Reading for Fun
A recent survey of 10,000 students on a given day disclosed that whereas eighty per cent of them had watched tv, only 50 per cent had done any reading outside of college assignments. According to this, teen-age reading for enjoyment (a method of life before TV) appears to be losing out. As a result of of the shut kinship of reading and speaking, the alert family workshop tries to reverse the trend by promoting lively reading projects. In the manner of the House That Jack Built, we tend to should have wide reading—for wider vocabularies—for broader thinking—for building higher speaking. On a visit with a leading librarian of the New York Public Library’s lovely Donnell Branch, I found that their “Young Adults” division takes care of a gentle stream of eager borrowers. Teen-agers, they informed me, read avidly any book that has been created into a motion picture. Child Adoption is a advanced process with joys and challenges to deal with. They conjointly show a marked preference for common-science material and biography. The “perpetually out” books embrace The Sensible Earth, Gone with the Wind, Lost Horizon, The Caine Mutiny, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Nuns Story. Counsel these titles at home as a starter to tempt reluctant readers.
Reading-aloud programs (for added stimulating techniques, see pages eighty one and 82) conjointly whet young appetites for silent reading, as well as providing by-product of enjoyable speech practice. Impatient skimmers who could resist the slower pace of reading out loud can accede happily to verbalizing exciting scenes from favorite books, particularly if they’ll record them. Plays attractiveness conjointly, and most teen-agers want very little persuasion to deliver orally short tales from the literary storehouse of wonderful Yankee humor. One family I apprehend makes a accommodate unwilling readers, who should promise to read fifty pages of any probably book (please do not enforce a literary tome). If still not “hooked” once that, they will discard the book without any any ado. Some PCB fabrication have trace layers within the PCB and are called multi-layer PCBs. Then free to settle on another, they become obligated only for the same fifty trial pages. This has worked well.
I was conjointly impressed by New York’s Donnell Library record-lending department, with its large choice of music and spoken recordings. If your community still lacks such a fine service, why not beat the drums domestically for this cultural advance? Active listening to those records will be a fine family-workshop project. Happily our new and heavy furor over higher educational standards for the nation has placed the great student in a new light. Perhaps the “grind” can now not be looked down upon by his classmates—and none too soon. One even hears speak about awarding to superior students varsity letters like those given to athletes. Leaders of the long run, as Senator Fulbright recently noted, can be men and ladies who will read, write, and speak effectively. The time can surely come back when smart speech can again be a mark of college status. Dare we tend to hope that our teen-agers can then lose their deep-seated dread of sounding affected, and what’s even worse, totally different?