The Chronicle of Higher Education asks, “Is This the End of Reading?” Reading in college, that is. An excerpt:
Academics across the country are talking about the reading problems they are seeing among traditional-age students. Many, they say, don’t see the point in doing much work outside of class. Some struggle with reading endurance and weak vocabulary. A lack of faith in their own academic abilities leads some students to freeze and avoid doing the work altogether.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. I’ll quote myself, looking backwards as a retired professor of English:
And a significant number of those who do the work seem unable to analyze complex or lengthy texts. Their limited experience with reading also means they don’t have the context to understand certain arguments or points of view.
I wonder about the extent to which the dreary professorial practice of outlining the textbook on “the board” is not merely a matter of professorial laziness but a way to compensate, consciously or unconsciously, for students’ weaknesses as readers. And I wonder about the extent to which the decline of interest in the humanities might be explained at least in part by the difficulty so many college students have with the mechanics of reading. Figuring out the words is, for many college students, just plain hard — because they were never properly taught how.The most revealing bit in the Chronicle article: the story of an academic who wrote in 2019 about her decision to require less reading, because less is (somehow) more. How did that work out? As time went on, she found her students still struggling, or not doing the reading at all:
She has long followed the mantra “meet your students where they are.” But she says if she meets them any further down, she’ll feel like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.Related posts
All OCA reading in college posts (Pinboard)
comments: 4
I'm starting to favor in-person oral exit exams at this point. If students can't demonstrate basic textual comprehnsion skills, they shouldn't be passing classes or getting degrees.
I think that’s the cue for an administrator to step from behind a curtain and say, “Find creative ways to help students pass!”
If I were still teaching, I think I’d rely on the spoken word and the in-class written word. Life is too short to waste time on the products of AI.
I hear colleagues say things like "well, times change" but it still depresses me. What flow-on effects is this going to have in the future?
Times change, but they change for reasons. I started seeing catastrophic change in students’ abilities and engagement in the fall of 2007, with traditional-age students whose life from eighth grade on had been shaped by No Child Left Behind. But I try to be optimistic in all things. I’d like to see reading instruction revamped from elementary school on, and I’d like to see an intensive year-long course of study (government-funded) for students who have been shortchanged in their formal education and aren’t college-ready. I can dream.
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