The Loss of Things I Took for Granted

From Slate:

As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.

Since this development very directly affects my ability to do my job as I understand it, I talk about it a lot. And when I talk about it with nonacademics, certain predictable responses inevitably arise, all questioning the reality of the trend I describe. Hasn’t every generation felt that the younger cohort is going to hell in a handbasket? Haven’t professors always complained that educators at earlier levels are not adequately equipping their students? And haven’t students from time immemorial skipped the readings?

The response of my fellow academics, however, reassures me that I’m not simply indulging in intergenerational grousing. Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience. Professors are also discussing the issue in academic trade publications, from a variety of perspectives. What we almost all seem to agree on is that we are facing new obstacles in structuring and delivering our courses, requiring us to ratchet down expectations in the face of a ratcheting down of preparation. Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade—except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.

If we ask what has caused this change, there are some obvious culprits. The first is the same thing that has taken away almost everyone’s ability to focus—the ubiquitous smartphone. Even as a career academic who studies the Quran in Arabic for fun, I have noticed my reading endurance flagging. I once found myself boasting at a faculty meeting that I had read through my entire hourlong train ride without looking at my phone. My colleagues agreed this was a major feat, one they had not achieved recently. Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to “turn it on” when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. That’s because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age, meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.

The second go-to explanation is the massive disruption of school closures during COVID-19. There is still some debate about the necessity of those measures, but what is not up for debate any longer is the very real learning loss that students suffered at every level. The impact will inevitably continue to be felt for the next decade or more, until the last cohort affected by the mass “pivot to online” finally graduates. I doubt that the pandemic closures were the decisive factor in themselves, however. Not only did the marked decline in reading resilience start before the pandemic, but the students I am seeing would have already been in high school during the school closures. Hence they would be better equipped to get something out of the online format and, more importantly, their basic reading competence would have already been established.

Less discussed than these broader cultural trends over which educators have little control are the major changes in reading pedagogy that have occurred in recent decades—some motivated by the ever-increasing demand to “teach to the test” and some by fads coming out of schools of education. In the latter category is the widely discussed decline in phonics education in favor of the “balanced literacy” approach advocated by education expert Lucy Calkins (who has more recently come to accept the need for more phonics instruction). I started to see the results of this ill-advised change several years ago, when students abruptly stopped attempting to sound out unfamiliar words and instead paused until they recognized the whole word as a unit. (In a recent class session, a smart, capable student was caught short by the word circumstances when reading a text out loud.) The result of this vibes-based literacy is that students never attain genuine fluency in reading. Even aside from the impact of smartphones, their experience of reading is constantly interrupted by their intentionally cultivated inability to process unfamiliar words.

For all the flaws of the balanced literacy method, it was presumably implemented by people who thought it would help. It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards, teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. The emphasis on standardized tests was always a distraction at best, but we have reached the point where it is actively cannibalizing students’ educational experience—an outcome no one intended or planned, and for which there is no possible justification.

. . . .

 I have to think that we can, at the very least, stop actively preventing young people from developing the ability to follow extended narratives and arguments in the classroom. Regardless of their profession or ultimate educational level, they will need those skills. The world is a complicated place. People—their histories and identities, their institutions and work processes, their fears and desires—are simply too complex to be captured in a worksheet with a paragraph and some reading comprehension questions. Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.

Link to the rest at Slate

PG will leave it to others to confirm or criticize the OP’s claims.

However, as he read the OP, he was reminded of several recent occasions in local restaurants where a young man and a young woman appeared to be on a date, but instead of talking with each other across the table, were each were texting rapidly, their focus exclusively on each of their smartphones.

The secret to reading the most complex literary classics

From The Independent:

There’s something very quaint about being intimidated by a book.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve all been there. We all have a volume in our collection that we bought on impulse, but can’t imagine ever actually sitting down and opening. Maybe it’s by an author who has a reputation for complex prose. Maybe it’s about a topic we haven’t encountered before, and we don’t feel we have the required background knowledge to properly engage with it. Maybe it’s a 900-page monster, and we can’t summon the courage to approach a tome whose sheer heft could probably kill a man if dropped from a substantial height.

But as a former English teacher, PhD researcher, editor, writer and recovering bibliophile, let me tell you a secret: books are more scared of you than you are of them.

(Or maybe that’s spiders. Either way, the point stands.)

I grew up in an area where reading was regarded with suspicion at best, and punitive action at worst, so my relationship with literature has always been complicated. By the time I was 17 and university was on the horizon, I had a vague idea that I wanted to study English, but I was a solid C-student (on a good day), so I’d made my peace with the fact that there would always be certain books that would remain off limits to me. I wouldn’t be dabbling in Dostoevsky. I wouldn’t be tackling Tolstoy. I wouldn’t be… kicking it… with… Kafka? That last one wasn’t as good.

My college library had a couple of shelves dedicated to the “Everyman Millennium library”, which was a really beautiful collection of classics in hardback. You had your major players – Dickens, Shakespeare, a handful of Brontes, etc – but there were also all these authors I’d never heard of before. Who was Marcel Proust? Or Nikolai Gogol? Is that man’s name literally “Balzac”? Surely that isn’t pronounced the way it’s spelled? (Reader, it was pronounced exactly the way it’s spelled).

. . . .

I spent the rest of the year checking out books at random and trying to read them. I started with books I was vaguely aware of, that were sub-200 pages, and gradually started to work my way up to thicker and more complicated volumes.

Here’s the thing about jumping straight to 19th century European realism when the most advanced book you’ve read so far is the last Harry Potter: your comprehension is not going to be great. Most of the time I wouldn’t classify what I was doing as “reading” – really I was just scanning my eyes over the page, only taking in the odd sentence fragment here and there. If I could get my hand on a plot summary or set of SparkNotes, I’d sometimes read that, alongside whichever book I was currently in the middle of, just so I didn’t feel completely adrift – but in general I just tasted the words on the page, with the occasional moment of comprehension as a rare bonus.

When I put it like that, it probably sounds like a waste of time, but I can’t recommend it enough. I “read” every James Joyce book in order, including Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and took in maybe 1 per cent of what he wrote. I “read” In Search of Lost Time over the course of several weeks, and came out the other side with only a dim awareness of what had happened. I got a good few books deep into Emile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart cycle before I realised they were even supposed to be connected to each other.

But even though my comprehension was minimal, I found that the act of reading was in itself valuable. It sounds obvious to say, but it was like exercising a muscle, where even if you struggle in the exercise you’ll still find that you feel the benefits later on. Going back to “normal” books after you’ve read Ezra Pound’s Cantos in full becomes trivial (even if you did only understand three of the poems). Better still, when you come back to those really complicated books somewhere down the line – the ones you thought went completely over your head on a first reading – you’ll find that you got a lot more out of them the first time than you thought you did.

The benefits go beyond the act of reading, too. There’s something to be said for the confidence with which you approach other tasks once you’ve persevered with a 1000-page Modernist abomination. It made me a better writer, a better public speaker, and a more attentive student. It’s probably the only reason I still have anything like an attention span in a world of iPhones. Plus, there are the bragging rights of getting to tell people you read Ulysses (they don’t need to know that you have no idea what happened in it).

Link to the rest at The Independent