Reading homework on mobile phone

[Parkerpenny]

Secondary English homework:

New school initiative, reading outdated from a mobile phone App and answering questions from memory. I guess the books are so old as they are copyright free and the App creators make more money.

So far, we have encountered outdated attitudes and language, so in my DCs current book, Sherlock Holmes visits a drugs den with opium and cocaine injecting, smokes 'shag' and 'wakes up with an ejaculation'. (LOL)

Women are non characters with non brains.

There is a wealth of actual books for teens to read but this style of homework works against my child's love of reading and works against us trying to limit screen time.

YABU - Get the hwk done and then read actual books.

YANBU - This is a dumbing down of actual reading and a poor version of education.

What's the app/ initiative called?

Er the Sherlock Holmes thing sounds pretty inappropriate and I'd flag it with the school.

Sparx Reader

I feel like the parent who always emails!

Holmes ejaculates a lot. Luckily, when I teach it, I'm there to deal with the linguistic foibles.

This (reading online and mechanistic comprehension tasks) is - in my opinion - a piss poor way of "improving reading for pleasure" which requires very little input from the school apart from paying for it.

I see WHY they're doing it, though.

I don’t think reading the original Sherlock Holmes stories can do any harm. It could improve reading and writing skills. Shag tobacco is just an old fashioned term for loose tobacco, an ejaculation is an exclamation and you see far worse drug dens on the TV.
So IMO you are being unreasonable.

I feel like Sparx Maths/Reader have the monopoly on all Secondary school homeworks!
My son's read a Sherlock Holmes on his Sparx reader and really enjoyed it. From a teaching perspective- class sets of books are invariably lost, graffited, damaged or never returned however, almost all children have a phone and the app (don't come at me just yet, I know that not every child does!) SHOULD all children read the paper book instead? Maybe. However DO they? No, so we've got to work with what we've got.

Why is Sherlock Holmes inappropriate? Language and attitudes change, it's good to learn about them.

Learning about them, yes. But reading the stories without someone to provide the context, perhaps less so.

I have vivid memories of a scene in The Sign of the Four in which Holmes fingers a rope. My year 11 Bobs were helpless in the face of that, until I explained what it actually meant.

Ok so I completely withdraw my first post - had utterly forgotten the original use of the term ejaculate and also wasn't sure if that you were reading the original AC Doyle Holmes.
Sorry.

Thanks for the responses.

I am not prudish against the old fashioned language or a bit of ejaculation and shag (LOL) but it just shows that it hasn't really been thought through and is just a money making app rather than adding very much to an enriching education. There are just so many other authors on offer these days and a rich diversity which we can offer to our own child. Sparx just takes up so much time and just ticks a read for pleasure Ofsted box when it is probably achieving the opposite.

I thought Sparx maths was bad but the reading really sucks!

There are just so many other authors on offer these days and a rich diversity which we can offer to our own child

But modern authors will be in copyright, so there will be an additional cost to read those.