I've been lurking in one of my unschooling yahoo groups during a discussion of books. The gist of the ideas shared was that all types of books, be they standard novels, graphic novels or comic books, have positive value & offer the reader wonderful ways of expressing ideas & stories.
This all triggered some memories for me.
I come from a family of book lovers. My great-grandmother, grandmother, & Mom all read voraciously & all of their homes were filled with books. My dad, when I was very young, used to work for a printing company & often brought home the imperfects - books that had ink splotches, etc., that would prevent them from being sold. These added a great deal to our collection. Even though we lived in a small house, our playroom (a converted enclosed porch) was filled floor to ceiling with metal shelving that held the books. My brother & I were both considered "early" readers - we could read before we started school, which then was first grade. I can't help but wonder if at least part of that was helped along by being surrounded by all the books. There were novels, non-fiction, comic books of all kinds(I read & loved Doonsebury, even though I didn't get most of the social commentary at that time!). We even had Disney movie books that came with a record (remember those things?). You could play the record & listen to the story being read out & hear all of the songs from the movie, all while reading along & seeing the drawings from the movie.
{A quick aside: one of the Disney books was Robin Hood - the one with the fox as Robin, etc. If any of you have heard/seen "Hampster Dance" on the internet, the song they dance to is a speeded up version of the slow intro song from Robin Hood! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampster_Dance)
When I was in junior high school, the administration established a schedule that had everyone go to first period class & then read (teachers, too) for, I think, 45 minutes. The stipulation was that it couldn't be reading that was part of homework (&, I think, no comic books). Other than that, it was students' choice. My mom recommended some of her favorite stories to me for my reading. One was "Jane Eyer" . I remember some of my classmates looking at me as if I had lobsters coming out of my ears. That's the kind of book you get assigned to read, not choose to read. Why would I read that for pleasure? But I did read it, & I liked it.
Sophomore year high school, I had to do a book report/essay critiquing a drama of my choice. I chose "Death of a Salesman". I didn't think much of Willy Loman. I thought he should get over it, & wrote as much (though "nicer") in my critique. My teacher was pretty blunt in her critique of my essay. She wrote something to the effect that "Death of a Salesman" is a classic work & is highly revered by anyone who knows anything about literature. I didn't get an "A".
The following year was junior year - a biggie for English class. That was the Year of the Research Paper. Everything we were taught went into the process of crafting a long, detailed analysis of a piece of literature. Guess what I chose. Yep, "Death of a Salesman". I wasn't going to let that drama get the best of me. I worked my butt off researching & writing my paper. I found out a lot about the context of when DoaS was written. I read that thing countless times - enough to quote passages if I wanted to. In the end, I got a much better grade than the previous go-round with Mr. Loman.
Flash-forward to senior year in college. As part of a course on family dynamics, we were assigned a paper - we were to use a piece of literature that involved a family & write about the family dynamics. I bet you can see where I'm going with this. "Death of a Salesman, Return of the Lomans"! I loved writing this paper. Of course, I was pretty familiar with this family. But something else was going on. I was older.
There is a difference between a 15 year old high school student and a 21 year old college student. By that time, I had met people from not only around the country, but from other parts of the world. I had experiences & life knowledge that I could draw upon to help understand something like DoaS in a way that I couldn't possibly have done the first time around. I was different person reading the same story, & I suddenly saw it as a new story. (I also got the long-sought for "A", which was gratifying at the time.)
I haven't read DoaS since. Maybe it's time for me to revisit it. Maybe not. I imagine that now that I've been with the same guy for nearly 2 decades, have children who are teens (or near-teen) & have lived an "adults life" , I will see new things in the story.
What I know is that reading it as a teenager didn't give me the definitive understanding of the work. Just because someone is exposed to something at a certain age doesn't mean they will benefit from it the way some people may think. When parents & teachers worry that kids aren't getting enough "real" education in something, be it classic literature or algebra or how to dissect a frog, they are assuming that the kids when understand it the same way that the adults do now. They are forgetting that some things are better understood in their own way, in their own time. Information gets processed by the brain in such a complex manner. Of course the life experiences of that person will impact how that information is understood & retained. This is why timelines for when information should be learned are so artificial. They ignore that fact that human learn their entire lives, & that the process of understanding something is so much more than input & output.
My kids are surrounded by books, too. They have an entire large bookcase devoted to manga. It actually serves as a lending library - they borrow out to their friends who love the different series but don't buy them, for various reasons. They see me reading all the time - be it the newspaper, online, magazines or books. They read every day - be it books, graphic novels, magazines, articles from the newspaper that I think might interest them, online, while gaming & sometimes while watching a movie (Kimi loves to use close captioning while watching). They choose what they want to explore & how they want to do it. And I know that every time they re-watch a TV episode or movie, or re-read a book or play a game or whatever else they are doing, they are getting something new from it. And they are the better for it.
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