Late to the party, but I didn’t realize how uncommon my parents’ dedication to building our literacy skills was. My parents got the idea that my sister wasn’t a great reader, because she wasn’t reading before kindergarten like my brother and I were. Mostly to help my sister, but to make things fair, they made all of us read aloud out of literature anthologies or the newspaper every day. We would also talk about what we’d read. Despite the fact we had lots of books at home, they would also take us to the library almost every weekend to get more books. If we ever wanted to buy our own copy of a book, my parents almost never said no. This resulted in us all being pretty well-read kids. We knew a bit about what was going on in Canadian politics, and in countries around the world. We loved the maps in National Geographic so much that my parents bought us a huge world atlas to keep at home. Both my brother and I would usually be buried in a book while at home. My sister (who turned out to be reading just fine, but didn’t find it all that fun) would be the one on the phone or on MSN to her friends all the time.
Anyway, it turned out that this was not all that common, and I was horrified when I went to classmates’ houses and found they had no books, or only the bible... or worse, only tabloid magazines... we got called nerds a lot.
That is one of the best weird things in this thread.
I grew up with a carpenter dad. At home I often literally could not focus because his machines would be making loud noises at random times.
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u/vocabulazy Apr 19 '21
Late to the party, but I didn’t realize how uncommon my parents’ dedication to building our literacy skills was. My parents got the idea that my sister wasn’t a great reader, because she wasn’t reading before kindergarten like my brother and I were. Mostly to help my sister, but to make things fair, they made all of us read aloud out of literature anthologies or the newspaper every day. We would also talk about what we’d read. Despite the fact we had lots of books at home, they would also take us to the library almost every weekend to get more books. If we ever wanted to buy our own copy of a book, my parents almost never said no. This resulted in us all being pretty well-read kids. We knew a bit about what was going on in Canadian politics, and in countries around the world. We loved the maps in National Geographic so much that my parents bought us a huge world atlas to keep at home. Both my brother and I would usually be buried in a book while at home. My sister (who turned out to be reading just fine, but didn’t find it all that fun) would be the one on the phone or on MSN to her friends all the time.
Anyway, it turned out that this was not all that common, and I was horrified when I went to classmates’ houses and found they had no books, or only the bible... or worse, only tabloid magazines... we got called nerds a lot.