A couple of weeks ago I noticed that a ton of middle schoolers were saying that they “don’t like non-fiction books” because they’re so “boring." And I was kind of appalled. I wandered if they even knew how vast and voluminous (vocab words!) the non-fiction genre is, just like fiction is. So I decided to conduct a survey and not just ask one student, but to ask 20, because 20 students would probably be more reliable than 1. And I needed to find out about a few things. At first I needed to know if each individual liked fiction or non-fiction, and why. If they knew some examples of non-fiction. And if any non-fiction interested them. I surveyed roughly the same amount of 6th, 7th and 8th graders and here were my results.
Fiction or non-fiction?: 15 fiction, 2 non-fiction, and 3 said both.
Why do you like that genre?:
- Don’t like the real world, like fake things. – 5
- Boring. – 3
- Too serious [in non-fiction] – 2
- Everything is perfect [in fiction]. – 1
- Lose interest [in non-fiction]. – 1
- Truthful [in non-fiction]. – 1
- [Non-fiction] is helpful to learn. – 2
Examples of non-fiction?:
- Magazines. – 8
- Newspapers. – 5
- Science/math books. – 4
- Biographies. – 3
- Journals. – 2
Does any non-fiction interest you? What kind?:
- Science books. – 1
- Math books. – 1
- Biology books. – 1
- History books. -1
- True stories. – 1
When I saw the results, I wasn’t that surprised. I kind of figured that fiction would be more popular than non-fiction because the students were almost telling me this BEFORE I did the survey… and the reasoning behind their decision was ‘normal’ in a sense. But when I saw how many examples of non-fiction people said, I was blown away (...almost). Everybody knew a lot of works of non-fiction and they still didn’t like it. I thought that if, and when they knew what was in the non-fiction genre they would like it. But evidently that wasn’t the case. So, my conclusion is that they are all aliens… (Just kidding)
