Thoughts on Audio Books and High School

[queenoftheskies]

Last night, my youngest son asked me if we could go out and buy an audio book version of a novel they're reading in his Honors English class. He said the teacher had one.

I asked why.

What he proceeded to tell me surprised me and I wondered if he thought it up on his own or if it was common.

He said it would be easier than reading the book. That reading took a lot of time and that he got bored and that sometimes the chapters were 20 pages and he had to stop and take a break.

For the record, my son reads well. Above his level in high school, actually. He's also in Honors English.

But, he doesn't WANT to read.

I can't say that he doesn't want to read at all, because he read quite a bit over the summer.

Maybe it's the choices of books that they read in high school. He and I have discussed before the fact that most of them are depressing and not uplifting. He wondered if that's what made them classics. :)

This particular book that the teacher has them reading is NOT off the normal reading list. There was a particular reason she chose it. And, once again, it's a downer, about a soldier dealing with the Vietnam experience.

Needless to say, I'm going to take a look at the book and read through for myself.

I wonder how this affects students and whether or not it can possibly prejudice them against reading by not having a mixture of various types of books interspersed throughout the year.

I explained to my son that I would be happy to purchase the audio book for him, if he still wanted it, AFTER he'd finished READING the novel. We discussed the reasons they were reading it instead of listening to an audio book in class and the advantages to reading and what would be expected of him by the time he reached higher levels in high school and then college.

Reading is a HUGE problem in California, it seems. Where my oldest goes to college. They have an entire series of remedial English classes (not just one) before they can even take college English. (If they can't pass the test they take when they enter college.)

My older two LOVE reading. They each have their own favorites, my oldest preferring Sherlock Holmes, and Plato and The Tale of Genji and classics, my daughter preferring fantasy and science fiction and horror, to an extent. And, manga, of course, because she aspires to be an art major.

My youngest loves the Harry Potter books. He's also enjoyed some series books, which do seem to tend more toward fantasy. He likes Jules Verne. He's read some Ray Bradbury.

He's involved in a lot at school, but his play will be over soon and I'm going to see about taking up part of that time with more outside reading.

I figure we'll go--just the two of us--and browse the bookstores and just talk about what we see. I really need a feel for what he likes NOW, since that may have changed since summer.

But, I also want to understand why he feels reading is a chore instead of an enjoyment. I need to know if it's reading that puts him off, or if it's strictly the type of material they're reading in school that keeps him from enjoying it.

BTW, I'm not taking issue with school curriculum. I know there are reasons certain books are chosen, and I am not privy to those reasons. I'm just wondering if other kids are like my son and if their joy of reading is affected adversely as well.

Comments

[shana.livejournal.com]

It may well be the books. I was a voracious reader, but it was really hard to get through the assigned reading in high school.

As a librarian, when I was assigned to YA I promptly bought books that were just for fun -- and circulation went way up. And kids that won't pick up a book with more than a hundred pages if they can help it will read the entire Dragonball series of manga.

There are kids who love those gritty problem novels that win the awards and get on the recommended lists. I wasn't one of them, and my circ figures say that I wasn't alone.

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

just out of curiosity, is it philip caputo?

: D

[quiller77.livejournal.com]

In grade 11, my son had to read "Fried Green Tomatoes" (that's the movie title; the book title is longer but is gone from my head right now). He's a fairly good reader but he despised that book. He said he could read for 50 pages and nothing would happen. It is a book that is both literary and oriented toward women. A wise choice for getting young men turned onto reading? I don't think so. He would've been happier with your son's book about Vietnam, depressing or not. In fact, when he had to do a novel study, he talked the teacher into letting him do the non-fiction book, "We Were Young Then and Soldiers."

Generally, high school reading choices seem designed for turning people off more than turning them on to reading. The choices are obviously made for other, more educational reasons.

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

My girl spends all her time reading, to the point that I just had to remind her (for the purposes of an essay she was writing) that "recreational activity" and "reading" are not the same thing for everybody. That said, she's also preferred to do some of the books chosen for school in an audio format.

I think they're just dreary.

The good news is that it doesn't seem to have affected her love of reading generally; she just doesn't want to read those particular books, and her Other Mom (who is the decisionmaker with regard to her English class) has chosen to let her use the audiobooks. K has almost perfect audiatory memory, once you have her attention, which may be why. I'm not sure.

[herefox.livejournal.com]

Kind of gives me chills...some of my cousins mentioned that they hadn't read a book in years. Given that I wander around with two or three on a regular basis and my book budget probably is at least a couple of thousand dollars a year.

Admittedly though I hated most of the reading we were assigned in high school and it was largely all depressing sorts of stuff. Even the classics that we read were (of course, your son is right, most classics ARE depressing...I was trying to think of one that wasn't as in 'we could have read this instead' and couldn't think of one)

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

ah, that would be fried green tomatoes at the whistle stop cafe - fannie flagg. :)

[quiller77.livejournal.com]

Right. I knew that. (Or would have remembered ... eventually.) Thanks. :-)

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

if i may offer something in defense of getting him the audio book...

i took AP english in high school. we read tough books. when we told our teacher of problems we were having, or if it became clear in discussion that we were having problems, he would pause the discussion and simply read aloud the passage we were having problems with. ten times out of ten, just hearing it made it made sense.

sometimes, even when we enjoy reading, we get too caught up in the words and don't get lost in the thing like we should (as opposed to just getting lost) to then understand it.

[jediknightmuse.livejournal.com]

It could very well be the books, and I THINK I know which Vietnam book you're talking about...but I don't remember the name of it for the life of me. But there are many books I remember reading that were just...very difficult to get through. Even in college there have been ones I couldn't stand. I had to read this book called "All Over But the Shoutin'" my freshman year for my English class and couldn't stand the book.

There were only two books that I actually loved reading in high school. They were To Kill a Mockingbird, and I read ahead in that book because it was so good, and Catcher in the Rye. Actually, my English teacher read Catcher to us, but it was okay because he has the nice Italian tone and awesome sarcasm...plus he did different voices for the characters, which was awesome. He was also my drama director.

I think that when the teachers -require- certain books to read, it's harder for people to show interest in them and actually push themselves to read, no matter how much of an avid reader they are. I loved doing book reports (actually, I think I really only got to do one book report and it was on a book I never read all the way through- I think it was a book that wasn't the first in a series so I got really confused) on books that I could choose. If they have to go with a certain list of "classics," they should give the list to the students and let them choose two to read over like...I dunno, four months, six months or something.

It sounds like your son just doesn't like the material he's being forced to read.

[peartreealley.livejournal.com]

As others have said, it could be the books.

It could also be the time.

With an audio book, one can listen, and by being forced to listen, you cannot skim, your eyes do not get tired, and you can write a note without having to put down the book. It doesn't matter how much you love it. In college, I didn't read fiction, because I was reading 50-100 pages of text books everynight (and I was writing on top of that). It wasn't that I didn't want to read, but my eyes and brain can only cling to the alphabet for so long before it wants a break.

Remember that written language came after verbal language. Written stories were just ways to keep records of the oral story tradition, at first.

I don't see anything wrong with wanting audio books (in fact, a lot of commuters use them to keep up on reading when they are on the road for 1-2 hours a day or longer; like truckers). Instead of saying, "oh my god, my son doesn't want to read anymore," why not get him a print version (for highlighting and referencing) and an audio version and see if having the double exposure makes a difference?

I mean, it's not like he's asking to see the movie version or something :D

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

I can't remember my mother ever having read a book for enjoyment in the entire time I knew her. Not one. She knew how to read and occasionally read the newspaper, but she never read for pleasure. Nevertheless she lived a reasonably successful and happy life and she didn't discourage me from reading for pleasure. I'm sure there's people out there who are dismayed that I haven't seen a football game since the last one I was compelled to attend in college.

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

I mean, it's not like he's asking to see the movie version or something :D

Or Cliff Notes.

[artistq.livejournal.com]

I hated reading.
I HATED READING.
I HATED READING BECAUSE I HATED SCHOOL BOOKS.
AND
Because my mother wanted me to LOVE reading!
need I say more??
; )

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

Reading critically, even stories or books that you find enjoyable, can be exhausting. I agree with shadawn. Sometimes when you're doing a lot of that kind of reading, it puts one off recreational reading for a bit. Since he's enjoyed recreational reading in the past, I doubt this one class will put him off it forever. It may put him off "Classics" forever though!

[peartreealley.livejournal.com]

That's exactly the reaction I was afraid of :)

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

When I was a Junior in High school, I was signed up for the English AP class. I hadn't realized that there was a reading list of books to read during the summer, but once I saw the list, I was relieved I hadn't taken that class. The reading list was full of the most dreary, boring, depressing classics you could EVER think of - and I signed up instead for early English Literature and Shakespeare for the two semesters, and discovered a lifelong love for Jane Austen and confirmed how much I loved Shakespeare and also the Greek writers and playwrights.

I sometimes think that high school teachers (and other teachers at all levels) TRY to kill any nascent interest children on the edge may have with reading.

IMO, of course.

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

With an audio book, one can listen, and by being forced to listen, you cannot skim, your eyes do not get tired, and you can write a note without having to put down the book.

this is it exactly! we readers skim a lot, even when we don't want to, without even realising it. and it's usually what causes us not to comprehend what we're reading. this is why, having every word read to us gets us to absorb every word and we're more likely to understand. we're not getting caught up in the little black squiggles on the white paper. we're getting caught up in the words themselves. :)

there's also something primal-ly good about being read to. like bedtime stories when we were little.

just make sure it's UNabridged!!! tho i doubt the teacher would be playing/offering it for them if it were abridged.

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

you signed up for english AP in junior high school?! they didn't even offer it to us till 11th grade!

the problem with english AP is, it's a standardized test.

i used to joke that nothing can ruin a perfectly good book more than being forced to read it for school. we read portrait of the artist as a young man in AP, and as short as it was it annoyed me...but something must have hit a chord, because i went on to read ulysses all on my own, and loved it.

[shanrina.livejournal.com]

Part of it may be that a lot of classics are depressing and really probably aren't what kids want to be reading. Part of it is probably your son's taste since it sounds like he's not a fan of depressing books and the Vietnam War...well...pretty depressing. Part of it may also be the psychological effect of just continually being forced to read. If your son sees it as a chore, well, everything he reads for a class will be a chore since it'll be done for the grade. Some people experience chore reading without fun reading, and then go from chore reading=bad to reading=bad. Or it may just be that he's got a lot on his plate and, well, he doesn't have the energy for fun reading. Maybe he's got a reading quirk--I had a lot of trouble when I took French lit classes because the French seem to tend toward insanely long paragraphs and I lose my place (I absorb information much better when I hear it than when I read it, and I think I absorb information between the paragraph breaks so when the paragraph gets long I have trouble absorbing it all at once).

Or maybe he's just tired. Plays are hard work, and sometimes your brain just won't function on certain levels. After I write a long paper or do a lot of reading for class, I usually don't want to read even if I'm in the middle of an amazing book just because I've already done so much reading and my brain wants to switch.

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

LOL - I'm recovering from a cold, so I wasn't as clear as I could have been. In the high school I attended, if you were a Junior and had the chops, you were invited to join the AP senior English class. I didn't realize there was a summer reading list to prepare for the class and when I found out about it, it was too late to read all the books necessary for it.

No, far as I know, they didn't have AP classes available in Junior High back then. Only in High School.

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

no, you clearly said "junior in high school" not "in junior high school"...i'm the one who got confused. ::smacks forehead::

they should have informed you about the required reading list (and given it to you) when they first invited you! bummer.

[geniusofevil.livejournal.com]

What book is it?

well.......

[dracschick.livejournal.com]

I'm one that thinks students need to be exposed to the classics. Yeah, some are boring but you need that exposure.

[silk-noir.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.

Could it be that your son is an aural learner rather than a visual learner? Does he process information better when he hears it rather than when he reads it? (Me, I'm just the opposite. I can tune out sound to where it's just blah-blah-blah. Most of the time. But text or picture is like a hook in my eyeballs.)

I'm kind of perplexed by his statement that the reading goes by too slow for him, which makes me think he does better hearing. (I should think waiting for the people to say the words would be too slow. But then I read like a freight train.)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

There was a rash of articles in the New York Times a while back about the predominance of novels about social problems on school syllabi. There does seem to be a sort of attitude that, if we can't count on the kids to eat their spinach at home, we'll force feed them spinach at school while we've got them.

Or maybe it's a fear that literature won't be considered a sufficiently serious, important, useful field unless we keep showing how terribly terribly serious it is by brandishing these painfully relevant books.

[ryan-howse.livejournal.com]

Me? I'd take on the curriculum.

Okay, in honesty, I dropped out of the faculty of education because of the sheer crappiness of the curriculum. (Switched into a regular BA in English and Religious Studies instead, and then...got a job teaching. Go me.)

See, here's the essential thing they're missing: You're about to graduate, you're about to go free...

and every single book is about how much it's going to suck, and you're going to fail.

In my grade 12 class, we read Death of a Salesman, The Stone Angel, and Halfbreed. I complained about each and every one of these books, pointing out their many flaws to my teacher, who finally conceded and let me pick the last book of the semester (I went with Animal Farm.)

We also read Hamlet. Most people enjoyed it, and enjoyed it even more when we watched the Kenneth Branagh movie.

But that's still five out of five depressing, no-matter-what-you-do-your-life-is-ruined books (or plays, as the case may be.) The last two at least had a plot.

It's not that the classics aren't important...it's that the classics are written with a more adult audience in mind. We need to capture their imaginations, and use books that are fun and relevant. Otherwise, they'll view reading as a chore, or at the very least, reading classics as a chore. And that's not what we want.