too real! Library Comic #331

[orangerful]

THIS omg THIS

I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to say that "video games" line to a parent who insists on stopping their child from reading the book they picked out and WANT to read. *sigh*

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, even if it turns out to be something wrong for you that can be educational.

[the_rck]

Two or three years ago, I had a go around with my daughter's school because they were demanding that books read for school be in a certain lexile range. Hers was high enough that everything in the school library was disqualified, and she was panicking because she couldn't find anything. That led to me researching just what 'lexile' means and how it's determined* and then getting mad enough to spit nails.

Fortunately, the school backed down. The things that the public library's reference staff dug up that were in the right lexile were all things that were likely to make her hate reading. It reminded me of 7th grade reading class which required us to read books with a certain number of new-to-us words that we could look up, define, and then use in sentences. I ended up going to Shakespeare for that and then discovering that the dictionaries I had access to (around 1980) didn't contain half of the words I wanted to look up.

*Because a string of 40 words taken from some random place in a given book will always yield exactly the same results, right? There's nothing wrong with a system that consistently rates different, unabridged editions of the same text at wildly different numbers or that puts one of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books at a higher difficulty than either the King James Bible or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, right?

I know that it's better than zero guidelines for teachers for steering kids on school assignments when they don't have time to help each child individually, but when I looked at the system, it came across as being as arbitrary as limiting kids by the physical weight of the book or by the color of the binding. It's been years, and I'm still pissed off about it.

[beccadg]

I'm torn. On the one hand, once I learned to read, I fell in love with comic books which my teachers hated, but my parents supported because my dad was a long time comic book fan who knew they were perfectly good reading material. On the other hand, I didn't learn to read until I was 8, and I can sympathize with the kid worrying about being crushed by trying to read a book they can't get through on their own. I mean I don't know about the library you work in, but my local one has a kid section it calls "The Kids Korner," a young adult one it calls "The Teen Room," and then everything else. Before I learned to read I hated even going in the Kids Korner because I knew even with some of the picture books I wouldn't be able to follow the story. After I learned to read I went through it systematically, starting with the Kids Korner, progressing to the Teen Room, and ending with pretty much anything in the place that happened to speak to me, though I retain a soft spot for fantasy and science fiction.

[alificent]

...oh my god, I can't believe this a thing. I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS IS A THING. I mean I guess I understand sometimes parents being concerned, like... I absolutely should NOT have read The Skeleton Crew when I was in fourth grade... BUT THAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH READING LEVEL IT HAD TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT I SWAM IN LAKES A LOT.