Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II

A few years ago, a friend of my mother’s asked her if I did any tutoring. I was happy to make a few extra bucks every week, so I agreed. The mother, it turns out, was a local piano teacher who was very happy with my services. Other parents began calling to ask about tutoring as well. I now have nine students, and I hold writing classes of no more than four kids. It’s a little writing seminar for 9-year-olds.

Last spring, two mothers approached me not for writing help, but reading help. Their boys, both in seventh grade, were lagging on reading comprehension scores. Could I help? The truth is, I don’t know anything about reading comprehension or how to improve it, and I told them this. But they seemed so desperate that they ignored my disclaimers and wanted to try me out anyway.

Once a week, these two boys who had no sense of appropriate behavior sat with me, making rude jokes, talking nonstop, and ignoring my instructions. These boys didn’t have a reading comprehension problem. They had a behavioral problem.

Not only did I dread this hour every week, but my preparation time increased by more than an hour just for this class. I was looking for reading material that I prayed was interesting to them, and then I had to think up activities and questions that went with it. I could see how their regular seventh grade reading textbook bored them out of their minds, and I had this noble idea that if only they had the right reading materials, they would pay attention.

After several months of misery, one of the boys suggested Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II (since he had already read the first volume). I jumped on the idea immediately. For one thing, it was an actual suggestion made by one of the boys. The other was that I knew that the book was a compilation of short stories, perfect for reading comprehension practice.

So I bought a copy of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II, and started reading the stories. I was amazed and astounded by the terrible, terrible quality of the writing in this book! I was also shocked by the inanity of the subject matter, ranging from classroom crushes to drug abuse. The writers and editors even managed to make real issues like death and friendship boring and laughable. I was actually angry that they are passing off this drivel to teenagers and charging money for it. We used it in one class and all three of us were taken aback at how dumb what we were doing was. It was a new low.

At the end of the school year, the boys took the summer off. They never came back.

Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II

Tags: book+reviews teenagers reading+comprehension chicken+soup