I'm with you, Dude.
(And with UM on the subject of the value of a great children's librarian.)
We have had quite a few struggles with DD's reading level given that her reading level topped "college level" before she was 10, and clearly most content written at that level is flatly inappropriate for a child that age. Interest is also a problem-- she simply lack(ed/s) the life experience to really appreciate some of the material that she CAN read, and then again, 99% of her peers aren't reading at a high level for fun, either...
really, even adult fiction isn't written at a college level. Everything "popular" is at about 6th-8th grade, it seems like.
It's frustrating as all get out for me personally. Not that I worry about her reading Captain Underpants or anything else-- we don't control what she is
permitted to read in any way.
But I sure would like to encourage her to read for pleasure at a level more commensurate with her literacy level, and I'm at sea as to how to do that. Her interest level is fairly normative for 14-18 yo, but it's clear that her literacy isn't-- and going "older" (in publication dates) no longer works, because too many of the great works of fiction are definitely dated in ways that don't allow a teen to identify with them very well in the context of today's environment. I didn't realize just how profound that shift has been until I was skimming back through Catcher in the Rye this past year-- and I realized that the book (which I read at my DD's age and found timeless) is more or less a mid-20th century
historical novel. It's becoming
Pride and Prejudice, that novel.
The publishing industry, unfortunately, sees all too clearly that the economics of publishing contemporary works at a high literacy level is....
not lucrative. In fact, teen-interest novels written at a 10th grade (or beyond) level? Losses. Right from the start. There's quite literally only a sparse handful of those books since 1990. Why
would my teen want to read books that don't speak to teens, but to mature adults? She certainly doesn't want to read books with sexual content, and that eliminates about 65-75% of
adult contemporary fiction, too.
I've also been distressed by a phenomenon related to that in the posted article-- that of
eliminating textbooks from instruction.This is evidently aimed at what is considered the "typical" learning style of modern students-- to reach them with short little multimedia clips and text no more than a paragraph or two in length. I only wish that I were kidding about that, unfortunately. So if students are not seeing larger amounts of text, why on earth would they become consumers of it as they get older? They won't, of course.
Is it just me, or does all of this seem to be
feeding a trend toward developing shorter and shorter attention span? My DH and I have found it both maddening and appalling. Maddening since this is not how our DD entered school, and appalling because
we can see that it is WORKING to affect change in that same child. We really DID give them a 6yo with a two hour attention span, and they really have successfully reshaped her into an easily bored teen with a 5 minute attention span, who fixates on whatever seems entertaining.
