When I was in elementary school, we had some reading challenges. We would track our personal progress in terms of how many books we’d finished reading within a certain amount of time and we’d get little stickers or marks on a poster. I can’t remember if finishing a book was a point or every 100 pages was a point, but it was certainly one of the earliest competitive achievement-based reward systems I encountered.<\/p>\n
And I did what I tend to do when faced with such a situation: I tried to win. I tried to win pretty badly. I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything but read for a month. And I did win. I obliterated everyone else in my class. To top it off, I’m pretty sure I even lied a little bit about finishing my very last book (something epic, like Moby Dick).<\/p>\n
I don’t really read anymore. I flip through the Entertainment Weeklys that come each week and read a novel out loud to Katie once a week or so. I sometimes read something in the public domain slowly on my iPhone. But that’s pretty much it. With no stickers on a poster, I guess there just isn’t enough incentive.<\/p>\n
So, I guess the trick is tricking myself into thinking there are stickers for reading or actually reward myself for reading with ice cream or something equally compelling. I do want to read more. Convincing myself that it’s worth the effort turns out to be the tricky part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was in elementary school, we had some reading challenges. We would track our personal progress in terms of how many books we’d finished reading within a certain amount of time and we’d get little stickers or marks on a poster. I can’t remember if finishing a book was a point or every 100 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[129,169,186],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-year26","tag-ice-cream","tag-reading","tag-school","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":365,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions\/365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}