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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

My elementary school had a unit (I think in third or fourth grade) where each student made and illustrated a book, which was then bound by the librarians and temporarily added to the school library's collection, on a special shelf (for books by current students). Other students could check it out during the school year, and I think there was even an assignment where you were expected to check out one other student's book and give some kind of report or presentation about it!

At the end of the year, you got your own book back to keep.

This was a really great school project.

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My school has a similar custom. Only the students are older (typically in their 20s) and the books are called "dissertations". Oddly, despite being in the library, and the students spending a long time writing them (often years), few people want to read the books.

On the other hand, to those who did need them, they were potentially invaluable.

Well those are supposed to be nonfiction, that always is less popular than fiction

>> supposed to be

Unfortunately, there's been a general decline in reading comprehension since the '50s. Things that would have been understood to be fiction are now read as unironic fact. Backwoods literalist christianity and backwoods literalist islam burst on the scene at around the same time that academia embraced a malformed version of deconstructionism. Back in the 90s we were so sick of irony we just wanted it to die. Turns out this is how it happened.

This is great, they should have more projects in school that allow kids a chance to move from being passive participants in the system to being contributors to it. I think this is a huge mental barrier that gets reinforced in schools rather than broken.

My primary school’s library included books written by students of any grade, and kept them at least while the students were still at the school, along with dozens of the best ones from further back. The whole endeavor was called the school library “publishing house”.

Students at school who wanted to could write a book (typically 3–10 pages, but occasionally longer), and the handwritten or typed document with line art would be xeroxed 3 times then each copy would be colored by the student, laminated, and spiral bound, with one copy sent home, one to the classroom, and one to the school library. All of the student authors would get to go to a ceremonial “authors’ tea”, held a few times each year.

It was optional but a great experience and some kids enjoyed it so much they “published” several books a year. Others only did it once during primary school, or not at all.

This was all back in the time when schools had enough budget to fund a full-time school librarian who could organize such a project. I don’t think it has continued down to today.

I think that -- even at that age -- the whole project would merely have rendered me more cynical than I was even then. Some smart girl had decided to accuse me of plagiarism for a Halloween-themed story assignment I had turned in (it was "too original").

In junior-high, I had convinced the band conductor to devote 20 minutes (in sacrifice to the sehr verehrter Herr James Swearingen) to a reading of a composition I had written for that ensemble. Hearing someone whose name or face I didn't know whistle one of the trite themes I contrived instilled in me an aeternal question mark: was that mocking or camaraderie?

Later, as an undergraduate, I awoke to hear some vandals (one of which was claimed to be the offspring of Frank Zappa -- as if that that put him on the order of a C.P.E Bach) demur to hurl paint on my door because he heard my sting quartet at workshop ("no dude, he's cool, did you hear...").

One may as well convince others of your worth by means of buying companies (a ls Musk) or by hurling interstellar bottles into space, only to suffer the heat-death.

The saddest, most devastating thought that has ever occurred to me is that despite Voyager's drift, the genius of J.S. Bach will ultimately be erased.

This comment is mensa-syndrome on overdrive.

It's a book project, if it makes you cynical and go on a diatribe about Bach, you may need to chill down a bit.

Maybe it's their book project, written right here.

Reminds me a little bit of a mobile development class where the teacher had everyone post an app on the play store. A few of them were pretty good.

should have done that in iOS and watch them all get rejected.

When my daughter was four she wrote an illustrated book and had it published on Amazon. It sold three copies. Dad, grandma and her uncle.

This would sux so hard for me. I could not draw at all. Having to have illustrated book publicly available would be major stressor for me.

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