Kid Logic

[sartorias]

Yesterday I went up to visit some relatives, and my mom gave me a scrapbook of keepsakes. Now that she's finally retired, she's been going through old family photos and miscellaneous stuff. She's never been much of a packrat, so I was curious to see what she'd saved. A lot of it (most) had to do with ancestors, like a xerox copy of the daily

Comments

[padawansguide]

How interesting - and I agree with you on kid reading. Who cares whether Divergent is good or not - they are reading, and Divergent may encourage them to continue reading and reading more widely. I'm for anything that hooks kids into reading and reading for pleasure. A book doesn't need to be fantastic to get enjoyment out of it, and them thinking about whether they liked it or not, gets them thinking critically.

[sartorias]

Yeah--and even if they don't begin thinking critically, there is a lot to be said for plain old enjoyment.

[padawansguide]

True!

[cmcmck]

I suspect that the gist of that review is really about the reviewer turning into a boring old fart who doesn't get kids.

The clue is in the 'we were so much brighter in my day' which tends to give me the nod to move away fast in the opposite direction!

I must have read so much real dross as a kid, but in the end, so what?

[sartorias]

Yep, that pretty much sums up my feeling, too.

[cmcmck]

Yeah and people have been complaining about 'the kids today' since at least the Classical Greek and Roman periods!

[sartorias]

This is true!

[sartorias]

I agree about historical content, for the most part. And the writing was often aimed at a more sophisticated reading level--which narrowed access. (So very many dyslexic and other people were silently flushed out of the system as stupid/bad/incorrigible/unteachable)

[sartorias]

Yes. Yes to all these things.

[pameladean]

OMG, Writing to Sell! That was much in vogue at least ten years later, when I was in my twenties. It was generally proffered in a "here, you airy-fairy wannabes with your impractical unreal fiction, here is a grown-up practical tome for you to come to grips with." I might still have my copy.

I read it several times but basically ignored it when writing.

And as for how smart what generation is, I am pretty sure that kids in general, however ill-served they are by idiots trying to dismantle public education, have been shown to be brighter generation by generation, though there isn't much evidence as to how or why.

P.

P.

[sartorias]

Another with that book, hah!

I agree about brighter generations.

[mizkit]

The plot holes and utter lack of comprehensible world building in The Hunger Games drove me spare, but I did point out to myself that I was roughly a quarter of a century older than the target audience, and a SFF writer to boot, both of which I thought were Probably Relevant to my distress over the matter. :)

[sartorias]

Yeah--I had the same reaction, and even older age!

[mizkit]

I don't think Hunger Games it's as bad as all that, certainly better than a lot of the paperback sf novels ("Boolznum the mad enchanter!") I read back when. What I find disturbing is that such a grim war story is so popular. But then we've now had two generations that have fought in pointless lost wars, so I suppose that is not surprising.