More than a quarter of readers of YA are over the age of 28 research shows

Yesterday, Lucy Knight, writing in the Guardian, summarizes and comments on recent research published in the, “Farshore and HarperCollins Children’s Books annual review of
Children’s Reading for Pleasure, 2024″.

The report is typically grim with only one in five young people reading daily but on the other hand a similar proportion read everyday. So the results are mixed. From the trends readers are less common this year than in previous studies. But…

• Parents reading to children makes a huge difference to children learning a reading habit, and
• plenty of children understand the danger of screens to reading, and
• a surprising proportion of adults read YA fiction (Young adult fiction).
• The pressure of schoolwork is cited as a reason why children and young adults don’t read; personally, I accept this explanation, when I was driven by school and university exams I read less too.
• Being a reader is a positive identity for young people (and I think for older people too).

YA fiction is popular for two reasons: First, the language and structure and so-forth are easier than “adult” fiction and “serious” literature. (This reminds me of a joke, what is the difference between fiction and literature, the answer; literature, a reader needs a professor to understand it.) And, second,  YA has a strong story, and mostly a happy ending. Thus YA fiction is a relief from the challenges of life and thus helps mental health. Reading for enjoyment, for pleasure, and for fun is a good for the reader. Maybe, we need to say, “I’m going to the library” like we say “I’m going to the gym”.

So, in conclusion, read for fun.

The Guardian article is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/30/more-than-a-quarter-of-readers-of-ya-are-over-the-age-of-28-research-shows

And the report is here:

Click to access The-Farshore-and-HCCB-Annual-Review-of-Childrens-Reading-for-Pleasure-1.pdf

 

A much younger me reading.

 

More book buying

Yesterday I traveled to Wellington and met with our daughter, to (as she put it) hang out. We found my great, great grandparents’ grave stone and I successfully did not buy anything in two of my favorite secondhand book shops. I did; however, buy three books at Unity books: “Not too late” is a book I was hunting and I knew Unity books had it, the two Ursula K Le Guin essay collections were a happy surprise, and bought on sight.

And I discovered the caffeine free Mocha coffees are yum.

A wonderful day.

Questions

I think making a habit of asking questions is a key critical thinking skill and I believe that following curiosity into wonderful places is essential to a full life.

As part of my teaching practice I spent time reading and thinking about how to encourage questioning. The spreadsheet below is a  set of questions we can ask. I never got to use it in class and, on reflection, I’m not sure what students would have made of it, but there it is.

Something to think about.McKenzie 2000 is book Learning to Question to Wonder to Learn; except, the date is 2005.

Write a compelling Blog (A Toastmasters assignment): Reflection

Blog number 560.

As I wrote earlier, this last month I’ve been writing to fulfill a Toastmasters’ assignment. I have learned two things:

First. Under the pressure of writing two blogs a week, I’m not writing as thoughtfully, clearly, and long; clearly, I prefer to have more time to think about the topic I am writing about.

And, second, this exercise has given me a greater appreciation of the bloggers, journalists, essayists, and opinion writers that I admire who publish regularly. I knew writing is difficult and the pressure to write to a deadline, and to eat, must be immense but I’ve found it so difficult just for a month. So I am in awe and respect for those who publish regularly.

Kia Toa, Kia Ngakaunui.

Reading and writing on paper helps children learn

I’ve been writing about notebooks and their uses. This Guardian article discusses recent research that supports my experience – reading and writing on paper helps children understand and learn.

I would normally find and reflect on the actual paper but in this case the paper is 49 pages of thick statistics and, in any case, the paper only looks at middle-schoolers. The paper is, “Middle-schoolers’ reading and print media: An N400 study. The researchers are: Froud K., Levinson L., Maddox C., and Smith P.

In short, the paper shows that middle school students read deeper and learn better using paper than when using electronic media: ebooks and word-processor software.

This does not surprise me because, as we have seen in my recent posts, thinking on paper has been and is essential to critical and creative thought. This is true for digital natives as well as for those of us who are a little older. I routinely ask artists and researchers what kind of notebooks they use. The answers are almost always, paper ones. And I have always been intrigued to see my students coming to class with paper notebooks and printed papers with margin notes. And I prefer to read from paper, if I’m reading to think. Clearly, there is something about working on paper that engages thought.

So I am encouraged that my preference for paper is supported by this evidence.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/kids-reading-better-paper-vs-screen

 

Common Place Books

I’ve been keeping notebooks since at least 1990 and have collected positive quotations since forever (My Beautiful Things collection). The most fascinating fact I discovered from my reading of “The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper”” by Roland Allen is how old collecting ideas on paper is.

Although there are records of ancient Romans collecting quotations, they did not have paper and hence did not have notebooks. The invention of paper notebooks dates to Florence about 1300. Books were rare and expensive. The habit of the time was that when you came across a piece of text you wanted to remember, say: a poem, a quote, a recipe… you wrote it down. These books were called, in Italian, a zibaldoni, which means a collection of flowers or a salad. These became valuable documents, passed from Father to Son. The selection of of these items and writing it down is at a basic level of critical thinking. Similar to my Beautiful things file.

Later from 1512 these books evolved to notebooks described as “Common Place Books” by then there was a large selection of available notebooks, the innovation was how they were used. Initially, the idea was to collect your quotes under different themes, thus the reader/writer ended with a thematically ordered collection. This represents a step forward into higher level thinking. Then the use of notebooks evolved to today’s huge variety, where writers collect ideas and reflect on them.

For me the Common Place book has evolved into today’s writers notebooks; like my current notebooks, where the author reflects on the text and outlines and drafts essays and so-forth. That’s evaluation and creative thinking.

There are stacks of articles about Common Place books, below is one about Oscar Wild’s notebooks.

 

My notebooks since 1990.

 

Book Review: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. Roland Allen 2023

I have a 35 year collection of notebooks where I collect ideas from books and papers that I read. They are paper notebooks and, as much as I can, I write in fountain pen. There is something about writing on paper in pen that calls to my brain. Before my collection of notebooks I collected class notes and lab notes on paper using pens; at that stage I had little choice, practical notebook computers didn’t exist.

So, when I discovered this book, I quickly visited my local independent bookshop and brought a copy. And the book is wonderful.

The first two thirds of The Notebook covers the history of notebooks beginning with a tiny three tablet device for writing notes dating to about 1305 BCE. This was found in the Ulu Burun shipwreck of Turkey’s Southern coast. The history winds through papyrus scrolls and parchment before true paper notebooks were invented in Florence about 1300. Then chapter after chapter on specific historical applications: accounting, zibaldoni, monks music, common place books, on the sea leading to nautical logbooks, and onto dairies and journals. Fascinating. And then two final sections: one of current uses of notebooks; including, police notebooks, authors’ notebooks, recipe books, and journaling. And concluding with the final three  three chapters: ego-documents, observing artists, and the extended brain.

Three chapters were of particular interest to me: First the chapter describing zibaldoni. These were collections of quotes collected for future reference, initially from when books were rare and expensive. These collections became valuable documents handed from Father to son. Second, the chapter on Commonplace books, these books are successors to zibaldoni, again collections of quotes and sayings but under a thematic index and at times including the collectors thoughts, these date from about 1512 to today. And finally, in a further evolution of the commonplace book, there is a chapter on writers notebooks.

As a scientist, I appreciated the sections on Newton’s and Darwin’s and Curie’s lab/note books  but I think a specific chapter on the use of lab/note books in science would have been of real interest.

However, in conclusion, this is a wonderful book, please buy.

 

Thoughts: Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock. Jenny Odell.

This is my review of Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock by Jenny Odell.

This is a  fascinating book with enormous amounts of information. A big complex idea book from Jenny Odell who wrote the best seller “How To Do Nothing”.

How to do nothing worked because Jenny introduced the idea of the Useless Tree as a metaphor for an approach to doing nothing that helped us time strapped, over scheduled, pressured readers to take a break. The metaphor allowed us to relax into our personal uselessness.

In contrast, “Discovering a life beyond the clock” has no such central metaphor and is rather a patchwork of explorations of our relationships with time in a context from individual wage slave, to an examination of productivity bro culture, onto leisure culture and its traps and complexities; and on a scale from the microscopic individual in a relationship with the moss growing in a kitchen cup to the universe to cosmic, stars and tides.

Certainly a broad exploration but I found myself confused and frustrated. The breadth of the writing was too much and confusing. In my view, too many topics. When I taught research skills I used to tell students who were choosing a topic to avoid topics that are too big. The hint that we have a too big topic is that your “Head feels like it’s exploding.” This book feels like this. Not only this, Jenny’s use of quotations everywhere meant that I did not get a clear feel for her voice and what she was saying. And just too much. I would have finished the book after Chapter 4, Putting Time in its Place, leaving out a chapter on climate change and three others on further more macroscopic topics. Enough is enough.

Perhaps it is just me, Saving Time has many exceptional reviews from much stronger reviewers than me. Maybe I’m easily confused, and too used to a straight narrative.

I recommend this book to you; plenty, of interesting ideas and much to think about, but get it from a library rather than buying it.

 

Curiosity: Questions

When  I began teaching first year degree students in New Zealand I was teaching a paper called Research Skills. The objective was to prepare students for their final year research dissertation and to teach thinking skills for a long fruitful life and career – in short critical thinking. The problem was that critical thinking is an incredibly complex set of skills and where to begin and what to focus on?

The answer was to teach and encourage questioning; of course, questioning is a foundation creativity skill clue that is limited by our understanding and imagination and by our awareness of the limits of our ignorance and our ability to question. This reminds me of  a quote from Carl Sagan, “There are no dumb questions”.

Focusing on questions opens the world up. As Carl Sagan suggests.

Now, Questioning is a skill we can teach learn and nurture; for example, The Right Question Institute teaches an approach called the Question, Formulation Technique (QFT): that is one sensible approach. I admit, I learned the traditional way, through years of study and particularly learning reflective practice in my post-graduate studies.

The focus on questioning worked in my classes, I had one student who, at the end of the paper, told me that most papers after the final test, she forgot everything. For my paper, every-time she read something, she heard me asking, “Who wrote this? Why should I trust this?” I count that as a success.

Another Book Buying Binge

Once again I have traveled to Christchurch and returned with books – nine books! They are:

Five by Anne McCaffrey, I have always loved her writing and her books were popular enough the there are plenty in the second hand book shops.

One by Ursula K. LeGuin. Ursula is another favorite author although I find her books and themes and writing difficult. Unfortunately, her books were not enormously popular and there are few in the second hand book shops.

I have read Clive Jame’s autobiography and a few of his essays. I bought this because I am interested in his essays.

I’ve never read a copy of Landfall which is a literary magazine in New Zealand (Landfall is New Zealand’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal). For a $2 cost I thought I would check Landfall out. There are plenty of these in second hand book shops in New Zealand.

The final book “The Notebook: A History of Thinking” on Paper by Roland Allen is the only one I bought new. I read a review for this the morning before we searched book shops for  gems. I’m fascinated by creative process and many creative people use notebooks. Whenever, I go to seminars or book launches and when I have the chance I ask whether or not the speaker uses a paper or electronic notebook. It always surprises me that even digital natives still use physical (paper) notebooks. For example, when my daughter started her Theater degree she bought a I-Pad and stylus; but after three years I noticed that she has reverted back to paper notebooks. So I had to buy this book and, at this stage, I’ve read the first chapter; it is fascinating.