based on a true story
I don’t think Fortnite is to blame for kids nowadays not reading…
That’s the joke. It’s the authoritarian overbearing parent.
He was being sarcastic lol
Reminded me of these
That violin one hit close to home.
I remember doing homework once, asked my grandmother if she was proud of me. “Do some thing for me to be proud of.” That hurt.
That comic up there – I witnessed almost that exact scenario. Teacher wanted the kids to all pick books. One kid spots something on the shelf and gets visibly excited. Pulls it out and starts reading. Teacher sees it, snatches it off him and tells him that this is a book for 8 year olds (the kid was 15ish) and tells him to get a book more appropriate for his age. Kid slouches around the shelves for about 10 minutes, finally picks up a book at random and sits in his chair tucking the edges of each page into the binding to make that looped-page look. He didn’t read a word. He sat there and did this to his book for the remainder of the reading session:
He had been genuinely excited about the 8 year old book he’d picked up. It was a new one in a series he used to read as a younger kid. He’d been actively sitting and reading, and then he was embarrassed in front of his classmates, told off for reading a kids book, and voila. He lost all enthusiasm for reading anything else that day.
What’s worse? That kid had been hit by a car like a year and a half earlier. Severe brain trauma. Had to re-learn a lot of basic things, like how to speak and how to read.
An 8 year old book would have been perfect for him. Easy enough to read that it would have helped rebuild his confidence in his own reading ability. A book meant for 15/16 years olds? A lot harder to read than a book for 8 year olds. Especially if you’re recovering from a relatively recent brain injury.
And yeah, the teacher knew all about his brain injury, and the recovery. He just seemed go be of the opinion that the kid was 15, so he should be reading books for 15 year olds, irrespective of brain injury.
Reading this thread I’m reminded of Daniel Pennae’s The Rights of the Reader, which can be found in a lot of bookshops and school libraries:
The child speaking at the bottom in Quentin Blake’s distinctive spiky handwriting is saying ‘10 rights, 1 warning: Don’t make fun of people who don’t read - or they never will’
I remember at one point at my old school, I’d read so much one year for that AR test thing that they banned me from the Library just cause I was reading so much.
