Frazz by Jef Mallett for June 18, 2013

Huh. I did not know there was an abridged version of “The Catcher in the Rye”.

People, your ignorance appalls me!!!

My problem with Catcher in the Rye wasn’t the profanity. It was just the fact that it was so boring.

I never, never had the same teachers the next year as I did the previous. Also, with many families moving with parents changing jobs, many kids would not be returning to the same school. So, a teacher assigning homework over the summer vacation makes absolutely no sense.

Nor I. I think it’s a more modern invention.

My only vacation reading was the summer editions of My Weekly Reader.

Thank you, dear Mrs. Olsen, for including science books.

There are a lot of books called “classics” that are tripe, unfortunately. And not enough credit is given to current or recent work that includes lots of vocabulary and encourages kids to read. The Harry Potter books, for example, are certainly not “fine literature”, but they got a lot of kids excited about reading well before the movies were made.

Anyone with kids 10-12ish – consider the book “So You Want To Be A Wizard” by Diane Duane. Pre-dates Potter, and (I think) better. Or, older, “My Father’s Dragon”.

Thankfully, I never had a summer reading list. I read because it was fun and something to do. I’ll bet most of them will be like Charlie Brown and wait until the last minute to read whatever. lol

Yeah, when I went to school I never got a reading list. My kids didn’t either.

When I went to high school, the reading lists (never summer), included “Great Gatsby”, “Lord of the Flies,” “Catcher in the Rye,” etc. Now 40 years later, my son is in high school, and he’s stuck with the same books, 40 more years out of date. Hasn’t anything worthwhile been written since 1970?

“…a list of math workbooks … you are to read one of each.”

… so I can just read them without doing any actual work?

Must be something new since I went to school.

An old farmhouse, an attic full of books from the turn of the century and before, old radios, hay to pitch before use and after, Mechanix Illustrateds..guns to shoot, a tractor to ride,tools all over the place and cold beer in the milkhouse...what more could a boy ask for?

Gee, all my summer reading was literature. Who assigns textbooks then?Now Jef has an excuse for drawing the same face all the time.

Summer meant going to the library and checking out 10 books at a time, reading all of them and exchanging them with a friend and then we’d return them all to the library. Wish my eyes would let me read books now.

Due to the school’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, she never uses her gay face at school.

Richard S. Russell: Especially civics. Combine an unregimented mind with the Constitution and you have a populist revolutionary on your hands. Probably would read Molly Ivins for history.

I did have the same teachers for my main classes in 8th grade as I did in 7th grade. For elementary school, though, where you have just the one teacher, it’d just be bizarre. I know some students did have the same teacher two years in a row when a 4th grade teacher became a 5th grade teacher, but I imagine that sort of thing isn’t too common. And by the way, guys… not liking books because of “cuss words”? Really? What planet are you guys from where people don’t cuss?

Imagine a world in which no one aged and these kids are perpetually in 3rd grade. Unless someone steps up their expectations, they will continuously stay at a 3rd grade level. Maybe Mrs. Olsen is making a revolutionary change here

“There are a lot of books called “classics” that are tripe.” Anyone who ever had to read “The Last of the Mohicans” should enjoy Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”.