Harvard student to her peers: read
Fourteen lines? tl;dr
“Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet”: from an Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”
“Is Reading Over for Gen Z Students?”
Listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos — two suggestions offered in this podcast — don’t replace the work (and joy) of reading. Podcasts and YouTube videos might, on occasion, supplement the work (and joy) of reading in worthwhile ways. But without the reading, what’s the point? If instructors are unwilling to assign “an entire novel,” exactly what are podcasts and YouTube videos supposed to be supplementing? And what happens when the work of listening and watching becomes odious?
Reading or not in college
The limited ability of many students to read and write about complex or lengthy texts is a sad and still largely unacknowledged fact of college life.
Struggling to read
Adam Kotsko writes about the decline in college students’ reading ability.
College these days
You can find nuance in this piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education if you like, but here’s the bottom line: a professor invited his students to read a book — a “physical book” — for extra credit.
Reading or not
Behind the Chronicle of Higher Education paywall, Steven Johnson’s report on “The Fall, and Rise, of Reading” in college courses. Here, a few takeaways.
More reading
On one page of The Chronicle of Higher Education, an argument for less reading and more “writing.” But on another page: an account of a community-college’s effort to make use of Columbia University’s core curriculum.
Less reading, more “writing”
To my mind, reading and writing are just things one does in a college class. As students’ language skills decline, assigning less reading and more “writing” solves nothing.
Reading, really fast
I learned yesterday that for some English majors, it’s now a point of pride to go really fast when reading aloud, with little or no regard for phrasing or intonation. Why is going fast a point of pride? Because so many students cannot read aloud with much fluency.
Moby-Dick at Harvard
“It’s sad to think of the faux mastery that passes for English studies in this account, and impossible to imagine playing the game, as student or teacher, without losing all intellectual self-respect.”
A Phi Beta Kappa infographic
“What those of us in higher education can do to make this infographic’s assertions credible: drop the PowerPoints and (so-called) study guides and perfunctory course requirements and ask students to engage in significant reading and writing and discussion. The stuff college is made of, or should be.”
The bookish expelled
“They dwell on passages. They ask difficult questions. They might even stare out a window for a while and think about what they have read.”
Recreational and recreative reading
I remember some years ago hearing of a college administrator who characterized English studies as “recreative reading.” It seems appropriate that he chose the needless variant.
Students and books
The appeal of paper
Trading places
Reading levels declining over eleven years
Freshmen surveyed
Books are a load of crap. Philip Larkin, "A Study of Reading Habits" "The 2007 Na...
Words, mere words
On the value of language