Nadezhda S. (1) (ILE) about the diversity of interests and love of reading

Hobbies for an ILE child are short-lived: something catches their interest — cool, beautiful, “I’m going to do this, it’s the dream of my whole life.” They do it for a few days, a week, a month, and then it’s no longer interesting, they’re bored. Then they see something else — again admiration, and so on every time. Long-term hobbies are rare. I had photography, a drama club, drawing, assembling model cars — basically lots and lots of hobbies, but all of them were short-lived. And to this day — still short.

<...> In childhood, everything in the world was interesting to me. I took apart all the alarm clocks. We had big wall clocks; I broke them, the hands would fall off. I managed to take them apart but couldn’t put them back together. I just stuffed everything back into the case. At home we had two broken clocks like that — I was curious.

I loved a constructor set with cars. It had many plastic, multicolored parts, and lots of pictures of the cars you could build in the end. And so I made those cars.

I was also interested in going to new places.

<...> I’ve read a lot since childhood. There had to be books at home — and different kinds. We had a cabinet, and one whole section was children’s books of all sorts; I liked reading by myself. They told me: go do your homework, don’t read books. I had a pop-up book: when you opened it, little figures would stand up — it was about a prince, everything beautiful and colorful, with houses and castles. I loved that book. There were children’s books about the zoo with only two lines of text on a page and mostly pictures. I don’t remember being read to much as a child.

For as long as I remember, I myself was drawn to books — I read adventure stories, love stories, everything in the world. I didn’t like many of the works we studied in school because they were uninteresting. Now I think we just studied them too early. We didn’t have the understanding to appreciate them. I read Mayne Reid, I read Belyaev — everything by them. I read a lot of Jack London; I liked adventure novels. That was around seventh grade. Later, when I got older, I started reading romance novels.

How do you get a child to read? You need to read interesting books to them every day from early childhood.

I have a constant need to learn something interesting. Now at work I sit on the Internet all day, I have no time to work — this is interesting, and this is interesting, and everything is interesting; I scatter my attention everywhere, I want to look at everything, download everything, learn everything. My eyes start to hurt, but everything is interesting, I want everything. I’ve downloaded a whole flash drive full of books for home. I probably have an entire library of e-books on my computer.

I constantly crave something interesting, and more interesting things.

This child needs to develop memory and attention. There are plenty of modern techniques now; this child often has poor memory, great distractibility, and often forgets everything. Very little sticks in the mind. Everything is interesting, but little gets remembered.