5 ms·

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

• selcuka 5y ago
  > Many also cheated by watching movie adaptations of books. This sounds risky as movie adaptations sometimes wildly differ from the original material.
  • chongli 5y ago
    Now you can search online for the differences between the movie adaptation and the book.
  • elliekelly 5y ago
    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.
  • HarryHirsch 5y ago
    At least they got exposure to culture out of it, so it's not all bad.
• planet-and-halo 5y ago
  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.
  • adflux 5y ago
    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.
    • planet-and-halo 5y ago
      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."
    • SlowAndCalm 5y ago
      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!
      • planet-and-halo 5y ago
        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.
      • hobs 5y ago
        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!
• lvxferre 5y ago
  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.