Reading for Pleasure

When I was little, I loved reading. The first "real book" I read was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's (Philosopher's to the Brits) Stone. After devouring the whole series over the course of two months, I was hooked.

I'm not exactly sure why I loved them so much. At first I wanted to read them because my older sister Hanna was reading them and I thought she was the coolest thing since Olympic Swimming Barbie. But then I finished the series (up to Order of the Phoenix, of course, because Half Blood Prince hadn't been released yet). I ended up with another fantasy book, and then another. Next thing I knew, I was on to young adult fiction. 

Then high-school started. Suddenly I had to read books I had to, not because I wanted to. I stopped reading for pleasure because the act of reading itself was sometimes tedious (None of my American Studies books, of course. Junot Díaz 4 lyfe!). 

I'm not the only one who stopped. According to this article from The Atlantic, about 50% of Americans ages 18-24 haven't read a single book for pleasure in the past year. The total number of Americans who don't read has tripled since 1978.

So why this drastic decrease in reading for pleasure? Maybe for the same reason that I stopped. When you're required to read for school, reading ceases to be an enjoyable hobby and turns into a job. Sure, some of the books you read in school are fantastic, but having to slow down to annotate stops you from becoming fully immersed in the text.

One of the biggest reasons for the decrease in reading is that everything is so goddamn distracting now. You're just sitting there, reading some Vonnegut, when your phone starts vibrating in your pocket, and oh, someone liked my Facebook status! The poor Vonnegut book is forgotten, dog eared in the same spot for all eternity. So it goes.

Why do you think that fewer high-school students read for fun? How many books have you read for pleasure this year?

Why I'd Rather Be Tortured than Put in Solitary Confinement

When most people hear the word torture, they imagine waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and starving, among countless other types of physical pain. When I hear the word torture, I think of those same things, of course, but the very first thing that pops into my head is solitary confinement.

This article from The Week tells the story of a man who was in solitary confinement for 75 days. His 7-by-ten-foot cell contained only a small bed and a toilet. The only thing he had that vaguely resembled human contact was the occasional glimpse of a security guard through a tiny plastic window in the door of his cell.

I can't even begin to imagine being completely and utterly alone. Everyone has experienced physical pain, but who has experienced living in a cell like that with no human interaction or way to pass the time for months? Your brain needs stimulation, and when it doesn't get enough from your environment, it creates its own. In solitary confinement, you start to hallucinate. Your brain goes into a fog and you can't concentrate on anything. 

The man in the article describes how his life has changed after his time in solitary. He stands on trains with his back to the door because he can't let people come up behind him, which makes crowds difficult. He struggles with paranoid fears of being attacked by strangers on the street or policemen for no reason.

Why do you think that our prison systems still use solitary confinement as a form of punishment? Do you think that solitary confinement can be justified?

Teenagers need more sleep

A recent study from University of Minnesota Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement has validated what teenagers have known since middle school: we can't get enough sleep because school starts too early. Teenagers who get under 8 hours of sleep tend to be more prone to depression and anxiety, high-risk behavior (e.g. drugs and alcohol), attention issues, and low academic performance. The researchers conclude that starting school just an hour or two later than the typical 7:30 start time would improve academic performance and reduce tardiness, among countless other things.

Every day I walk into advisory to find half the people half asleep, dark circles under their eyes, a cup of coffee glued to their hands. Had they been able to sleep just a little longer, they would be more alert and not half-dead.

So why is it so difficult to get schools to change? Maybe it's because parents with multiple children usually have established schedules to get everyone to school on time. Generally, elementary schools start later in the morning. The older you get, the earlier school starts, until college. A later start time could disrupt a household's entire routine and make it difficult for anyone to be on time. There are also after-school sports to consider. Unless we shortened the length of the school day (which is not going to happen), a later start would mean a later dismissal. Outdoor sports teams would be forced to play in the dark, especially in winter when the days are shorter.

Do you think there's a way for the school districts to compromise?

Facebook instead of Face-to-Face

I’m constantly hearing from adults that I need to get off “The Facebook” and go be social.  Ross Douthat, a writer for the New York Times, has now joined my parents in arguing against social interaction through the internet in his article The Age of Individualism.

Typically someone raised in a home without a ton of exposure to the internet or other groups of people would adopt their parents’ religion or political party. But with internet access, your brain becomes a mixing pot of ideas.

People around my age don’t generally go to church to hang out with friends on sundays. They’re more likely to be sitting at home and writing American Studies blogs or binge-watching Netflix. They’re not getting their sense of community from a religious institution or even a or an actual meetup. Instead, they’re making their social connections through internet mediums like Facebook.

The consequence of this departure from face-to-face social interaction is that it is considerably more difficult to trust other people. According to the Pew Research Survey Millennials in Adulthood: detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends, only 19% of millennials responded that generally speaking, most people can be trusted. It’s a lot easier to trust a tightly-knit group of people who you meet with regularly than it is to trust that girl you went to summer camp with in 6th grade who you occasionally chat with on Facebook.

This mistrust is bred by the lack of physical community. It’s a lot harder to lie face-to-face that it is to lie on on the internet because you don’t have to worry about body language or tone of voice. Knowing this, why would you immediately place your trust in every one of your 436 Facebook friends, 370 which are total strangers?

Would it be better for young people to shut their laptops and join a youth-group, or should things stay as they are? Is there a realistic happy medium?

"To [quote], or not to [quote]? That is the question."

Everybody loves quoting. As a high-school student, my first instinct when writing a paper is to find a quote and build my argument around it. It’s much easier to add on to someone else’s words than to write words of your own. The problem with this is the tendency to let the quote speak for itself rather than explaining it. In the words of Maria Konnikova, a writer for the New York Times, “Quotation becomes a way not to add depth to your thinking, but to avoid thinking in the first place.”

See what I did right there? I didn’t bother to flesh out my argument at all. I could’ve used any quote there that said the same thing because I just left a blank space. I just quoted because the line was readily available and I have a healthy appreciation for irony. But most people use quotation because it’s an easy way to avoid thinking and to save time.

Quotes are abundant online. I can go search ‘quotes’ into google and get about 215,000,000 results in .2 seconds. So when a teacher assigns a paper with “a minimum of FIVE quotes,” why shouldn’t I pull phrases from sources online in order to meet the quota? I can use a quote as a springboard to develop my entire argument. But in the words of Konnikova, “when we strip away context, we strip away everything that enables us to determine what something really means. Words themselves become decorative — evocative, perhaps, but denuded of their essence.” Americans have the tendency to focus on the decoration instead of the substance.

In the North Shore especially you can look out the window and see a cluster of mothers in full exercise gear -LuluLemon yoga pants, pink tennis shirts, visors- drinking Starbucks and not even exercising. What’s the point of dressing up like you’re going to the gym when you’re actually just going to chat with your child’s friend’s parents? It’s to give the appearance of fitness. And while they take clothes out of context to look good, their children grow up to go to New Trier and write papers that consist almost entirely of quotations to make them sound smarter.

Always remember these words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I HATE quotation. Tell me what you know.”

Do you think that excessive use of quotation should be encouraged? Have you ever found yourself relying on quotation when you don't know what to write?