From The Bookseller:
A children’s author has described the labelling of her books as “too immature” for certain students as “heart-breaking”.
Robin Stevens tweeted about a message she received from a young fan who was told not to read her books in school because “she was too smart”. The comment gained support from other authors and publishers and was retweeted more than 250 times in two days.
The Murder Most Unladylike Mysteries (PRH) author said: “Dear teachers who tell your students that my books (or any books) are too ‘immature’ for them to read. You’re wrong. Please stop. A kid wrote to me explaining that she has to read my books at home because she is too smart to read them in school. My heart broke.”
Stevens told The Bookseller she found the situation “really concerning” in case it discourages children to read at all. She said: “It was an email that a kid of around 14 sent me from New Zealand but I’ve seen it in the UK as well. She was very smart and the teacher said she was too smart and she had to read my books at home.
“Sometimes kids in England have said ‘I love your books but teachers have said they are not high level enough for me’. It’s heart-breaking. Reading shouldn’t be like that. Kids should be able to dip in and out of different things in the way adults do – many kids are reading YA or Malory Towers [Hodder Children’s Books]. Comfort reading is about returning to books as a confident reader. Adults do it all the time – they could read The Essex Serpent (Serpent’s Tail) and The Girl on a Train (PRH) in the same week.”
. . . .
The author said she had rebelled as a child against dictated reading lists for pleasure. “My mother was given a list of books I should read when I was a child and I didn’t like this. I refused to read a book she bought me off the list which turned out to be Skellig [by David Almond, published by Hodder Children’s Books] – I read it 10 years later and loved it.”
Link to the rest at The Bookseller
I knew read-shaming was a thing, but I didn’t know that it started this early.
great comment phrase, ‘read-shaming’
Not that long ago, we had an article on PG about adults who read 5…FIVE books a year. This is why.
Set books are one thing. They do have to be read because the curriculum is designed around them. But the OP is not talking about compulsory texts. That child was reading for pleasure. As a teacher myself, I’m shocked that a teacher would /shame/ a child like that. This is how children learn that movies are for fun and books are for work. The stupidity astounds me.
I think it’s difficult for most adults to really apply the way they felt as kids to this for the simple reason that we didn’t have so many separate age-based genres back then. Now publishers try to cram everyone into MG, YA, NA, etc. Even when I was that age in the 90’s, I read kids books until I read adult books. Even though I was consistently reading four grade levels ahead, I can’t remember anyone being particularly obnoxious about not letting me read what I wanted based on its ‘reading level’. But when I was in junior high, I was reading adult fantasy/sci-fi novels. Now publishers expect kids to move much more gradually from chapter books to lower MG to upper MG to YA to NA and then only start reading adult novels once we’re out of college. Which is one reason I hate dividing books by age group beyond “children’s” and “everything else” as it was for so long. Maybe the fact that things are the way they are now (with all these different age-group genres) is partly why teachers are that way.
OTOH, I think kids have a lot more freedom in what they read for their school-reading than I did at that age, even if they’re still guided toward books that will challenge them more. I don’t really think it’s a terrible thing to put *some* restriction/requirements on what kids read, especially if it’s a teacher trying to teach reading. One doesn’t generally teach well without pushing the student a little outside their comfort zone.
Maybe the fact that things are the way they are now (with all these different age-group genres) is partly why teachers are that way.
No, I think this might be universal across time with teachers 🙂 In high school in the 90’s one of my favorite teachers commented that a novel I was reading was way below my level. He expected me to be reading Robin Cook (his favorite), or Danielle Steele or Michener, etc. I think he was the one who gave me a Jonathan Kellerman mystery.
I liked to read Danielle Steele alongside Christopher Pike — a YA horror novelist for those not in the know — but I don’t think the MG / YA / NA categories are intended to straightjacket readers. I’m operating on the assumption that publishers know that some kids will read both Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie.
No, I think those categories are for people buying for other readers. Just thinking of my nephews, I might know that Christopher Pike is too old for them, but I don’t know the current writers targeting their brackets. In terms of reading skill I assume a book meant for the 8 year old may be too advanced for the 6 year old. My method is to look
for Clifford the Big Red Dog or Curious George and see what’s on the shelf with them, but I could imagine other clueless aunts zeroing in on whatever categories those books are in.
I’m not sure I can be all that upset about this, because I get where the teachers are coming from. Part of their job is to encourage students to challenge themselves (their jobs practically depend upon it), although the way they may have communicated that might not have been the best.
I’ve encouraged my nine-year-old to always punch up regarding reading, and he reads at near-adult level now without having sacrificed his enjoyment at all.
Teachers do their best, but they are judged on the measurable achievements of their students.
So they need to push the more advanced kids toward advanced books.
This is a case of the system being the problem, not the teachers. (although some teachers suck too lol)
I read voraciously as a kid (and still do), so grade-appropriate lists were pointless to me (and my brother and sister). BIG salutes to all the school and public librarians who fed our reading habits.
And shout outs to my parents for early encyclopedia purchase (the pre-internet browser par excellence), my grandpa for introducing me to westerns when I was 12 or 13, and Mrs Pancoke (totally guessing the spelling, a teacher at Koloa School in the 70s) for introducing me to adult science fiction when I was 10. (so I read Heinlein’s juvenile science fiction novels AFTER the adult ones, which made no difference, they were all great yarns).
I get each side, I think. The child is wild, like a good horse, tamed a bit to sit still enough to be saddled and then free together to go on an adventure.
School. you mean prison for many; could I please just wear an ankle monitor and not have to go sit on hard chairs made of petrol five days a week for 7 hours each day and be talked at, instead of allowing canter, trot, gallop? Please.
That any author is allowed with any regularity in any school or univ is an amazing priviledge; that their works are taught as part of curricul. keeps the very few works alive. Not taught books at school, suffer often dust.
Freedom to read is like freedom of expression. Freedom of speech at schools, both protesting and watchdogging and whistleblowing is a hard ride in boot top snow, too often. Too bad first amendment didnt include not only the word ‘government’ but also ‘all institutions of teaching’.
I agree with Alicia. Homeschooled children are often maybe a little pale from a bit too much ‘be mannerly’, but often, in my experience, conversational at depth in many amazing ways.
To have a teacher who loves you is a miracle, for they actually see you, instead of seeing lessons merely, that must be chopped up and fed as mash.
As long as a child is encouraged to read, I’d say good. For somewhere in the entertainment and deadzones, there will also be learning and meaning. In terms of ‘challenge’ to read ‘more difficult’, NO! My life is too short to even ever attempt to read proust. NO! Do not make the young waste precious life reading stuff that is difficult as though it is character building unless they need it as an engineer to make bridges stay up.
I read the Irish. Difficult enough. Great joy
I can’t ever remember being told that I needed to read more ‘difficult’ books although I read anything and everything as a child. And since none of my parents’ books were forbidden, I probably read a few things that were a bit too old for me – like the copy of Lady Chatterley that lurked at the back of the bookshelf and had so bored them that I think they had forgotten they had it! As a young child, asthmatic and at home a lot, back when treatments were inadequate, I inherited a set of old ‘Wonder Books’, from a much older aunt – fat anthologies with Grimm’s fairytales, extracts from Alice in Wonderland, stories by Oscar Wilde, Stevenson and so much more. But I also read Enid Blyton,voraciously, and nobody told me they were too young for me. I do think reading for children should be an adventure rather than a challenge. I can remember two or three teachers with real affection – one in particular read The Wind in the Willows out loud to a class of very young inner city primary school pupils in industrial Leeds, doing all the voices – magical and I still hear him when I read the book. Later, a young graduate showed us – in our early teens by then – the sheer magic of Shakespeare. Again it was her voice and her knowledge and enthusiasm that carried us along although a more formal system might have labelled the material too difficult for us. But it is all too easy to put children off reading. It puts me in mind of Dickens’s Mrs Pipchin whose system of education wasn’t to ‘encourage a child’s mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster.’ I think there are a few Mrs Pipchins in charge of curriculum development these days.
I always enjoy reading your thoughts about your own life Catherine. You said reading should be an adventure. Yes!
Thanks
Adults should back off. When I was a child and a voracious reader, either adults were trying to stop me reading (it’s too nice a day to be inside / shouldn’t you be doing your homework?) or they were asking me what I was reading and then giving me their unwanted opinions about my choice.
Really annoying.
While I don’t agree with a teacher discouraging a student from reading what the kid obviously enjoys reading, I do understand that there’s long been a system in place that assigns “grade level” to books.
And that it’s good to encourage kids to read above their grade level. 🙂
When I first began going to a public library (probably around 7-8), I read everything I could. As in, I read the “Billy & Blaze” series (1st grade level?) at the same time as Star Trek novels, Trixie Belden, classics, and Victoria Holt.
The only time my mom said “no” about a book up until I was 15 or 16 was if there was a lot of graphic sexual/violent content.
Then again, she took us to see JAWS when I was 7… LOL 😉
And what do the kids do when they’re too smart for school?
They flourish when homeschooled.
They read an awful lot of library books – keeps one set of them quiet while Mom works with another.
They learn like sponges.
They ask very good, very tough questions.
Oh jeez. One teacher at one school is kind of a dick. There are thousands of other teachers who’d be thrilled to see kids reading, no matter what the level of the book.
Yeah, go ahead and ignore the rest of the article and the dozen other sources.
As a parent with a daughter who LOVES to read and was reading 5th grade books in the first grade…I appreciate the teacher’s stepping in here to get the child to read more difficult books. It would have been much easier for the teacher to just say “OK, that’s appropriate for your grade level” even if the child was reading well ahead of her classmates. But instead they were making their students actually choose books at an individually challenging level. Oh no! Trying to get a child to learn! In school no less!
Based on the quote from the student (in the fifth paragraph not the author’s rewording in the third paragraph) it doesn’t sound like the teacher was saying the child couldn’t read the easier book, just that they couldn’t use the easier book for their required school reading when it wouldn’t help them to learn and grow their vocabulary, reading comprehension, critical thinking, etc.
We struggle getting my daughter to push herself and if she was left to pick her own books she would still re-read the Magic Tree House books she loved in first grade but were too easy for her then.
For school books my daughter is always told to get “good fit” books for her, meaning books that will help her grow her vocabulary and challenge her. As long as 1/2 of the books she gets are “good fit” books, she can get whatever other books she wants, so she has stayed up to date on the MTH books that way.
Sorry for the rant but we have struggled with this a bit so it hits close to home.
I was reading college poetry textbooks at age six, just because they were around the house. So? Was it less challenging to read Trixie Belden, which had a lot more about interpersonal relationships and crime? Would it have helped me grow if the teacher had told me I could no longer read any kid books, or would it have been a cruel punishment for being smart?
A teacher or librarian who really cares about growth will suggest new, interesting books and authors, but without demands, and without denigrating the stuff that a child is already reading and enjoying. You don’t fertilize minds with a machete.
Perhaps they’re ‘too mature’ for the teachers/school boards in question.
I’d suggest she add ‘This is the book your immature teachers are afraid you’ll like reading!’ to the cover.