(no subject)

[the_rck]

evalerie has had to loan us a car again. Scott got home about 5:30 last night with the further news that it will be Friday before the dealership has a replacement tire for us. Driving on the spare is a really bad idea as it’s only supposed to be safe for about forty miles. Scott was more than a little panicked at the idea of trying to get back and forth to work twice on the dratted thing (after getting home on it once already). We’re really, really fortunate to have evalerie around.

Cordelia complained last night, right at bedtime, that she has a school assignment problem— She needs to find a book to read that’s at her reading level by tomorrow. All of the books she’s got from the library are rated as too easy by the company who does this system. This thing is called 'lexile levels.' Most YA stuff is 700th to 800th lexile. Cordelia is supposed find a book at 1350. When I went to the official site, all the stuff at her level was very clearly aimed at adults. When I filtered by the age for which things were appropriate, I got absolutely no books at all. The closest thing I saw on the list to something that might be appropriate for Cordelia was The Scarlet Letter, and, well, no. She’s twelve.

I suspect that the big problem is that the company has only rated a few thousand books and has focused heavily on stuff at lexiles that kids are more likely to read. I think, too, that they may only rate things that publishers and/or schools specifically ask them to or that they know are popular.

I emailed her teacher, and I put in a reference request with the local public library. The teacher got back to me this morning. She said that anything between 1000-1400 would be fine, so I went back in. I narrowed the search by length (over 108 pages) and by age (10-13). I didn’t try to limit by genre/subject because I knew there’d be too few options for that. I got very frustrated because there were books that turned up three, four, even five times within a particular lexile, not even different editions of the book— the same exact book.

I turned up 120 books between 1000 and 1370. Most of them were at the low end of the scale. The local library only has a few of these, and those are almost all non-fiction, cataloged for adults, or part of a series without being the first book in the series. Cordelia very much doesn’t want to read non-fiction, but I think she’s going to have to. She also says she must have this book by tomorrow morning which… Yeah. I suppose Scott can take her to the library tonight if we absolutely have to; he’s not going to be thrilled to do it, though.

There were two authors who looked promising, Karen McCombie and Mary Hooper, but the library doesn’t have any of their listed books, so I guess they’re not options. We don’t have time for interlibrary loan (and the state ILL system is going down some time this month for a couple of weeks. I’m not sure when) or for special ordering a book. I suppose I could call and ask Book Bound and Barnes & Noble if they have any of the specific books. I just very much don’t want to have to.

The library just got back to me. I’m not sure that any of their suggestions are things that the lexile people have actually rated. I’m not sure Cordelia’s prepared for Persuasion (that has always struck me as an Austen book that isn’t really comprehensible until a person is well past adolescence). I have asked the teacher if Northanger Abbey or Emma might be acceptable. Code Name Verity and A Clockwork Orange may be too dark for her. I hated The Great Gatsby and Gulliver’s Travels when I read them in high school, so I wouldn’t really expect Cordelia to love them now. I think Cordelia would love Spindle’s End, but I’m not sure she’ll read it given that we own a copy.

I know nothing about The Book Thief, The Midwife’s Apprentice, or The Spies of Mississippi, so I have no comment on them. The only other specific suggestion is Little Women which… I don’t know. Maybe she’d like it. She thought Anne of Green Gables was horrifically boring, though, so I’m dubious.

Cordelia’s tastes run to YA dystopia, YA fantasy, and YA science fiction. She’ll also read some humorous books aimed at her age group that are about the trials and tribulations of middle school or high school students.

I have three more appointments covered by ACS volunteer drivers. I’m glad of that, but I’m also kind of tired of juggling it all and tempted to tell them that I’m covered all the way through, what with my friends and family. It’s just that taking me in is a fair sized bite out of the middle of someone’s day. I do have someone to drive for every single remaining appointment whether the ACS finds someone or not.

I’m trying to make lists of foods our family can’t have or doesn’t like and of foods we actually do know we like. evalerie has offered to coordinate volunteers to try to help us with dinners until I’m recovered. Making the lists is hard because there are so many fiddly things that we need to avoid and because there are a lot of foods that two of the three of us like a lot but that the third person (almost always Cordelia) won’t touch.

Comments

[kalloway]

MelCat will be down from the 18th til who knows when. iirc, December 11th at the latest.

[the_rck]

Thanks! I knew it wasn't supposed to go down until later, but it was down a few days ago when I was looking for something, so I wasn't sure.

[kalloway]

It's been kinda iffy for me, but nowhere near as bad as the local district's site, which goes down pretty much every night in the hour before I go to work + on the weekends. So... pretty much every time I am awake enough to add books to my list. *facepalm*

[retsuko]

The Book Thief is excellent, but heartbreaking. I think she'd like the main character a lot, though, and it may not affect her the way it did me.

[the_rck]

Unfortunately, checking the website, the lexile for The Book Thief is only 730, so it's out of the running. Cordelia did think it looked interesting, though.

[transposable_element]

According to the website I looked at, Northanger Abbey and Emma are both in the right Lexile range.

Has she ever read any Frances Hardinge? Her book Fly By Night is rated 1080. It's a sort of picaresque secondary-world fantasy with some dystopic elements. Her later novel A Face Like Glass is more dystopic (and my favorite of her books), but I can't find a Lexile rating for it anywhere.

[the_rck]

Northanger Abbey and Emma are in the right lexile range, but they didn't turn up in my search because I specified an age range they don't fit. (Oddly, Jane Austen's books seem to vary in lexile according to edition, even when that edition has the full text. I can't figure that out.)

Spindle's End by Robin McKinley is in the right lexile range and didn't turn up because it doesn't have an age range assigned to it at all. I actually own it, and Cordelia very much likes fairy tale retellings, so we're trying that.

If Cordelia wants to try Hardinge, we'll have to wait and use ILL. The local library is usually quite good, but it doesn't have any Hardinge at all. I wonder what age range the lexile people think Fly By Night is good for? I went for 10-13 in my search. I wouldn't have thought that book would be aimed entirely at the under 9 or over 14 crowd. Maybe, like Spindle's End, it doesn't have an age range assigned.

In using the age range, I was trying to filter out all of the really not appropriate stuff I turned up last night-- Cicero and critical analysis of the works of Anne Tyler and that sort of thing.

[transposable_element]

Hardinge seems to be not very well known in the U.S., which I think is a shame. Most of her books are classified as middle reader for marketing purposes. I think this must be because of the age of the protagonists and because there is very little in the way of romance and related activities. I read an interview with her in which she says that she writes for herself at about age 12.

[the_rck]

Our library had Fly By Night for a while, and I tried it but bounced off of it. I've wanted to try her other work because people praise it so highly, but I've never gotten my act together and tried ILL for it. Then again, my tolerance for dark stories has been low for a while now, so maybe putting that off isn't a bad thing. Later on, I might be more likely to enjoy her work.

[laurajv]

that is a tough and annoying problem.

I'm cringing internally at the thought of reading Austen at 12; I think it would've put me off Austen for life.

[the_rck]

I can't say that I'm enthusiastic about the idea of Cordelia reading Austen, especially Persuasion (though Mansfield Park would be worse). I remember bouncing off of Pride and Prejudice as a young teen and thinking that it was quite inferior to Heyer. I very definitely did not get it then.

I have discovered, though, that the options aren't as limited as I thought-- Limiting the search by age doesn't work in a way that makes sense to me. Basically, if one does that, the search only returns things that are completely within the specified range and omits anything that merely overlaps. So, when I said 10-13, that's what it gave me and not 9-12 or 11-14 or anything else that would have made sense to include. Why would a site like that construct its search that way?

I'm a little boggled, however. Apparently both The Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck and The King James Bible are lexile 1000. And The Hunger Games is 810. I would never have considered The Hunger Games simpler in vocabulary and grammar and such than any Diary of a Wimpy Kid books.

[laurajv]

that is a bizarre way to construct an age search. makes no sense whatsoever. :/

my kids are much younger than cordelia but i've already run headlong into the "reading level is high; child is still the age they are no matter what reading level they are" issue. I took a look at the lexile site and although it seems like a better way to judge someone's reading level, I'm pretty uncomfortable with forcing people who are clearly good readers to challenge themselves rather than reading things appropriate to their age.

I'm an adult with a graduate degree in English who largely reads YA, so it's possible I have Opinions in this area

[the_rck]

As you may have seen, the teacher has now told Cordelia that the lexile of the book she picks doesn't matter as long as the subject matter and story structure (if fiction) and all of that are complex. I really wish she'd told us that before I spent hours going through lists and searching the public library catalog and all that.

I'm sure that it's as my husband thinks and the teacher didn't answer the questions we posed with full thought. That is, she answered the way she would for absolutely any child in her class, without thinking that Cordelia's one of the kids who need a different sort of challenge. Apparently, for kids at that advanced a lexile, the teacher doesn't see a point in pushing for a larger vocabulary and more complicated syntax, not at this age.

I am going to email the teacher and let her know about the strangeness of the age search. I think that might be very useful for her to know for other families.

I think that the fact that the website doesn't actually have any instructions about how to construct a good search is a major signal that they're not really together. The company's response to certain questions seems to be 'Shut up! Our algorithms are good because we say so!' (People have asked why the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books are considered higher lexile than, say, Harry Potter and why different unabridged versions of certain English classics have different lexile ratings, differing by as much as 300 points. There are other people not happy with those answers because both responses are getting serious downvotes from people who read them.)

[laurajv]

that seems very SHUT UP AND USE OUR METHOD

I also noticed that they only mention their method as compared to norming, not compared to readability metrics like Flesch-Kincaid...hmmm....

[the_rck]

Someone pointed me at the Wikipedia page, and it looks like the federal government has put a big push behind the lexile system on the theory that it's uniform, easy to apply, etc. A lot of big publishers are on board with it.

Apparently the lexile rating is determined based on analyzing a single 125 word snippet from somewhere inside the book. Changing the punctuation will change the lexile rating.

I'm not familiar with other readability metrics. What is Flesch-Kincaid?

[laurajv]

The Flesch-Kincaid readability tests also analyze the text itself. There's the FRE - Flesch Reading Ease - where higher scores are more easily readable, and you can use it to analyze anything from a single sentence to a whole document. Some very complex sentences or passages therefore can give you extraordinarily silly FRE scores.

The FRE of the preceding paragraph is 52.3.

Then there's the F-K Grade Level, which is a formula that gives you an approximate grade level. The F-K Grade Level was first developed for technical manuals, which is why I know it -- my BS is in Technical Writing -- but it's pretty widely used. A bunch of states have legal requirements for what the F-K score can be on certain kinds of documents; in my first job out of school one of my assignments was to reduce the F-K score of a manual from 12 to 9 or lower.

The F-K of the preceding paragraph is 12.3.

These scores can be manipulated fairly easily (I got the scores from https://readability-score.com, since I don't currently have software that will do it on my machine), and it can be fun to add and remove bits and see how things change.

[kyrielle]

Reading Austen at 14 or 15 put me off Austen for life. Or at least, I think of her as boring and tedious and have never again picked one up.

[laurajv]

I got partway through Pride & Prejudice at 15, had a lightbulb moment that I wasn't old enough for it, and picked it up again at 25. I'm glad I had that moment, and honestly it was pure luck that I did. She was writing for adults! My mother had tried to push it on me and...no, mom, no. Not For Kids.

[zhelana]

The Book Thief is realistic fiction. I'm having trouble getting into it.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

The Midwife's Apprentice is historical fiction about the trials and tribulations of a teenaged girl. (Young teen, I think?) Cordelia might like it. I'm really shocked that it's considered more difficult reading than most YA. I usually see libraries shelve it with the children's books.

The school assignment problem seems to be much more general than that. Has Cordelia run into the idea that she sometimes has to read a book for school that she doesn't like? Maybe a badly-written book, maybe a book from a genre she dislikes, or whatever...she just has to read it anyway, because it's a school assignment. I know she's 12, but a lot of teachers do try to present reading as something the students are supposed to be enjoying. And she might have had so much choice in past reading assignments she expects you will find her something she'll enjoy.

I don't think it's your job to find her something she will enjoy. It may not be possible to find something she will enjoy, given that it has to have the right lexile rating, and it has to be available quickly. How did the teacher expect her to find books with the right lexile rating? Is there a list in the class or the library? Can you ask the teacher to provide a list for her? (Don't be afraid to say you have cancer and need help with this nonsense. [I mean, it's probably prudent not to tell the teacher the lexile ratings are nonsense] But it's ok to ask for help.)

[the_rck]

The lexile ratings are absolutely nonsense-- I've been poking at the website, and the King James Bible and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books are both lexile 1000. Which... um... yeah. Oh, and The Hunger Games is an 810.

I have also discovered that the sorting system is kind of broken. When I specified an age range, the system took that to mean it should only give me titles that fell exactly in that age range. So, when I said I wanted 10-13, I lost 9-12 and 11-14 and other such overlapping variants completely. There also seem to be a bunch of things that don't have an age range attached (Frances Hardinge's books don't, for example, and Spindle's End doesn't) and so didn't come up either.

I think Cordelia's main objection right now is the time involved in trying to pick out a book. I tossed Spindle's End at her because she and I both thought it might work (she likes fairy tale retellings), but she says it's too hard. I think she might not be ready to sustain that 1350 rating over the course of an entire book.

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

We listened to The Midwife's Apprentice as an audiobook, years ago on a road trip. I only vaguely remember it, but I have a vague sense that I liked it.

Adrian Turtle -- It sounds to me like this assignment is meant as reading for pleasure, so my vote is that it *should* be a book that Cordelia might enjoy, not a book that she has to grit her teeth to get through.

The Book Thief sounds pretty dark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Thief

[the_rck]

We looked up The Book Thief. It's a 730.

This stuff is ridiculous-- The website lists both the King James Bible and a couple of Diary of a Wimpy Kid books at 1000. The Hunger Games is 810. I'm not pleased at all.

I think Cordelia's reading stuff that interests and challenges her and that the lexile rating shouldn't matter. I know they need some sort of measure, but this one doesn't work.

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

Yes!!!

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Oh, I read Gulliver's Travels when I was in 5th or 6th grade. I liked it. Considering how reluctant Cordelia is to read the books you recommend because you love them best, do you think she might like (or at least be willing to try) books you bounced off?

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

I think I remember liking Gulliver's Travels too, though mostly because my mom has always talked about books that she has read as if I have read them too, even when I was a small child, and she had done a lot of talking about Gulliver's Travels that never made any sense to me, so it was nice to finally find out what actually happened in that book.

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of seeing if Cordelia will read books that her mom didn't like. :)