From: john coy <johncoy_at_mac.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2010 07:28:02 -0500

Marc,

Thank you for raising this topic and thank you everybody for a very interesting thread that illuminates the issue. Let me add another tangent: hunting. Here in Minnesota, we have thousands of kids who can not wait to go on their first deer hunt. It's something they dream about. I've even had second and third graders when I'm reading NIGHT DRIVING make a gun with their fingers and shoot the deer in the picture.

Now regardless on one's feeling about deer hunting, these students are passionate about it, and their interests are not reflected in the books they see. Most of them, but not all, are boys, and often these are the same boys who as teens we wonder why they are not more interested in books and reading.

At a young age, they get the message that they should be interested in reading something else, that what they are interested in isn't quite right or good enough. We lose thousands of these kids as readers every year and we pay an enormous cost as a society.

Now does anybody have a good recommendation for that deer hunting picture book?

Thanks, John Coy

www.johncoy.com
Received on Fri 15 Oct 2010 07:28:02 AM CDT