Summer Reading!

Every year around this time the ailes at the video store would be full with frantic parents and their children looking for the last copy of The Scarlet Letter to rent. Or maybe someone would rent that old VHS copy of John Steinbeck's The Pearl we had. No, these weren't eager students of classic literature looking to view Hollywood's take on the classics, but rather an angry mob of parents and their kids hoping to find movie versions of all the books they were supposed to read over the summer. When I first started to work in video retail in 1986, their were a handful of parents renting the movie versions of books for their kids. They would always claim that their child had read the book but now wanted to see the movie. But by the time we closed in 2004, the parents just came out and admitted that their kids didn't even bother to read the books that they were assigned. The new excuse was that they didn't understand what they were reading. Well, if that's the case then perhaps there is a bigger problem then just not wanting to read. Maybe the child doesn't know how to read, and if so why aren't the parents concerned? What would amaze me was when the parents would get on waiting lists for a movie that we only had one copy of, like The Invisible Man. The Invisible Man was one of my favorite books to read when I was a kid. I am also a fan of the 1933 Universal Studios film version starring, Claude Rains. And it is that version that parents would rent for their children. That film is almost nothing like the book. And secondly, the book is so short and such a quick read, that in the time the parent waits for the only film to become available, their child could have read it twice over. While parents are partly responsible for this lack of interest in the written word by their children, some teachers are to be blamed as well. In my time behind the counter I saw many teachers who would rent films to show in their classrooms, and not all were part of the lesson plan. Teachers would flat out tell me that one day a week would be set aside to show movies in class. These were not films related to certain lessons that were being taught, but just a movie or two that the teachers felt would keep them occupied. That kind of laziness is really absurd. Have teachers adopted a defeatist attitude? "If you can't beat them, join them!" Is that what they think! No wonder the educational system is in such disrepair in this country. But at the same time I must admit that the sudden surge in popular children's books like the Harry Potter series brings me hope. Maybe things will start to turn around and future generations raised on Potter and Narnia will actually want to read first and then go see the movie.