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Is 30 minutes really the amount of novel reading we find unacceptable these days? I’m not asking quite as snarkily as that sounds. Do you think the problem wou

Is 30 minutes really the amount of novel reading we find unacceptable these days? I’m not asking quite as snarkily as that sounds. Do you think the problem would be alleviated if the hours of class time were shorter and (maybe) handed over to a study hall period or even to just being sent home? In college I know the theory is supposed to be that one hour of class time equals two hours of homework (though that rarely happens in practice, in my American experience). But high school has far more hours of class time.

tpmoney 2y ago
For me as a kid who loved reading and fell out of it by the time I finished school (and then re-found that love decades later), the biggest contributing factor wasn't 30 minutes of reading for school. It was forced reading of books that were uninteresting to me in the first place, and then having to engage with those books in a wholly artificial way. There's a lot of interesting things to be gleaned from books and certainly expanding students horizons is not in and of itself a bad idea. But school reading is painful, whether it's 10 minutes or 4 hours. You're given pre-selected material with pre-selected lessons to be taken from that material. You are expected to write summaries that explain why the curtains in the foyer of this book were blue (regardless of whether there's actually a reason the author did that or if the lesson planner just hallucinated some meaning out of thin air), and then discuss obvious lessons in non-fiction materials as if there was any other purpose to writing the book in question except to present that lesson. Sometimes you're given books to read that match whatever the current hot social topic is, again without regard to the quality of the books, and then expected to regurgitate the correct opinions on that topic as if the book presented those opinions, and again without regard to what the book actually said (or failed to say). Reading in schools is presented and treated with the rigor of a mathematical proof, and the soullessness of dispassionate scientific observation of dying rats. It should be no wonder that what that is the experience of children with reading, so many fail to find a hobby or pleasure in it. We don't seem surprised when most students don't do mathematical formulas in their spare time after learning it in school, why should reading be any different?
- lupire 2y ago
  Everyone always complains about the "blue curtains". Did everyone but be ready the same book, or are you just repeating a meme? (for what purpose?) But I do analyze literature and study mathematical formulas in my free time, so maybe I'm built different. It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
  - Cayde-6 2y ago
    I can confirm, we ”analyzed” the color of the curtains in some novel I now forget. I believe they were, in fact, blue. The teacher was adamant details like that were always meaningful and certainly not just to paint a scene. It was far from the only instance of such “analysis”. What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
    - thereisnospork 2y ago
      >What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill. I find it disappointing how poorly the lesson is taught. The question shouldn't be 'Why?' [The author did something] it should be "What?" [did the author do]. Whether they were colored for a purpose or not, what does the blueness of the curtains convey?[0]. The point then is to be able to generalize to 'what is this media conveying,' occasionally with intent[1], and 'how do I create media with my intended conveyance'. [0]'Nothing in particular' is a valid answer, that the protagonist's favorite color was blue could be another. [1]e.g. in a commercial: actors, wardrobe, setting, et al are all very intentionally selected to convey the message 'this product will make your life better' or similar.
    - cultofmetatron 2y ago
      > how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, and now we have chatgpt to do that!
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Several high school teachers I know don't assign long reading sessions because their students are dealing with some kind of unstable home life (or are homeless) and don't have an appropriate setting for it outside of class. That is, they avoid it because it injects a class bias into their grades. Given that, making space within the school day for such things seems like a good idea.
- lupire 2y ago
  That's quite the cartwheel in front of the horse! I suggest removing the competitive grading system, and adding more hours to the school day, not removing the educational opportunity.
  - freilanzer 2y ago
    A teacher can't exactly do that now, can they.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    It's not so much about competition between the students as it is about competition between the schools. If your curriculum puts economically disadvantaged students at an academic disadvantage, and your school has many of such students, then your school ends up with less funding because your students do poorly on tests compared with the well off schools. So if you want to help the students you've got, you come up with curriculum that doesn't penalize them for having jobs, kids, or other outside-of-class reasons that they can't sit down and read at length.
everforward 2y ago
Half an hour is fine, it’s really the cumulative volume. If a kid has 7 classes and each gives half an hour of homework, that’s 3.5 hours of homework. Add on the classes and they’re “working” 11.5 hours a day or 57.5 hours per week, every week. That would be concerning for adults, it’s well into burnout territory. Then we want to act surprised when kids don’t want to read on their own and only want to play video games, as if all us adults are working 60 hour weeks and then excited to keep doing our job in our free time. My novel approach would be to cut out a bunch of shit that kids don’t strictly need and hope that gives them the time and freedom to explore those things on their own. We do not need 12 years of history classes. They’re nice to know, but widely forgotten anyways. That could probably be cut to like 4; I do not and will never need to know about Sumerian burial rites. We do not need most of the flowery English classes. Reading comprehension is important, identifying symbolism is not. No one has ever asked me to check if an email contains a motif. Much of our science classes are generally useless; chemistry comes to mind. I have never, even once, used anything I learned in chemistry. I know too little to do anything practical with it, and yet it was a year long class. The other option would be to just kill summer break and use that time for teaching instead of homework. I don’t care for that, though. In a decade we’ll be back to having homework and summer break isn’t going to come back.
- BizarroLand 2y ago
  I don't know if I agree with your cynicism. One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo. You know the same things that your neighbor knows, within a reasonable margin of error. Therefore, you have social compatibility with them. You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth. That's valuable, right? To get that, you had to go through the same 12 years of history and bored idiot English teachers telling you about symbolism and metaphor and giving you terrible 5 paragraph essays to fill out with the same dumb rote formula. If you look at the overall social outcome, for the majority, this is a good thing. If, however, it turns out that you are special and of a rare breed, then for your own children you should hire private tutors or school them overseas or do something somehow to cultivate their greatness. If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.

tpmoney 2y ago

For me as a kid who loved reading and fell out of it by the time I finished school (and then re-found that love decades later), the biggest contributing factor wasn't 30 minutes of reading for school. It was forced reading of books that were uninteresting to me in the first place, and then having to engage with those books in a wholly artificial way. There's a lot of interesting things to be gleaned from books and certainly expanding students horizons is not in and of itself a bad idea. But school reading is painful, whether it's 10 minutes or 4 hours. You're given pre-selected material with pre-selected lessons to be taken from that material. You are expected to write summaries that explain why the curtains in the foyer of this book were blue (regardless of whether there's actually a reason the author did that or if the lesson planner just hallucinated some meaning out of thin air), and then discuss obvious lessons in non-fiction materials as if there was any other purpose to writing the book in question except to present that lesson. Sometimes you're given books to read that match whatever the current hot social topic is, again without regard to the quality of the books, and then expected to regurgitate the correct opinions on that topic as if the book presented those opinions, and again without regard to what the book actually said (or failed to say). Reading in schools is presented and treated with the rigor of a mathematical proof, and the soullessness of dispassionate scientific observation of dying rats. It should be no wonder that what that is the experience of children with reading, so many fail to find a hobby or pleasure in it. We don't seem surprised when most students don't do mathematical formulas in their spare time after learning it in school, why should reading be any different?

lupire 2y ago
Everyone always complains about the "blue curtains". Did everyone but be ready the same book, or are you just repeating a meme? (for what purpose?) But I do analyze literature and study mathematical formulas in my free time, so maybe I'm built different. It's hard to say what school is doing in wrong when students aren't interested in study. Maybe the answer is to let the mom studious students leave school.
- Cayde-6 2y ago
  I can confirm, we ”analyzed” the color of the curtains in some novel I now forget. I believe they were, in fact, blue. The teacher was adamant details like that were always meaningful and certainly not just to paint a scene. It was far from the only instance of such “analysis”. What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill.
  - thereisnospork 2y ago
    >What we actually learned from those lessons was that English/literature class was a waste of time and how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, which I guess is a useful skill. I find it disappointing how poorly the lesson is taught. The question shouldn't be 'Why?' [The author did something] it should be "What?" [did the author do]. Whether they were colored for a purpose or not, what does the blueness of the curtains convey?[0]. The point then is to be able to generalize to 'what is this media conveying,' occasionally with intent[1], and 'how do I create media with my intended conveyance'. [0]'Nothing in particular' is a valid answer, that the protagonist's favorite color was blue could be another. [1]e.g. in a commercial: actors, wardrobe, setting, et al are all very intentionally selected to convey the message 'this product will make your life better' or similar.
  - cultofmetatron 2y ago
    > how to craft complete bullshit that sounds deep, and now we have chatgpt to do that!

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

Several high school teachers I know don't assign long reading sessions because their students are dealing with some kind of unstable home life (or are homeless) and don't have an appropriate setting for it outside of class. That is, they avoid it because it injects a class bias into their grades. Given that, making space within the school day for such things seems like a good idea.

lupire 2y ago
That's quite the cartwheel in front of the horse! I suggest removing the competitive grading system, and adding more hours to the school day, not removing the educational opportunity.
- freilanzer 2y ago
  A teacher can't exactly do that now, can they.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  It's not so much about competition between the students as it is about competition between the schools. If your curriculum puts economically disadvantaged students at an academic disadvantage, and your school has many of such students, then your school ends up with less funding because your students do poorly on tests compared with the well off schools. So if you want to help the students you've got, you come up with curriculum that doesn't penalize them for having jobs, kids, or other outside-of-class reasons that they can't sit down and read at length.

everforward 2y ago

Half an hour is fine, it’s really the cumulative volume. If a kid has 7 classes and each gives half an hour of homework, that’s 3.5 hours of homework. Add on the classes and they’re “working” 11.5 hours a day or 57.5 hours per week, every week. That would be concerning for adults, it’s well into burnout territory. Then we want to act surprised when kids don’t want to read on their own and only want to play video games, as if all us adults are working 60 hour weeks and then excited to keep doing our job in our free time. My novel approach would be to cut out a bunch of shit that kids don’t strictly need and hope that gives them the time and freedom to explore those things on their own. We do not need 12 years of history classes. They’re nice to know, but widely forgotten anyways. That could probably be cut to like 4; I do not and will never need to know about Sumerian burial rites. We do not need most of the flowery English classes. Reading comprehension is important, identifying symbolism is not. No one has ever asked me to check if an email contains a motif. Much of our science classes are generally useless; chemistry comes to mind. I have never, even once, used anything I learned in chemistry. I know too little to do anything practical with it, and yet it was a year long class. The other option would be to just kill summer break and use that time for teaching instead of homework. I don’t care for that, though. In a decade we’ll be back to having homework and summer break isn’t going to come back.

BizarroLand 2y ago
I don't know if I agree with your cynicism. One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo. You know the same things that your neighbor knows, within a reasonable margin of error. Therefore, you have social compatibility with them. You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth. That's valuable, right? To get that, you had to go through the same 12 years of history and bored idiot English teachers telling you about symbolism and metaphor and giving you terrible 5 paragraph essays to fill out with the same dumb rote formula. If you look at the overall social outcome, for the majority, this is a good thing. If, however, it turns out that you are special and of a rare breed, then for your own children you should hire private tutors or school them overseas or do something somehow to cultivate their greatness. If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.