When I was in the fourth grade, my reading book had two science fiction stories — “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury and “The Fun They Had” by Issac Asimov.<\/p>\n
I’ve been thinking about the first story quite a bit lately, as it’s been raining so much.\u00a0 I’m beginning to feel like the protagonist, who is slowly going crazy because of the rain.<\/p>\n
But these two stories also trigger a thought.\u00a0 How many people got into science fiction because of stories they\u00a0read in school<\/em>?\u00a0 Probably few people older than I am, as the genre was considered beneath contempt by many educators before I started going to school.\u00a0 In Stranger in a Strange Land<\/em>, there’s this throw-away line about a character having read\u00a0War of the Worlds <\/em>in school, “same as everybody”.\u00a0 When the book was\u00a0first published, I am sure it was meant to be a least a little absurd.\u00a0And yet, my fifth grade teacher, who read aloud to the class quite a bit, read A Wrinkle in Time<\/em> to the class.\u00a0 When I was in 10th grade, I was actually able to take a whole unit in spec-fic.\u00a0 We read Dune, <\/em>and A Canticle for Leibowitz <\/em>(Hey, it was still the Cold War).\u00a0 I’m trying to remember others, but I can’t.<\/p>\n If you’re over 35 or so, did you ever<\/em> encounter science fiction as part of your school curriculum?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was in the fourth grade, my reading book had two science fiction stories — “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury and “The Fun They Had” by Issac Asimov. I’ve been thinking about the first story quite a bit lately, as it’s been raining so much.\u00a0 I’m beginning to feel like the … <\/p>\n