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iamthatis4536 t1_jdfqbkb wrote

Reply to comment by walrussss in Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading by drak0bsidian

I think you are in an area with a lot more resources. We are a title 1 school and I’m pretty sure a lot of the parents aren’t actually literate.

My school in a different state was like then when I was growing up. I actually “failed” reading because I read everything in the library and they didn’t have anything else. Reading at home didn’t count. My spouse went to several schools in multiple states and they all had rules about which books you could check out when.

I’m actually surprised this is so surprising to so many people. These smaller school districts just don’t have the resources to keep track of which kid is reading at which level.

To be very fair to our staff, I have one child who is way, way above their expected reading level and the staff occasionally helps them “sneak” books. They are doing the best they can, and I’m in a situation to supplement reading at home.

But in all the areas I’ve lived in, there have been massive hoops to get through with reading. These are our current struggles, but some have been kind of insurmountable. I had one library that kept charging us for ruining books we had never even laid eyes on. Like we wouldn’t go for a month and get a fine for ruining a kids book when we didn’t have kids. Mostly I just wanted to highlight that sometimes just getting something to read can be really hard.

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janellthegreat t1_jdhomc0 wrote

Related to limited resources, a second-hand story. A friend had a high school daughter who was graded on how much her reading level improved each semester. The daughter was a great reader, yet was at threat of receiving a failing grade. The friend had to go in and and demonstrate that the entire darn school library only had -three- books above her daughter's reading level, so how did they expect her to improve when there was nothing challenging left to read?

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iamthatis4536 t1_jdhv4m9 wrote

I had a friend whose kids’ typing teacher only graded on improvement. So she had her kids bomb the test at the beginning of the term, then each week count the words, draw a line where it was one more word than the week before, then stop typing when they got there. All her kids passed with flying colors. That’s exactly how I would have handled the reading. My kid would be reading at a kindergarten level at the beginning…

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