My sixth-grade teacher wanted us to read 10 books during the school year. Whenever we read a book, we were supposed to fill out an index card with the title and author. I read 152 books that school year. Mrs. Silverman saved my stack of cards to awe subsequent classes. I slowed down the pace in seventh grade because I was reading longer books. I couldn't finish David Copperfield or Ivanhoe in a day.
Mireille Silcoff, a cultural critical and short-story writer, paid her 12-year-old daughter $100 to read a book, she writes in the New York Times. Her "whip-smart" child had read a few graphic novels and listened to Harry Potter audiobooks, but had "never read an entire chapter book for pleasure."
Almost 30 percent of 13-year-olds said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, in a pre-pandemic survey, Silcoff notes. That's "a substantial increase from the 8 percent who said the same roughly 35 years earlier."
Her daughter said she and her friends just “weren’t into” reading. They have smartphones instead.
Despite parental controls and time limits, Silcoff writes, the smartphone changed her daughter from "a gregarious Tigger" to "a monosyllabic blanket slug who wanted only to stay in her room with the blinds down, door closed, under a duvet, palming that little rectangle as if unhanding it would make her social life disappear."
I told her she needed to read because novels are the best way to learn about how people’s insides work. She said she could learn more from watching the people she followed on social media, who were all about spilling their insides.
I said books offered storytelling. She said, “Netflix.”
I said books taught history. She said, “The internet.”
I said reading would help her understand herself and she said, “Um, no thank you. I’ll just live.”
So, she tried bribery: $100 if she finished a book of her mother's choice within a month. That worked.
Friends who knew her daughter suggested Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty. It had been turned into an Amazon Prime series, which her daughter had "watched and loved."
Her daughter finished it in a week and read the sequel in two weeks "at no extra charge."
Silcoff is happy with the experiment. "Together, we finally opened a new portal for her to the printed page: a quiet personal place that I imagine — I hope — will serve her for a lifetime."
Reading a young-adult book that's already been made into a TV series seems . . . not all that impressive to me. And expensive.
I can't imagine what's it like to not enjoy reading.
Reading is down for 8- to 12-year-olds, writes Dan Kois on Slate. Sales of “middle-grade” books are falling, and "kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to stop reading for fun." It’s called the “Decline by 9.” According to a Scholastic survey, "at age 8, 57 percent of kids say they read books for fun most days; at age 9, only 35 percent do."
Like everything, the "trend started before the pandemic, experts say, but the pandemic accelerated things."
$100 to read a book? OK, kid, here it is: Moby Dick. There will be an oral exam when you're done.
My fifth grade teacher did this one better: a chart on the wall showing each student's progress toward reading one book from each of ten categories, then a gold star for each ten books past that minimum. A one-page book report was required for each book.
It turned into a competition (the teacher never framed it that way, but kids will be kids) , with the top students getting several gold stars and each vying to be the one with the most. Boy, did we read that year. After the ten required books (biography, history, science, etc), you could read any book you liked. I think I read every one of the "You Were There..." books in our school libra…