Welcome to speed Round Sunday on the Parenting Roundabout podcast, where we share a
mini episode from our past for your weekend listening pleasure. We'll be back tomorrow
with a brand new episode. So, Nicole, what are your kids reading
this summer? Good question? Um? Yeah, what are what are my
kids reading this summer? Um? Let me think? Well, Oh,
my daughter actually read two or three chapters of her American ap American history course
tex wool and that's about as far as she got. She does not she
does not read if she doesn't happen. Yeah, it's not on a computer
screen, it's not happening. We would she read an ebook if you put
the padron her phone. Only if it has audio to go along with it.
We'll have I just listen to the soundtrack of Hamilton a bunch of times.
She'll be all ready for Ye'll be ready for American History. There you
go. Yeah. If any high school teacher is not using Hamilton to teach
American history at this point in time, they're not paying attention. I wonder,
I wonder if you a teacher will I'll have to keep an eye on
that. Um. And there's cursing in wraps. So you know, yeah,
Um, my son is reading graduate admission admissions information. Oh there aren't.
There are not a lot of um books for you know, how to
kind of thing, well, yeah, or just even in general in our
family right now, they're just they're not a lot of books lying around trying
to manage our dramatic lives. So unfortunately, my kids are not reading this.
They didn't have like reading lists. Your daughter didn't have a reading list
from high school that she had read. Well, he's not doing she's not
doing ap English or ap Lang. So she didn't have any summer homework because
she's she's a math science girls, right, but she does have to do
this ap us history class and that's why she a couple of detectors. But
in our in our district, at least when my kids were in school,
everybody had summer reading stuff they had to do. And it was miserable way
to spend the summer when you have kids who are reluctant readers and the assigned
reading is over their heads and so you have to explain it to them.
Yeah, fun, the Catherine. Did they have enough to do? Agree
daughter, her last day, her last day before school, her last year,
summer break, her and her friends were up like studying and doing homework,
and of course they could have done it over the summer, but who
wants to do homework over the sum Yeah, but they were spent the whole
day yesterday cramming in all their summer homework. It's miserable. Well, who,
it's not a good way to turn reading, you know, kids onto
reading. Yeah, well that's true, that's true. Some kids enjoy it.
I guess if you enjoy reading, it's an easy gig. But for
those who struggle, Catherine, did your daughter have reading assignments so she didn't
have read this is a really bad speed run question when she's reading. Is
the driver is a manual? You know? Yes, how to how to
drive book? Although she she started, you know, on the first day
of class, they said, okay, you know, for tonight you read
this thirty page chapter or whatever. Um, so, of course thirty pages.
I'm like, okay, that'll day thirty minutes. But then the next
day she went to class and she found out that they basically just went over
exactly what they had read. So then she's like, well, I don't
need to read this because we're just kind of go through it line by line,
so no need for prereading. No, she at least in her mind.
So yeah, there's that. And then my son, he didn't have
any assign reading either. He man, you guys all got it easy.
I know he did decide that he wanted to pick up Maybe it was last
summer. I don't remember when we started it, but he was reading.
We were reading Oliver Twist together, oh yeah, and he he noticed it
and he said, let's let's do that. And I said, you want
to start where we left off, which was like a hundred pages that,
no, let's start over because I don't remember. Okay, just watch the
music. He likes musicals, right, yeah, and we have heard that
song, just a one song on the Broadway channel, you know Oliver that
song? So yeah, so yeah, so we're reading it and we're kind
of enjoying the sarcasm that it just drew us with. So that's kind of
fun, and that's what we're doing. Whoa. Yeah, you see My
theme here is forget the reading, just watch musicals basically, or listen to
the Oliver. This is actually, this is what I would have liked to
have been able to do with my kids. Don't like us for a while
there in the spring we were he wanted to read War in Peace, so
kid, so he did for a good while. He got it's a great
show off book, but it's not easy to read, and it's really boring.
Got maybe two hundred pages in um. But that that Broadway show Natasha
Pierre and the great comment that is based on like a tiny sliver of that
book, and he really listened to he wants to go see that. Yes,
I would guess ideas infinitely more entertaining than reading the books I read.
I read Anna Karenina when I was actually in Russia waiting and waiting and waiting
to adopt. It was very appropriate because it felt similarly endless but and just
you know, tragic and hopeless, and you know, not a fun read.
But you know, great works of literature. I have to say,
because my English major diploma is staring at me as I talk, but great
works of literature. Well, speaking of great works of literature, the thing
my daughter is reading. My kids are adults now and so not constricted by
reading lists and me forcing them to read things that they have to read for
school. So I don't think my son really reads anything at this point in
this life. He has some sort of massive project involving moving photos around on
his phone that seems to take most of his non working time. You know,
anytime you go into his room and ask him something, it's like,
I'm busy, I'm doing something. I asked, what's he doing? He's
working on his photo albums she seems to have. I think he just like
downloads random pictures of cars until there's like thousands of them, and then he
has to delete them, then he has to organize them and exactly. But
my daughter has always liked chicken soup books, Chicken Soup for the Soul and
the many many, many, many, unbelievably many offshoots from that, and
she enjoys buying them, she enjoys sitting with them. I am not one
hundred percent convinced that she is actually reading them, but she swears to me
that she is, because she was always reading. Reading has always been difficult
for her and not have fun activity or something that she particularly enjoys or pursues.
So I have my suspicions. But you know what, they are short
little essays, and they are heavy and human interest, and so possibly you
know something that she would actually want to read. But that is the big
book around our house right now are all men of chicken soup books, which
she has purchased with her Amazon Prime membership, and she got accidentally well buying
chicken soup books. Chicken soup for the not paying attention when you buy things
is what we need. But you know what, I'm happy. I've always
been a I don't care what my kids read. If they find something they
want to read, I will read it with them. They should read it.
If it's a Seventh Heaven novelization, which was we went through for a
while, I think we read, you know, full house novelizations. We
read I Carly novelizations. If there's a children's TV show and they made a
book out of it, we've probably read it. But you know what,
it's words going from the eye to the brain. Yeah, I'm not biggy.
So she wants to read or merely just purchase chicken soup books, that's
you know. I'm not going to complain, even though I'm really glad she
doesn't want me to read them with her. I like those books. Some
of them are pretty good. I'm sure they are. They just all look
to me like the kind of thing I would have written in a cubicle early
in my career. I love the perspective you give us. It's so grounded
in reality. I have many, many, many things like that. In
my early career I was, in addition to moving a lot. In my
twenties, I had lots of weird little jobs. But about the