In my opinion, middle school reading material really sucks. I don’t like it because one, they are chock-full of hard vocabulary, two, no matter where you are, in school, at home, in camp, you are expected to write an essay about it, and three, I strongly dislike most of the content in those stories.
First of all, I don’t like the fact that I have to take the time to search up so many words that I don’t understand. I think my vocabulary is pretty decent one day and then suddenly I read something on a middle school level, and boom–my self esteem drops by a ton. It takes too much time and energy to flip open a computer (hardly anybody uses dictionaries anymore now that we have Google), type in the word, and somehow try to comprehend what comes up. When I can’t understand even the meaning of the word, I look at the synonyms and then scold myself because I feel dumb. And–look at the time! It’s been three minutes. And because the stories I’m reading are so full of these kinds of words, a block of text that should’ve taken me only twelve minutes to read ends up being around thirty.
Second of all, we are expected to write something about every single story that we read. In school, we have opinion essays, graded essays, timed essays, long essays, short essays… I dislike that we have to write so much about whatever we read. I would like to just read a book in class for the fun of it instead of in preparation for some writing assignment to come later in the year. At home, (Well, I don’t know for you, but for me) I get asked to do this random thing and then the next second I get asked to do that random thing and–who knows what you’re going to be asked next! I wouldn’t be surprised if I had to do some other sort of writing assignment later. My mom signed me up for this camp so I guess this could count as assigned essays, because the whole point of this is so that my writing and reading can improve.
Third of all, I don’t like what I’ve read so far with middle school content. If it’s not kidnapping, shooting, poisoning, or other forms of killing, then it’s probably stuff like what I read today about Victor and the french scowling. And I’m not a big fan of either, if you get what I mean. During my years at the lower school, I quickly grew fond of series like Harry Potter, The Mysterious Benedict Society, or even Wings of Fire. These stories revolved around things like magic, mysteries or riddles, or adventure instead of just poisoning, and they weren’t even that realistic. It’s much creepier reading a realistic story of kidnapping and then asking for ransom from a rich guy than reading a book about mythical color-changing dragons who sleep and bask in the sun twenty-four seven, lazily eating fruit, and occasionally rolling their eyes because some queen from 100 miles away died.
But then again, that’s just my opinion on things like the vocabulary, the amount of work associated with the reading, and the content of middle school stories.