Johnson, King writes, who with Muir ‘ignited a quarter-century of legislation and environmental activism that would change the shape of the nation and stewardship of nature everywhere.’”
Have a great day,
Glenn
This essay was posted (written by a 17 year old) today on The Free Press.
100% on point with your post today: https://www.thefp.com/p/free-press-high-school-essay-contest-winner?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=136521670&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email