Kids today!

That is closely related to the question often heard: "Are you going to eat that?" Usually just as you're aiming it toward your open mouth.

Or asking "what are you doing" when you are reading a book. This one really buggs me!!.....Amelia in Australia

I am going to share some hard-won motherly wisdom with you, my intimate friends. If you don't know where your child is, or even your children - age has little or nothing to do with this, the child can be a toddler or an adult as long as he/she still lives at home -- go into the bathroom and close the door. Within minutes, the afore-mentioned child will be knocking/pounding on the door, calling "Moooooooommmmm!"

It's so true!!! BTW, this also works on cats.

My favorite is trying to drink a soda. This isn't something I do a whole lot of, I drink more water than anything. But every now and again I want a soda. Usually a sprite. I don't think I've drunk an entire soda all by myself in 13 years. I usually get about 2 sips and then someone says "Mom can I have a drink of your soda??" lol Last week I had the stomach flu. Really gross stuff. I wanted a sprite, the bubbles make my tummy feel better. Sure enough, not even the stomach flu warded them off!! I was 1/2 way through my sprite, here came the girl... "Mom can I have a sip of that?" No!!!

Sharon

Mine are just like that. But if I take a sip of theirs - heavens forbid! "MOM! That's mine! Now it has your germs on it!"

A

I think people missed the irony in this post. :o( One of the most horrifying true stories of Hollywood was when Demi Moore was questioned about the movie Scarlet Letter (which btw was a total bomb), in which she starred and produced, as to it's almost non existent resemblance to the classic by Nathaniel Hawthorn. Demi replied that it didn't really matter because hardly anyone is alive anymore who ready the book anyway.

Val

Apparently MS. Demi Moore did not study English and or American Literature in college. DGD is a sophomore this year and is re-reading it for a class--she had first read it in an Advanced English class in high school. Emily

This is the origin of the cinematic term "Demi Moore Ending."

Valkyrie wrote:>

The sad part is: the scout was selling popcorn to two of the best readers in their respective schools. Both nieces taught themselves to read early, they get books for any gift occasion, they have races to get through the latest Harry Potter. When the 14yo was a tot we went to a petting farm and to see the Easter bunny for the first time, just her and me. She didn't bring a stuffed animal or a blankie along, she brought a book!

The niece who's a classmate of this poor misguided scout was talking about how she's recently finished "The Prince and the Pauper," which is one of those Mark Twain stories full of multisyllabic words laid out in

19thC style. It ain't no comic book. BS is lucky he didn't make that crack in front of my babes; sorry, no sale, take yer stinkin' popcorn back to your basement lair and watch TV with it!

Their grandfather is notorious for similar queries. You'll walk into a common area of the house in the morning, smelling fragrant, damp skin, clean clothes, still dripping off your head, and he'll ask, "did you wash your hair?"

Whew.

--Karen D. who really needs to find that folksong "Foolish Questions"

I taught my son phonetics at about age 3 and he was reading before he went to kindergarten and received books for every 'gift occasion's and also for no occasion at all. He would read to me while I fixed dinner and I would read to him all the time as well. In the 3rd grade he did a book report on The Man in The Iron Mask, he came home VERY upset because the teacher gave him an F. In front of the entire class she told him he did not read it since it was an "adult book" and that his mother doing his book reports for him was not acceptable. Needless to say I was up there the next morning with a STACK of 'classics' that he had read and I encourage her to ask him whatever she liked since he HAD in fact read them. Here's the clincher, she couldn't really ask him too many pertinent questions because she hadn't read them. She had however seen some of the Disney films. I was a little taken aback when she admittedly had not read nor even heard of Silas Marner. This person wasn't selling popcorn; this was the person in charge of my son's education!

Val

The attendance secretary at my daughter's high school called her a liar and initially refused to accept the note I had sent explaining her absence the previous day. The text of the note:

To whom it may concern,

Please excuse my daughter, Elaine, for being absent yesterday. She was at the stables when Monday's storms hit and was struck in the back by a flying chair while helping to lead the horses to safety.

Followed by my signature and home and cell phone contact numbers.

Now this was the exact and unvarnished truth. It sounded dramatic because it was. The roof was torn off the arena, debris was flying everywhere, horses and people were careening around in the dark and Elaine (age 14) kept her cool and started capturing loose horses and confining them in stalls on the undamaged side of the building. The wind was so strong that all of the barrels and equipment in the arena were sucked up and spinning in the center. A three-hundred pound man was picked up and thrown across the floor. And one of the flying chairs hit my daughter in the back and knocked her off her feet. She was so amped up on adrenaline that she barely felt it at the time but the next day she was so sore she could hardly walk let alone drag her 500 pound backpack around so I let her stay home. There was wind damage all across the county, it made the news.

So this wretched excuse for a human being reads the note that I had sent and calls my daughter a liar and says that if she wanted to skip school she should just say she had the flu. Apparently picking up the phone and letting her puffy little fingers do the walking was too much trouble. Then she hailed a passing principal and made her repeat the story again, apparently believing that she could trip her up in the details. The principal was also skeptical, but ultimately gave Elaine the pass she needed to go to her first hour (by now the bell had rung and she was tardy). Neither of these so called-professionals felt it necessary to pick up the phone and make a call before flinging accusations.

I was up at school later in the week and made a point of stopping by the office and introducing myself. I asked her if she thought it was appropriate to accuse a student - a straight A student with an unblemished record - of lying, without making any effort to confirm her story. The miserable old harridan was obviously embarrassed and muttered something about "the stories these kids tell", but I sort of suspect she'll hold her tongue in the future (at least with my daughter).

Kathleen

Bunch of dozy pillocks! I would have thought the way she moved and the bruising would speak for themselves! *I* might have rung you up and told you off for letting her back without a medical say-so! ;)

I did once have an 'excuse' offered that the lad in question had been in casualty half the night and unable to walk much for two days after acquiring a 9" gash in his leg, requiring spectacular stitching... This wound was acquired when he broke into a pub cellar and got to drunk to climb out again! I thought the punishment of a gashed leg and a three-day hangover fitted the crime nicely. In addition, the landlord of the pub extracted the value of the booze in hard labour, filling potholes in the carpark!

Many of my students shocked me by telling me that they really hated reading. In most cases, when I questioned them about this, I found that they had had much trouble learning to read as children, and always thought of it as punishment. This gives me the idea that elementary school teachers are not being taught to teach--reading or anything else, for that matter.

My son, who got the second highest SAT score in the State of New York when he graduated many years ago, is a speed reader. He taught himself speed-reading, because he's dyslexic, and finds that reading in this manner helps him. I, too, am dyslexic, but a day doesn't go by that I don't have a book in my hand. My point is that if any of you have a child who is having reading difficulties, it could be dyslexia, and speed-reading is a way to handle it.

I, too, am shocked when I hear people say they don't read because they can "see the movie." J. Arthur Rank Productions was the only studio that ever tried to stick to the book when making a movie. Most Hollywood productions are so far removed from the books that there is little or no similarity.

Teri

Some of the BBC productions (and CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) can be reasonably accurate, too.

Both of your stories are why three of my grandchildren are or have been homeschooled. The eldest is now in college, so only two are in homeschooling at the present time. The other three have been fortunate to live in a smaller town and attend a private school where their Mom is a volunteer/ substitute/officer with the PTO. Emily

I stopped going to movies about 7 years ago, when I went to see a movie of a favorite book and it didn't have any resemblance to the book except the title. Now, the author will not allow his books made into movies, unless he is on set with the director. Emily

With out National Curriculum (stifling though it can be!), even if kids choose not to study English Lit at higher levels, they must still do a certain amount of lit as part of the general English course up to the age of 16. This includes at least one Shakespeare play. Very often, when I was teaching it, I would use a film or TV series as a way into the novel or play. It's an excellent starting point for the disaffected or refuzniks. The program would go something like this:

Romeo & Juliet Start with bits of script on paper... The fight where Mercutio is killed is a good one! Have a lively drama lesson with teams playing with rolled up newspaper swords and lines from all different characters. Discuss how effective the words and directions are. Write a report of the lesson.

Show them the SAME DIALOGUE in scenes from the film. Discuss how effectively they are used in that order, etc. Discuss the performance of the actors. Compare what the kids did with the film.

LOOK at the same dialogue in script form. Play with editing the scene for a modern audiences: what would they cut and why? How would they stage it/light it/costume it? Do a few design sketches (nice cross curricular activity with art/CDT here!) and lighting diagrams (get physics involved with the causes and effects of coloured lighting and the use of gels).

Read the script: start the process of character analysis and development, story development, use and effectiveness of imagery, etc. Look at where the story came from. Examine the structure of the play (did you know that most of the main dialogue is written in sonnet form?), and the meaning of the imagery. Why is it set in Italy? (There are lOTS of reasons for this, and some of them surprise these kids used to foreign holidays, multi-cultural Britain, and images from all over the world.)

Whole new discussion about the nature of humour, and why there is nowt so flat as a 400 YO joke! Why do jokes go out of fashion while the basic story of kids in love remains universal? Rewrite the jokes!

There's enough meat in this for me to keep a bunch of 30 14 YOs busy for a whole 16 week term! :) AND they find it fun. I started one lot of disaffected youths off by 'refusing' to allow them to read Shakespeare. I kept giggling at bits of it and snapping the book shut when they asked what was funny, told them for a whole half term (at least once a lesson!) that they couldn't do it, I was saving it all for *me*! By the end of the term they were begging to have a go. So I did Macbeth with them the following term, and they laughed like drains at the 'knocking without', especially when we also read the Terry Pratchet scene in Weird Sisters based on it.

The real trick with any reading program is to get kids interested. I was taught to read by a bossy big sister when she started school and came home and taught me everything she'd done at school that day as a game. This masked my dyslexia for many years, but I never let it stop me reading, and it gave me a certain sympathy and empathy with the kids I taught who had learning difficulties of this nature. I never let it stop me studying or getting my MA in modern lit. Get them hooked and they'll read anything. There will, of course, always be those for whom the written word is anathema, but if you can encourage them to read

*something* every day (even if it's just a short article in a local paper), for those people that is a major achievement and needs to be recognised.

Get away from the idea that kids *have* to read classic lit in school. Why? Some of it is complete drivel! Some of it is unbearably boring.

90% of it is completely irrelevant to them and their lives. Get them READING! Start with the stuff they like and expand their horizons: they will come to the classics (if they have a mind to) and explore them when and if they are ready. There is lot of beautiful MODERN, NEW literature out there: it isn't classic and it isn't Literature - yet! It hasn't been around long enough to become Literature. But it's damned good stuff, and MUCH more likely to turn them into lovers of Literature when they are ready than a diet of Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy et al fed to them because 'it's on the syllabus and they have to do it'. Why the hell *is* it on the syllabus? Because it always has been and those who devised the syllabus were at schools of a totally different character in a different era, and that's what THEY did at school!

Find kids some modern stuff they can relate to in some way: examine the structure, the character development, plot, imagery, etc. Find something a little more classic that has a parallel story line: compare the two (and don't make them read the whole classic text unless they want to!). Let them explore and decide for themselves WHY the classic text is still alive and kicking today: sometime you will find, if you examine book sales, that the only reason X is 'very popular this year' is because it's on the GCSE syllabus!

Now don't get me wrong: there is some classic lit that I adore and teach very well (Shakespeare's sonnets, for example, and many of the plays), and some I cannot stomach (most of Dickens!). Given the will to explore, there is enough variety of lit out there for everyone to find SOMETHING they like!

We are a family of readers. I can't tell you when we last went to a movie. This past summer one of my grandsons read 22 books. He just went into grade

1 this September. As I said we are a family of readers. I know there are still lots of people young and old reading. DH and I run a small used book store for our local library and we have a hard time keeping the shelves stocked. Juno