Doug Unplugged: Kids book review

Post first published in my personal newsletter

People learn differently. There are so many ways to bring in information, that it is silly to think that everyone learns just like you do. for instance. Rebecca and I despise reading. We are visual learners. This meant if I had a teacher who only talked, I would have to take notes. There was just no way I would remember anything said... I had to develop my writing so that I could learn from that teacher. Even better was learning hands on. 

Geometry was a stupid class, I'd be ridiculous if I thought English was a silly class but I didn't learn much. I know for a fact, learning every bone in my body was a waste of my time. This was brought up last week by a friend. "Why don't schools teach taxes," and really why don't they? After high school, I was plopped out in the world like many of us with little real world business knowledge. Which is how every person makes the resources to feed themselves.

I have never once been asked by the government to find the angle of a parallelogram, They have never asked me to correct my grammar, and I know we have doctors to tell us what bone we broke... but the government will make it a point to shut you down if you don't figure out your taxes. 

Everything I learned in Highschool that was valuable, happened outside of the classroom. I learned how to tell a joke and make a friend. Some academics might say, this isn't a skill but that's ridiculous. I know I have used that skill 200 times for every one time I did long division since 2005. 

Doug unplugged points this out in a big way. Every day Doug's Parents plug him into this matrix that is supposed to teach him everything so he can be a smart robot. What they didn't know is apparently their son is not an internal learner... Like a lot of kids, Doug is a hands on learner. 

Doug sees a pigeon and realizes he knows so much about pigeons but he had never heard one coo. He decides to unplug and set out for adventure. The book does a good job showing, world experience is leagues more important than schools make it seem. Doug goes around town learning the most basic of things. The type of things all of us take for granted. It made me wonder what the heck the plugin was even teaching the poor kid. 

this all ends quite abrupt as he makes a friend and watches the friend hug his parents.... Doug flys home to give his parents a hug.... 

Don't get me wrong, the message is there, but it was like the author looked at his page count and was like oh shit... I gotta think of an ending pretty quick here. Only got 4 more pages. I just felt like there was more to tell with the ending of that story, but I didn't learn story structure in school so what do I know. I only learned grammar and read poems in old English. (I drew a lot in English who really knows.)

ART
the art in this book is fun. nice and simple shapes. There is one page that uses an infographic style to show how he learns when he is plugged in which I really enjoyed looking at. Great character design and nice coloring. Very fun to look at.