Which reminds me of something my sister said about her year teaching English at a magnet school in Austin Texas. She was one of the only teachers who stocked her classroom with age appropriate books and encouraged her students to pick out and read ones that appealed to them. The administration and most of the rest of the teachers regarded this sort of thing as a bad idea, because students reading books for fun were not spending time honing the skills needed for doing well on the next standardized test.
An Anecdote from my uncle's childhood (he was born in 1956):
One day, his teacher shocked the class by asking them who they thought had done best on the citywide reading assessment, better than the rest of the school, head and shoulders among almost all kids their age. The answer was my uncle. And why? "Because he reads all the time!"
His classmates could not believe it. He read all the time, sure - but he read comic books, how could that help?
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Date: 2025-05-15 04:35 am (UTC)An Anecdote from my uncle's childhood (he was born in 1956):
One day, his teacher shocked the class by asking them who they thought had done best on the citywide reading assessment, better than the rest of the school, head and shoulders among almost all kids their age. The answer was my uncle. And why? "Because he reads all the time!"
His classmates could not believe it. He read all the time, sure - but he read comic books, how could that help?