57 votes

The elite college students who can’t read books

92 comments

  1. [35]
    ShroudedScribe
    Link
    I had no idea so many grade school students were no longer reading complete books. Even if that number is just over 10%, that's wild to me. I'll admit that I fell into temptation and leveraged...

    I had no idea so many grade school students were no longer reading complete books. Even if that number is just over 10%, that's wild to me. I'll admit that I fell into temptation and leveraged CliffNotes a couple of times, but assuming my workload wasn't too high, I didn't mind reading.

    44 votes
    1. [34]
      Plik
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      I basically stopped reading for fun in undergrad and on because the readings for class (books and textbooks) just killed my power to read for leisure. It wasn't until I was working again that I...

      I basically stopped reading for fun in undergrad and on because the readings for class (books and textbooks) just killed my power to read for leisure.

      It wasn't until I was working again that I started to read for fun, but still at a lower rate.

      But man, imagine being a middle or high school nerd and not having read LOTR, Silmarillion, WoT, Dragonlance, Dune, William Gibson, etc. That's crazy.

      Edit: anddd there I go spelling leisure as leasure :/

      51 votes
      1. [29]
        DavesWorld
        Link Parent
        The books a standard English class's curriculum pushes as required reading very commonly destroy many students' desire to read outside of enforced requirements. Every time I point this out, it...

        I basically stopped reading for fun in undergrad and on because the readings for class (books and textbooks) just killed my power to read for leisure.

        The books a standard English class's curriculum pushes as required reading very commonly destroy many students' desire to read outside of enforced requirements. Every time I point this out, it usually enrages the hell out of English Teacher and/or Literary Student types. Their usual position seems to be "anyone who doesn't adore (standard required reading titles) is an uncultured swine who just needs to try harder to appreciate true literature."

        Which is the exact reason most people who get turned off from reading stop reading. It's supposed to be an enjoyable experience, something they look forward to. Their reaction should be "I get to read a book I enjoy." Instead, English class and English teachers usually end up teaching them "books are boring as hell and you're an idiot for not understanding how you should like them despite this."

        There's a reason leisure reading has cratered in the modern world. And it's not only because there are many more things one could do with their time other than read these days. Sure people have Youtube and movies and so on, but people who enjoy reading make time to read. Anyone who enjoys something, whatever that something is, usually makes time for that thing. Because they enjoy it.

        When the standard curriculum consistently produces people who abhor reading, which has been exactly what happens for going on four or five decades now, my argument is there is something seriously wrong with the curriculum. Which is where the elitists and English Teacher types come back into it, insisting people are wrong. That people should simply learn to like the 'right' things and stop hating them.

        Yeah, that's clearly working. Demanding people just stop hating reading is the way to fix it. That'll encourage people to read. Changing course, and putting some more modern, relatable, engaging titles on the lists ... nah, that'll never work. That'll never encourage more people to develop a love of reading. We should just continue to shame and berate them for not embracing "the classics."

        48 votes
        1. [10]
          chocobean
          Link Parent
          Case to your point: I still dislike reading Shakespeare, for the same reason I watch movies instead of read scripts. The standard way of teaching Shakespeare, line by line, respond in short...

          Case to your point: I still dislike reading Shakespeare, for the same reason I watch movies instead of read scripts. The standard way of teaching Shakespeare, line by line, respond in short essays, suck.

          The correct way for appreciation should be from watching a good company production live, then a tv version with subtitles, and then text as respond teaching tool.

          It's like making kids learn music theory and read sheet without ever letting them hear a single piece of music, and then wondering why kids hate music.

          41 votes
          1. [3]
            GenuinelyCrooked
            Link Parent
            Also, look, I get that it's uncomfortable to talk about sex and dick jokes with teens, but if you take those things out of Shakespeare you ruin it. Sanitizing it and pretending that it's higher...

            Also, look, I get that it's uncomfortable to talk about sex and dick jokes with teens, but if you take those things out of Shakespeare you ruin it. Sanitizing it and pretending that it's higher brow than it is makes it boring. I had a teacher that threw tampons at us when we were being rowdy and wasn't afraid to talk to us about the raunchy stuff, and the whole class got so enthusiastic about A Midsummer Night's Dream. It made a huge difference. Those same kids could barely stay awake the next year going over Much Ado About Nothing, which can also be hilarious when taught correctly, because the teacher was afraid of talking about sex any more than the bare minimum necessary to understand the text.

            32 votes
            1. [2]
              chocobean
              Link Parent
              That's pretty funny to have tampons thrown at kids, but probably won't fly these days :) That's a shame, yeah, there's a lot of fun ranchy stuff in Much Ado. Heck even in Macbeth, a tragedy, the...

              That's pretty funny to have tampons thrown at kids, but probably won't fly these days :)

              That's a shame, yeah, there's a lot of fun ranchy stuff in Much Ado. Heck even in Macbeth, a tragedy, the porter speaks of alcohol and sex. It's funny stuff, that, given some breath, will naturally stir interest.

              8 votes
              1. GenuinelyCrooked
                Link Parent
                It didn't hurt us, it worked great to get our attention, and it made us comfortable with being silly while still respecting the teacher and shutting up while she talked. Honestly it was a genius...

                It didn't hurt us, it worked great to get our attention, and it made us comfortable with being silly while still respecting the teacher and shutting up while she talked. Honestly it was a genius move and it's a shame it would be politicized if it happened now.

                Shakespeare was written to draw an audience. It wasn't written to impress hundreds of years of scholars, it was written to sell tickets. To that end, the plays are funny and sexy and violent, just like a lot of the stories that we enjoy now. Even the tragedies had "comic relief". It's easy to read them to a class of teenagers without them catching on about a lot of the sex, because they're unfamiliar with a lot of the euphemisms and implications, but that removes a lot of the humor and an important layer of understanding.

                The really cool thing about our time reading A Midsummer Night's Dream is that yeah, we made a lot of jokes about the sex, but that wasn't the sum total of our enjoyment. Acknowledging the sex allowed us to catch on to the humor, and it also just made us more comfortable with enjoying the things that felt like spectacle. A man's head being turned into a donkey head is funny! Closing out a play with "if you didn't like the play, consider this; maybe you dreamed it and it's your own stupid fault for having dumb dreams" is straight up laying the foundations for Deadpool to play with the fourth wall. But if your eyes have glazed over before you even know who Puck is, you're not going to enjoy it when he closes the play on a note of humor, if you're even paying close enough attention at that point to get it.

                This same sex-positive teacher also taught The Crucible, and it was the same. Instead of a dry, dusty, boring slog, she explained how it was a proto-Mean Girls with deadly consequences. The problem isn't just that teens have to read books that are boring, it's that books that were written for adults and include sex and violence have those aspects de-emphasized in the curriculum, and that makes even good books boring.

                20 votes
          2. [2]
            Akir
            Link Parent
            I really think we as a society need to spend more on exposing children to the arts. Reading Shakespeare scripts is like watching a dance performed by someone without limbs - you might still be...

            I really think we as a society need to spend more on exposing children to the arts. Reading Shakespeare scripts is like watching a dance performed by someone without limbs - you might still be able to appreciate it, but it's missing the full range of expression. Missing out on a performance robs you of body language, intonation, visual signposting (from set, prop, and costume design), and so on. It's basically like saying "we need to teach The Scarlet Letter" but only giving students access to the Wikipedia summary of the book. I cannot think of a single objective that would be better served from reading the script alone versus seeing it actually performed - except, perhaps, as a source of examples for poetic devices and form.

            8 votes
            1. teaearlgraycold
              Link Parent
              Yes. Reading the script to break down the exact word mechanics employed is useful. But that could be done for smaller sections.

              Yes. Reading the script to break down the exact word mechanics employed is useful. But that could be done for smaller sections.

              6 votes
          3. terr
            Link Parent
            When I was in college studying theatre arts, I'm not ashamed to admit that a group of my peers and I got together to watch Kenneth Branagh's rendition of Hamlet rather than reading the play. It...

            When I was in college studying theatre arts, I'm not ashamed to admit that a group of my peers and I got together to watch Kenneth Branagh's rendition of Hamlet rather than reading the play. It was very well made, engaging, true to the original script, and significantly easier (and faster) to absorb than reading the text. (Our only problem with it was that as they were carrying the dead Hamlet off, as his dead eyes stare at the screen, Kenneth blinked a fraction of a second before the scene faded out. It really spoiled the experience!)

            Overall, I'd also recommend a good production (whether live or recorded) before diving into the text.

            5 votes
          4. CannibalisticApple
            Link Parent
            This reminds me of one of the only books my high school class stopped reading midway. We actually had pretty decent selections of books compared to some classes. One of them was an autobiography...

            The standard way of teaching Shakespeare, line by line, respond in short essays, suck.

            This reminds me of one of the only books my high school class stopped reading midway. We actually had pretty decent selections of books compared to some classes. One of them was an autobiography of someone who climbed mountains as a teen, and I think we would have probably been okay with it if the teacher hadn't experimented with homework and made us write notes on every page. It was just one or two bullet points per page, but even that was tedious and bad. Sometimes there just isn't enough substance on a page to make a single bullet point.

            We were all miserable reading it. Even I, the one who constantly reads ahead and was known for being a major bookworm who'd read ahead in class, hated it. The teacher let us vote on whether to stop, and it was unanimous. I fully blame that homework for burning us out so bad.

            (If anyone is curious, the other book we stopped reading was Speak. The teacher had chosen it as our first book in freshman year, which had a "coming of age" theme, and planned to read it for the first time along with us. I was checking out the interviews at the back to avoid reading ahead due to a friend's teasing, and thus discovered that it was NOT a coming of age book but about a rape survivor. We dropped the book since that was a bit too heavy for our class, but I got permission to keep reading it on my own time.)

            5 votes
          5. teaearlgraycold
            Link Parent
            Completely agree. I’ve always loved to see Shakespeare live. Some of the adaptations are pretty good too. Switching this up would also eliminate most of the time spent testing students on if they...

            Completely agree. I’ve always loved to see Shakespeare live. Some of the adaptations are pretty good too. Switching this up would also eliminate most of the time spent testing students on if they read the play. You can now primarily test for analysis skills.

            4 votes
          6. public
            Link Parent
            Your example about music is the exact one given in Lockhart's Lament about the miseducation of K–12 mathematics. It's not just reading where teacher's colleges are failing to create competent...

            Your example about music is the exact one given in Lockhart's Lament about the miseducation of K–12 mathematics. It's not just reading where teacher's colleges are failing to create competent teachers.

            1 vote
        2. [4]
          streblo
          Link Parent
          A lot of teachers are doing this and have been doing this for years. Let's be real, it mostly is because of that. It's hard for books to compete with the instant gratification of devices even for...

          Changing course, and putting some more modern, relatable, engaging titles on the lists

          A lot of teachers are doing this and have been doing this for years.

          There's a reason leisure reading has cratered in the modern world. And it's not only because there are many more things one could do with their time other than read these days.

          Let's be real, it mostly is because of that. It's hard for books to compete with the instant gratification of devices even for adults. It's especially hard for young people who have not grown up reading books and whose attention span has been trained by their phone.

          16 votes
          1. [3]
            blivet
            Link Parent
            It just goes to show how important your upbringing is, though. I spend a lot of time online, but practically all of it is reading, like I’m doing here. I spend almost no time at all watching videos.

            It just goes to show how important your upbringing is, though. I spend a lot of time online, but practically all of it is reading, like I’m doing here. I spend almost no time at all watching videos.

            5 votes
            1. Sapholia
              Link Parent
              Counterpoint, I vastly prefer text articles to videos, but it's because of my shortened attention span. I don't want to be trapped in someone else's idea of the rate of information absorption (and...

              Counterpoint, I vastly prefer text articles to videos, but it's because of my shortened attention span. I don't want to be trapped in someone else's idea of the rate of information absorption (and also there's often just too much bloat to contend with, and skipping around the video is too frustrating and ineffective, even with "chapters" added to the progress bar). With text, I can skim, and stop to read interesting bits, and see if the whole thing is something I'd like to go back and read more thoroughly from the beginning or if it's something to just give up on.

              I was absolutely a bookworm growing up, and I still read these days but I find myself stopping every few pages to reach for some alternate activity, though I'm trying to train myself out of this. I definitely blame this on the ingrained internet habits of instant gratification from the past couple of decades, and most of that had nothing to do with videos.

              12 votes
            2. streblo
              (edited )
              Link Parent
              I also don't watch a lot of video content but I can still feel the effect on my brain. I was a voracious reader as a child and young adult but mostly due to time crunch and then intertia I stopped...

              I also don't watch a lot of video content but I can still feel the effect on my brain.

              I was a voracious reader as a child and young adult but mostly due to time crunch and then intertia I stopped reading for most of my twenties and early thirties. When I picked it back up again I had to literally retrain my brain to actually read and retain text without scanning and skimming.

              2 votes
        3. [4]
          NoblePath
          Link Parent
          Counterpoint. Part of a good liberal arts education is developing the mental and intellectual discipline and stamina to closely read dry but important information. If more people read the terms...

          Counterpoint.

          Part of a good liberal arts education is developing the mental and intellectual discipline and stamina to closely read dry but important information. If more people read the terms and conditions, which, while voluminous, are not usually inscrutable lawyerspeak, we might be able to foment some legislative and judicial
          Change in favor of consumers. Comprehending nuance in criminal culpability takes some real dedication to thinking thhrough multiple iterations of cause and effect down multiple axes. Not fun, bit important. Like understanding that global climate change doesn’t just result in hotter weather, but also more erratic weather, and more extreme. And that it takesore than a couple of years to manifest.

          All this kind of thinking requires having learned some discipline and developed some stamina. That only comes by being repeatedly stabbed in the eye by an instructor as any kung fu movie can tell you.

          14 votes
          1. [3]
            GenuinelyCrooked
            Link Parent
            You're correct that this is an important skill, but if that's the current goal, instruction should be honest about it. Pretending that it's an important and inexplicably enjoyable work just makes...

            You're correct that this is an important skill, but if that's the current goal, instruction should be honest about it. Pretending that it's an important and inexplicably enjoyable work just makes kids feel disconnected and frustrated.

            It's also not the only important skill. Reading for pleasure is important as well. In fact, an even better skill (in my opinion) is being able to find the pleasure in dry material. Treating it like a puzzle and pointing out the bits that are exciting if you understand the implications would be helpful in that, while still training kids in stamina.

            15 votes
            1. [2]
              blivet
              (edited )
              Link Parent
              I read an essay by Kingsley Amis a long time ago where he said that he thought it was a huge mistake to teach works like Beowulf as if they could be read for enjoyment, when the truth was that...

              I read an essay by Kingsley Amis a long time ago where he said that he thought it was a huge mistake to teach works like Beowulf as if they could be read for enjoyment, when the truth was that their value derived almost entirely from their status as historical artifacts.

              8 votes
              1. GenuinelyCrooked
                Link Parent
                That rings true to me. I kind of enjoyed Beowulf, but only because I'd consumed so many other things that had references and allusions to it, and it was nice to finally know what they were...

                That rings true to me. I kind of enjoyed Beowulf, but only because I'd consumed so many other things that had references and allusions to it, and it was nice to finally know what they were referring to. It wasn't high literature that was referring to Beowulf, though, it was like, The Mountain Goats. You can bet my teachers weren't cool with me listening to that on my MP3 player in class.

                When I think of the stories I hated the most, they were stories with unlikable characters like Return of the Native or Wuthering Heights. Teaching those stories as things it's okay not to enjoy, I think, would have helped me a lot.

                4 votes
        4. [4]
          Lexinonymous
          Link Parent
          I actually agree with you on many of your points, but I have to admit that although I hated reading through the books at the time, and I don't consider myself a voracious reader as an adult, some...

          Instead, English class and English teachers usually end up teaching them "books are boring as hell and you're an idiot for not understanding how you should like them despite this."

          I actually agree with you on many of your points, but I have to admit that although I hated reading through the books at the time, and I don't consider myself a voracious reader as an adult, some of the books have stuck with me the longest have been part of the required reading curriculum.

          I still get chills thinking about the consequences of colonialism in Things Fall Apart, or the unflattering journey through the antebellum south in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or the intricacy of the revenge plot of The Count of Monte Cristo, or the downfall of the protagonist of Frankenstein. What's more, our English textbooks had a smattering of excerpts from numerous other authors - the one that sticks out in my mind the most is from one of the Pern books.

          In retrospect, I'm glad I was "forced" to read through those books, and I think the curriculum had the intended effect on me. That being said, there were just as many books in the curriculum that slipped from memory, and I also disagree fundamentally with the idea that forcing people to read is a virtue. But by the same token, it's hard for me to tease out the difference between otherwise-engaged classmates that didn't enjoy reading, and those who were unwilling - or unable - to engage with any part of their schooling.

          11 votes
          1. [3]
            DavesWorld
            Link Parent
            Other than teaching the language, how to coherently and competently comprehend English and communicate in it written or spoken, I feel the goal of pre-college "English Class" should be to try to...

            Other than teaching the language, how to coherently and competently comprehend English and communicate in it written or spoken, I feel the goal of pre-college "English Class" should be to try to create a love of reading. The point of book reports and any books the teacher will put before the class prior to college should be to turn out high school graduates who enjoy reading.

            Why?

            Because if they don't like reading, most of the rest of it doesn't matter a damn. They won't read, they won't find reading interesting and engaging, and they become like the bulk of the people we have today. People who don't read, and thus are left behind by those who do sit down and open a book. Which is exactly what we have now. Several generations of adults for whom reading doesn't even make their top-ten list of "thing I might do with my time."

            There's something to be said for a shared cultural education. Americans can definitely benefit from understanding the general, basic cultural relevance of something like Lord of the Flies, 1984, Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men and so on. The relevance of it to our shared culture. Or, if not the relevance, at least have some basic concept of the general theme of those stories.

            But American high schools don't really even achieve that goal. When most "graduates" exit with their diplomas vowing "I'll never open another book ever again" is there really any shared culture that's been instilled? Sure they might have passed a test or two on Lennie and George, but if they block it out of their heads because they despised the material and the course, what are the odds any of it achieves any relevancy within them as they go forward into life?

            I entered primary school as a voracious reader. If you look up that term, my picture should be next to it. I never left the house without two books on me; one I was reading, and the next one I'd open the moment I turned the last page on the first. I read constantly. If I was awake, I was very probably reading.

            But none of my teachers ever celebrated it. They just sneered and looked down their noses at me, sighed and shook their heads. Because I wasn't reading "the right" books. I read genre, I read about heroes and villains, I read stories where adventure and excitement happens. I read stories that were engaging and interesting, that made me want to keep turning pages.

            Books the teacher would tell me I was wasting my time reading.

            Then that teacher would stand up at the front of the class waving a copy of Romeo and Juliet, explain how we were going to spend the next month learning how to decipher iambic pentameter, and then the rest of the quarter finally slogging through this dense, incomprehensible, boring thing. All the while, the teacher extolling how amazing it was, how full of genius and marvel and skill it is.

            And there'll be a test. The teacher would ask stuff like "what did it mean to you when Romeo and Tybalt fight?" And then would explain at great length how you were wrong when you tried to answer.

            You're the one reading the book. How can your takeaway be wrong? Well, in English Class, quite easily. There's the one way to interpret the book, and then all the other ways which are very wrong and you should shut up and just study the answer from the Cliff Notes so you'll pass the test.

            Story is art, at the end of the day. Art is individual. Except in English and in the study of English. Then there's right answers and wrong answers.

            I wonder why so many students come out of school hating reading? What could it be?

            Teach students about the structure of story, how scenes and themes layer in like building blocks, fitted together in a certain order to create and grow a character, pull together arc and growth. Use the stories they enjoy to help them see the magic of story, get them to delight in where a great story can take them.

            Get them excited to read.

            Then, and only then, can you wave something like Romeo and Juliet in their face and have a chance of them being interested in reading it. But, even then, Romeo and Juliet does not need to be read in iambic pentameter. There's zero reason unless you're a linguistics or high-level literature scholar, to study iambic pentameter. The cultural magic and cultural genius of Romeo and Juliet isn't in the verse, it's in the story.

            That's the part that has something culturally relevant, that students can maybe gain some shared benefit from.

            11 votes
            1. [2]
              Queresote
              Link Parent
              This opened up a memory for me that had long disappeared. I read nearly to the same degree, but for a long time I did read what were considered "the right" books. In fourth-fifth grade I was...

              Because I wasn't reading "the right" books.

              This opened up a memory for me that had long disappeared. I read nearly to the same degree, but for a long time I did read what were considered "the right" books. In fourth-fifth grade I was reading College Level, and breezing through these books. I truly and genuinely enjoyed them. But one day, I saw a book I really wanted to read. I picked it out, went up to the librarian, and was told I wasn't allowed to read it because it was below my reading level. It was an 11th-grade reading level book.

              I continued to read, but that incident took the magic out of the experience.

              9 votes
              1. aetherious
                Link Parent
                Your memory unlocked a memory for me of a school librarian who didn't believe I was reading a book a day, and would quiz me on them. I had to start having my friends borrow books for me to get...

                Your memory unlocked a memory for me of a school librarian who didn't believe I was reading a book a day, and would quiz me on them. I had to start having my friends borrow books for me to get around the limit.

                7 votes
        5. snake_case
          Link Parent
          Not all books are created equal, though, and its hard to teach a class when not everyone is reading the same thing. I think your distaste for how books are introduced in a classroom is just a...

          Not all books are created equal, though, and its hard to teach a class when not everyone is reading the same thing.

          I think your distaste for how books are introduced in a classroom is just a symptom of the bigger problem, we cant have individualized education when education has been standardized.

          8 votes
        6. [4]
          Plik
          Link Parent
          Yeah, no arguments there, and the fun nerd stuff that was still pretty fucking long still got poo pooed because it wasn't fancy enough.

          Yeah, no arguments there, and the fun nerd stuff that was still pretty fucking long still got poo pooed because it wasn't fancy enough.

          7 votes
          1. [3]
            teaearlgraycold
            Link Parent
            I can’t see how a Tolkien class wouldn’t teach students everything they need to know.

            I can’t see how a Tolkien class wouldn’t teach students everything they need to know.

            6 votes
            1. Plik
              Link Parent
              If it includes the Silmarillion, then it'll be about as intense as Shakespeare/Beowulf.

              If it includes the Silmarillion, then it'll be about as intense as Shakespeare/Beowulf.

              6 votes
            2. sparksbet
              Link Parent
              We actually read the Hobbit in one of my middle school English classes. It is less enjoyable than it was reading it for pleasure with my mom, but far more fun than a lot of the other parts of that...

              We actually read the Hobbit in one of my middle school English classes.

              It is less enjoyable than it was reading it for pleasure with my mom, but far more fun than a lot of the other parts of that class's curriculum.

              4 votes
        7. lou
          Link Parent
          My education was not in English. Which books are you talking about here?

          My education was not in English. Which books are you talking about here?

          1 vote
      2. Habituallytired
        Link Parent
        This is how I was before high school, I would read literally anything you put in front of me for fun, and I would read it cover to cover. Then I started high school, and I stopped reading for fun...

        This is how I was before high school, I would read literally anything you put in front of me for fun, and I would read it cover to cover. Then I started high school, and I stopped reading for fun entirely. Even when I read the final HP books as they came out, I read them once, and didn't get into them at all. School killed my love for reading. It's only since covid that I started reading again, and being a voracious reader like I was, partially because I discovered audiobooks, and partially because I missed having that avenue for escapism.

        14 votes
      3. sparksbet
        Link Parent
        Yeah, I was an avid reader prior to college but I basically had no time to read for pleasure once I started undergrad. I managed to read some good books I enjoyed by taking some classes on science...

        Yeah, I was an avid reader prior to college but I basically had no time to read for pleasure once I started undergrad. I managed to read some good books I enjoyed by taking some classes on science fiction, turning it into schoolwork, but that's about as far as it got.

        10 votes
      4. [2]
        em-dash
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        I was definitely a nerd, but not the reading sort of nerd. Being forced to read things for school thoroughly killed my enthusiasm for reading before it ever got a chance to develop. I didn't...

        imagine being a middle or high school nerd and not having read LOTR, Silmarillion, WoT, Dragonlance, Dune, William Gibson, etc.

        I was definitely a nerd, but not the reading sort of nerd. Being forced to read things for school thoroughly killed my enthusiasm for reading before it ever got a chance to develop. I didn't realize until much later that it could be enjoyable.

        (My school district had this well-intentioned attempt to incentivize students to read 25 books per school year. "Incentivize" almost immediately turned into teachers making it mandatory. Kids who already liked reading were fine, but the rest of us just resented it and picked 25 books we could either get through quickly or could credibly pretend to have read. It turns out forcing someone to do something 25 times is not an automatic path to them liking that thing. This was a thing throughout elementary and middle school for me. Everyone forgot about this program around the time I entered high school, but by that point the damage was done.)

        (edit: I also just spontaneously remembered the time someone in my class got told off by our middle school literature teacher for reading Eragon during class. That's unrelated to the rest of this story, it's just bizarre enough to have stuck in my memory.)

        10 votes
        1. Plik
          Link Parent
          Yeah HS, freshman year my friends and I would all read under the desk in literature class. The teacher knew, said she was happy to see us reading, but then realized that was a mistake because we...

          Yeah HS, freshman year my friends and I would all read under the desk in literature class. The teacher knew, said she was happy to see us reading, but then realized that was a mistake because we just didn't pay attention.

          ...honestly we didn't need to, LOTR and WoT were far ahead of what we reading in terms of word count, and we kept up on the course reading, but it looked bad. To Kill A Mockingbird is like...one chapter of a Robert Jordan novel? xD

          7 votes
  2. [38]
    chocobean
    (edited )
    Link
    For a long form piece on long forms, I'm very disappointed to read so many exercrpts saying the same thing ("kids ain't readin'") and so very few words dedicated to "why", with interviews and...

    (It [Columbia's Literature Humanities reading list] had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were added.) [...] Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects [...] A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics.

    For a long form piece on long forms, I'm very disappointed to read so many exercrpts saying the same thing ("kids ain't readin'") and so very few words dedicated to "why", with interviews and quotes supporting the above. But no, I reached the end and the above three sentences were nearly the only foray into why, plus a guess at standardized testing / common core.

    Why, if Columbia's lit profs have observed a decline in reading abilities, did they expand the list to include nonwhite authors without remove white authors? Which ones are they going to trim and why? Why did Columbia's required great reads course even include a long reading list to begin with -- is the school considering dropping this required course?

    The quoted 2023 survey: did it directly ask students why they aren't reading? It's no new mystery that humanities don't pay: the perennial joke about the starving humanities grad is decades old. Decades ago it uses to be basket weaving grads starve, then we included eng / language majors, then history majors would starve. These days theatre, music grads, visual arts for sure. Even Rendered Arts and gaming media arts grads, presumably folks whose media are still billion dollar industries, are assumed to be struggling, or looking to be exploited by Pixar / Sony / Disney / EA at best. When we have a shrinking class of people who can afford a life of contemplation, when the young are told to aggressively zero sum their way to living wage via STEM careers since their parents can pick play groups, how are we surprised to find the young cannot afford to go to university for enrichment, and cannot afford to choose to spend time on humanities?

    University is just the dungeon grind where you sink time and money to grind just good enough gear so you can stop bleeding money. College costs have more than tripled by some estimates: student loans cripple for life in US. Of course the kids are more focused on survival than reading. What I wanted to read about is whether kids aren't reading because they can read the room and sense they can swim past the required humanities courses with minimal effort, or if they can't also read the STEM textbooks that will put them into actual money making jobs. When there's money on the line, can kids still read. And what of the young who have side gigs reading or writing text: are they reading and writing for fun?

    I hope the author originally included a paragraph talking about how little time they were given to write this piece, about how originally they had wanted to answer these questions and more. But bills gotta be paid and so they did the minimal, got one round of statements from academics and handed it in.


    side comments

    Old cat lady rants

    At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

    What is the American prep school? An after-school program that aims to give high schoolers an Advance Placement credit? Or is it just high school but paid? Either way thats pretty shocking to have only read one Austen in a dedicated course.

    And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

    Is this a joke?! "Back in my day" only 3 or so kids got As in any given course as a matter of course. And we went to a non elite school.

    Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

    Yikes on a bike. They're really fun books but even my preteen has outgrown them. Riordan wanted young readers to move on from them: to introduce the classic mythology characters like that were peers at a summer camp so that when you bump into them again in the Iliad they wouldn't be intimidating strangers.

    39 votes
    1. [27]
      kfwyre
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      When I was a student (which wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things), at the beginning of each year I would have to buy a stack of eight-or-so novels that we would be expected to read...
      • Exemplary

      When I was a student (which wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things), at the beginning of each year I would have to buy a stack of eight-or-so novels that we would be expected to read for that year. The novels were to be read almost entirely outside of class, with class time being dedicated to activities/discussions/writing about them.

      I can't tell you a lot about my specific English classes as the details of them are lost to time, but I can still remember a lot of those novels that I had to read.

      In my school now, as a teacher, our curriculum has students reading only two full novels each year. These novels are read entirely inside the classroom.

      The "why?" of this change is hard to pin down. I don't think it's one thing. I think it's a constellation of many things:

      Editor's note (it's me, I'm the editor): after writing all of these I'm going to number them to help with organization and readability since there's a lot here, but please don't look at this list as hierarchical or prescriptive.

      One: The most obvious is that reading is competing with screens and videogames and social media for kids' attention. We read the novels in-class because we can control the environment for the students and create one that is conducive to reading. We know that, for most students, that simply won't happen outside of school. Even if a student sits down in a quiet space to read a book, it's essentially a given that they will be interrupted by notifications on their phone. If a parent takes the phone away to get the student to focus, it's almost a given that the student will be anxiously thinking about what they're missing on their phone right now, rather than focusing on the text they're supposed to be reading.

      Two: Another reason is brought up in the article. New standards, and the standardized testing that goes along with them, emphasize informational texts, as well as looking at multiple texts and synthesizing information from them. These are good in theory, but in order to fit those skills in (along with many others), you can't spend all of your time reading full novels.

      Three: Furthermore, reading is an "invisible" activity. It happens entirely inside the child's head. This doesn't jive well with testing and accountability culture, which like things to be measureable. As such, you get more bang for your buck in doing measureable activities than you do in doing just letting students do plain old reading, even though doing just plain old reading is the exact skill we want them to have and the best way to build that skill in them.

      Four: Additionally, the educational culture has shifted from something that students are responsible for to something that teachers are responsible for providing. When I was in school, I was expected to read multiple novels outside of school, and if I didn't, that was considered my fault. Now, teachers have to create the conditions under which kids read, because if we don't, that's our fault. The expectation that students read outside of school is unenforceable and is seen as an overreach on our part rather than a necessary part of the child's education.

      Four-point-one/Five: Even asking parents to buy books, as my parents were expected to do when I was a student, is completely out of vogue. Now, schools should be the ones to provide the books, and we of course don't have the money to drop on large class sets of modern novels, nor the continued funding to do the sort of upkeep to keep those titles current.

      Six: Another big part is an arrested development from the learning-to-read to reading-to-learn stage. The standard path for a student is that they develop reading skills and gain automaticity, such that they no longer have to expend metacognitive effort on what they're reading. This allows them to shift into the "reading to learn" phase because they can grapple with complex texts and new vocabulary. Students who never make it out of the "learning to read" phase, however, find reading unnecessarily laborious and challenging. Their reading is not automatic, and their comprehension suffers greatly because of that.

      Seven: A big part of this has been a failure to apply sound practices to teaching reading. I highly recommend the podcast Sold a Story as a primer. My district is one of the districts that used one of the programs mentioned in the podcast which encouraged students not to sound out words according to phonics rules but literally guess at words based on their understanding of the passage (called "cueing"). I understand how absurd this sounds, but I promise you this isn't a fringe practice and was (probably still is) widely practiced in American education.

      Eight: The above dovetails with another issue: the broad painting of American education as consistently failing. NCLB and standardized testing ushered in the idea that education was terrible in this country and we needed the strong stick of accountability to whip us into shape. In practice, what ended up happening is that harsh measures were applied to failing schools, and companies sold "solutions" that schools were encouraged to buy to get themselves back in good graces. At best these were well-intentioned, and at worst they were predatory. The lack of accountability applied to them, however, makes it hard to tell the difference.

      Eight-point-one: The reading program I mentioned above was considered a best-in-class curriculum that made its publishers millions (possibly billions) of dollars. New York City alone paid tens of millions of dollars for it. Did New York get its money back after the reading program failed to work? Of course not. Did those schools get punished for their reading scores, however? Of course.

      Eight-point-two: Ignoring the scores though and zooming in on the real issue: those kids were not properly taught to read. They got stuck in the learning-to-read phase and thus never reached the reading-to-learn phase, much less the reading-for-fun phase. When this happens, students get into a conflicted state where they eventually age out of the books they can read (which are meant for younger audiences) and they're unable to comfortably read the books that would interest them (stuff for young adults and teens). We have specific books called "hi-los" (as in "high-lows") which are high-interest but low-reading-level books for older readers -- they have topics a high school student might be interested in, but they're written at a much lower level. These are useful, but they're also a crutch.

      Nine: Speaking of crutches, we also see them with the proliferation of graphic novels and audiobooks. Don't get me wrong, I love both of those, and I think they're valuable and worthwhile and love that kids have access to them, but students tend to use them in place of reading rather than as a way of developing reading. They'll listen to an audiobook because it's easier than reading, but then their brain isn't practicing their reading skills so they don't develop them. They'll use a graphic novel because it has pictures, but then their brain isn't practicing its visualization skills, so those atrophy. They can "stall out" as readers on these media and never really move past them. It's less popular now, but a few years ago we regularly talked about the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid rut" that students would get in and refuse to leave. We had late high school students wanting to read those books, despite them being meant for kids half their age.

      Ten: We can also add in the cultural climate to all of this. Reading books, and particularly teaching books, has never been as controversial in my lifetime as it is right now. For any book we do teach, we have to weigh its potential blowback. Excerpts are a lot easier to vet and a lot less controversial, because even if they come from a controversial book overall, a small snippet is less likely to offend. Of course, that's not always the case: a teacher at my school got lit up by a parent one time because he assigned a David Sedaris essay in which Sedaris casually made an off-hand mention of a boyfriend.

      Eleven: We can also toss in a dash of social promotion and grade inflation. Because of the aformentioned shift in education that made schools responsible for providing it rather than students responsible for engaging with it, students now can't really fail or be held back. Refuse to do your work? You still pass. Refuse to read? You're going on to the next grade anyway. There are some merits to this process, but in the schools I've worked in, it's been policy to an outright fault. It ends up pushing students whose skills haven't developed into settings in which they literally cannot meet the curricular demands they're supposed to. It doesn't surprise me that many of the students in college can't/won't read long texts, because for the many preceding years of their educational careers, they probably learned that even if they couldn't/wouldn't do an assignment, there wasn't any actual penalty or blowback from that.

      Twelve: Finally, I think there's a big elephant in the room with regards to adult reading. We can wring our hands about kids not reading, but how many adults don't read either? Are their parents reading? Do you regularly read? What about your peers and co-workers? (I mean this as a general "you" to all readers -- not you specifically, chocobean!) I feel like reading is becoming a lost art in general, and kids now are growing up underneath an adult canopy that also seems to be losing a love of reading. Whether that's because we're too busy, too tired, too distracted or whatnot really doesn't matter, because kids look to us as role models and emulate what they see. If the adults in their life don't seem to prioritize, enjoy, or engage in reading, what's the implicit lesson that kids are learning about reading?

      Twelve-point-one: I feel this in myself. I used to be an avid reader, but now I genuinely have to force myself to do it. I still enjoy it, but it feels much more like an "eat your veggies because they're good for you" obligation rather than a "eat delicious food because it's a joy" treat. I struggle with keeping my attention focused and finding the time. And if it's that hard for me -- someone who's on the reading frontline with kids on a daily basis -- then there's almost certainly something bigger at play here.

      In summary, I don't think there's a single "smoking gun" we can point to for why reading is the way that it is right now. I think trying to pin it on one thing oversimplifies a very complex issue. There's not a "north star" we can look to here. Instead we can simply gaze up at all of the different parts of the constellation, and even then I'm not sure we have the whole picture.

      45 votes
      1. chocobean
        Link Parent
        This is so well put together that I wish the article was like this. To your point 12 and 12.1, I feel quite terrible because my kid is not only outpacing our reading, my kid is now basically...

        This is so well put together that I wish the article was like this.

        To your point 12 and 12.1, I feel quite terrible because my kid is not only outpacing our reading, my kid is now basically responsible for doing most of the encouragement of reading full length books in this household.

        To the many professors interviewed, I wonder how many of them have become slightly atrophied as well, resting on a larger collection of books reads o'er time instead of keeping pace with the young with new books.

        I recently went on a vacation and actually, honestly, sat down and read two novels. One is a fun trashy romance, and the other is a sci-fi light adventure. I had so much fun. Why did I ever stop? The reasons are legion and complex, but the fix is so simple: just read a bit more today than I did yesterday, and keep it up the day after.

        14 votes
      2. [8]
        tanglisha
        Link Parent
        All of this is so frustrating to me. These policies were probably put in place to accommodate but not call out kids whose families can’t afford those books and who have no time after school to do...

        When I was in school, I was expected to read multiple novels outside of school, and if I didn't, that was considered my fault. Now, teachers have to create the conditions under which kids read, because if we don't, that's our fault. The expectation that students read outside of school is unenforceable and is seen as an overreach on our part rather than a necessary part of the child's education.

        Even asking parents to buy books, as my parents were expected to do when I was a student, is completely out of vogue. Now, schools should be the ones to provide the books, and we of course don't have the money to drop on large class sets of modern novels, nor the continued funding to do the sort of upkeep to keep those titles current.

        All of this is so frustrating to me. These policies were probably put in place to accommodate but not call out kids whose families can’t afford those books and who have no time after school to do homework because they’re doing other work. It doesn’t make sense to hold families and kids responsible when they can’t do anything about it. At the same time, accountability needs to exist or on top of the reading issue the kids will never learn to follow through with what they’re supposed to do.

        We didn’t get reading lists in my school, I’m not sure of that’s because of the time period out because we were in a poor rural district. I read a lot to get free pizzas, though. I read a while back that schools were giving summer homework, is that still happening?

        9 votes
        1. [6]
          skybrian
          Link Parent
          I'm a little unclear on whether we're still talking about college students, but if so, novels are unlikely to be very expensive compared to textbooks, let alone tuition. Or if it's reading over...

          I'm a little unclear on whether we're still talking about college students, but if so, novels are unlikely to be very expensive compared to textbooks, let alone tuition. Or if it's reading over the summer in high school, there are libraries. For some classics, they're in the public domain and can be downloaded, or there are cheap paperback editions.

          Education is very expensive due to things like housing, labor, etc, and novels are darned cheap in comparison, so it seems rather strange to economizing on that?

          So it seems like there are workarounds, although perhaps kids don't always know about them, and they don't always work, so it's worth looking into that. Maybe libraries need to buy more of some books?

          One theme I see is that both parents and students are assumed to be incapable of providing for themselves, and so the school must provide. Sometimes that's true, but I wonder about a system that has to provide everything to everyone because some kids will need more help. Perhaps a majority of families could do some things themselves, and when they don't, it doesn't teach self-reliance and makes the system more expensive, because it has more responsibilities.

          7 votes
          1. [5]
            DefinitelyNotAFae
            Link Parent
            I've never seen evidence that it "teaches self reliance" to make kids and families provide school supplies.

            I've never seen evidence that it "teaches self reliance" to make kids and families provide school supplies.

            7 votes
            1. [4]
              skybrian
              Link Parent
              I don’t know of any evidence either, so I guess it’s more of a question? I think that learning to use libraries and the Internet are useful skills. Also, learning how to go shopping and spend...

              I don’t know of any evidence either, so I guess it’s more of a question? I think that learning to use libraries and the Internet are useful skills. Also, learning how to go shopping and spend money. And maybe learning to make your own sandwiches? Kids need to learn the things that adults know how to do, and sometimes they can be learned by doing them for real rather than as a classroom exercise.

              6 votes
              1. [3]
                DefinitelyNotAFae
                Link Parent
                Sure, but when work doesn't let me leave for lunch they have to provide it for me. "Making them pay for their own lunch will teach them self sufficiency" is some bootstrap logic. They might make...

                Sure, but when work doesn't let me leave for lunch they have to provide it for me. "Making them pay for their own lunch will teach them self sufficiency" is some bootstrap logic.

                They might make their own lunch and buy it, or they might not. There's no direct connection between lunch not being provided for free and children developing those skills. My mom made my lunches or gave the school money for hot lunch, because I was a child for example.

                I believe studies generally show that it's less stigmatizing to offer lunches for free to everyone. It doesn't highlight your poor kids getting the special "free lunch." (Gloppy PB sandwich when I was a kid.) And it keeps kids from just not eating to avoid being bullied. It also avoids the whole school lunch debt issue. Plus, along with providing breakfast, they do better in class when they're not hungry.

                Plus in the real world, my job has to provide me the tools I need, and if they don't let me leave for lunch they have to provide it. (Or legally just let me leave.) We make kids be in school. Ethically we should feed them. Teachers being made to solicit supplies from parents or their own pockets is another failure of the school system, not a failure of self-reliance.

                4 votes
                1. [2]
                  skybrian
                  Link Parent
                  It depends on age, though. I remember when my mom said it was time for me to start making my own lunch. I remember complaining that the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I made were somehow not...

                  It depends on age, though. I remember when my mom said it was time for me to start making my own lunch. I remember complaining that the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I made were somehow not as good as hers, but apparently I got over it.

                  I can sort of imagine kids making their own lunches from provided ingredients at school, but it would have to be a very orderly class for it not to turn into chaos and I’m not sure we have those in the US. I’m not actually against school-provided lunches since there are indeed some advantages, but something seems lost, too, when kids don’t do simple things for themselves sometimes. It’s far from “self-reliance” (very few people are self-reliant) but I still think doing simple things themselves might be good for kids, and something is lost when there are fewer opportunities for that?

                  And you can’t leave to eat lunch on an airplane, when camping, or when working far from any restaurant, so you bring it with you. This is what lunch boxes are for. It seems pretty normal? You often get time to eat your lunch and a break room.

                  Eventually I got a job at Google and they provided free meals, but that was an unusual perk and greatly appreciated.

                  5 votes
                  1. DefinitelyNotAFae
                    Link Parent
                    I think kids need self reliance. I think feeding them is more important than teaching it by not feeding them. And they're functionally in the care of the state as it's illegal for them not to be...

                    I think kids need self reliance. I think feeding them is more important than teaching it by not feeding them.

                    And they're functionally in the care of the state as it's illegal for them not to be there which means IMO schools should feed them.

                    That's different than being camping. (Camps do have to legally feed kids too.)

                    3 votes
        2. kfwyre
          (edited )
          Link Parent
          Don't get me wrong, I don't think parents should have to pay for books either. That puts an undue burden on families in poverty. A lot of the more recent changes in education have been...

          Don't get me wrong, I don't think parents should have to pay for books either. That puts an undue burden on families in poverty.

          A lot of the more recent changes in education have been well-intentioned steps toward equity, but a lot of them are misguided or ineffective because you can't fix poverty via schools, and our country seems thoroughly uninterested in fixing poverty in general.

          The shift I described effectively moved education from something that was being unequally subsidized by parents to something that is less meaningful and rigorous overall through a lack of that subsidy. It's the "right" thing to do in that it puts less demands on parents, but it achieves that through a fundamental (and I would argue unwelcome and detrimental) shift in how we operate.

          In an ideal world, schools themselves would have the resources and wouldn't need that sort of external subsidy in the first place.

          4 votes
      3. [16]
        Plik
        Link Parent
        For your point eight, I was brought up to believe that the US system was kinda shitty for...reasons (while I was going through it). I have a lot of experience teaching the Cambridge international...

        For your point eight, I was brought up to believe that the US system was kinda shitty for...reasons (while I was going through it). I have a lot of experience teaching the Cambridge international system, IGCSE and AS/A Level.

        I can say that as a not very gung-ho American, I am way more impressed/proud of the American system (at least the honours/AP stuff) than the British system (or variations thereof). The Cambridge system is mostly (IMO) complete dog shit.

        I do, however, believe that there is a huge range in quality in the US, and honors/AP students are 100% getting a better education. The few general core courses I had to take were a bit of a cluster fuck.

        Also my parents read, like, a lot, so it was normalized. Thx mom & pops.

        9 votes
        1. [15]
          Tannhauser
          Link Parent
          As someone who went to a good American public school and only has some familiarity with the Cambridge system, could you expand on why you think the US AP system outperforms it?

          As someone who went to a good American public school and only has some familiarity with the Cambridge system, could you expand on why you think the US AP system outperforms it?

          7 votes
          1. [14]
            Plik
            (edited )
            Link Parent
            Disclaimer: I was in HS when math was separate subjects algebra 1-2, geometry, trig, pre-calc, & calc. Dunno if it's still like that in the US. Short answer: Minimal/bad calculus integration (as...
            • Exemplary

            Disclaimer: I was in HS when math was separate subjects algebra 1-2, geometry, trig, pre-calc, & calc. Dunno if it's still like that in the US.

            Short answer: Minimal/bad calculus integration (as in the way calculus is integrated into the overall curriculum), and too much ~scaffolding (repetition between years).

            Long Answer:

            The What

            1. Each year's curriculum is too broad. They try to cover almost the entirety of math at a shallow level at the beginning, and then do the same thing with just slightly more detail each year (scaffolding). Scaffolding is supposed to be the addition of supports (scaffolds) at the beginning, with their gradual removal each year. With the Cambridge international system this tends to not be that. Rather it turns into absurd repetition with very shallow increases in detail each year. From what I've heard of other subjects, it's basically the same across everything.

            2. There is a bizarre focus on certain topics and not others, as well as the introduction of what I will call a crutch (using gaming terms), The Triangle of Dhoom, rather than sound mathematical processes/operations.

            3. The textbooks, which teachers will often follow in order for lack of a better plan, do not match the order of required knowledge closely enough for other subjects like physics, mechanics, econ, and business. There are also shit tons of errors, wrong equations and diagrams are frequent (the Earth is upside down and right side up at varying seasons within the same diagram for example).

            4. Official mark schemes can be unclear, and often have weird and too few points. Something that I would remember or think of as a 6 point question might instead be 3. Sometimes you get a point for just writing the equation, sometimes you don't. Units are often printed in the answer space, except when they aren't...then you might or might not lose a point. There is no rhyme or reason that I can find.

            The Why? Or...Why is this bad? Why is it this way? Just, why?

            1. The scaffolding used is bad because you spend like 4 years relearning the slope-intercept form of a linear equation. Normally that might be learned ~twice in the US, and usually only as part of a semester's (not year's) curriculum. Doing it over and over for IG and then AS/A is repetitive. So it's boring, and also probably tricks students into thinking they already learned the topic....but surprise! This year they decided to add one random detail. This is bad IMO.

            2. Y=mx+b and gradients are heavily focused on. Vectors lightly. The unit circle...practically never? 2/3 things you should understand pretty well for physics are almost ignored, and not taught in detail. The very strong link between triangles, trig functions, the unit circle, and vectors is basically ignored. The Triangle of Doom is some weird crutch used to teach how to rewrite equations of the form a=b/c instead of teaching kids how to keep an equation balanced based on applying the same operation to both sides of the equation. This fucks them, because as soon as they get to something like I=Anvq, there aren't enough spaces in the triangle for the variables, and they crutched on it instead of learning absolute basic algebraic manipulation skills.

            3. Vectors are required almost immediately for physics, the math curriculum doesn't go into useful knowledge until usually the 2nd semester, or even second year of either IGCSE or AS/A Level. Cross and dot products are basically not covered. Maybe a little towards the end of the 2nd year of AS/A, which is far after that knowledge would help with electromagnetism and dealing with vectors in 3D space. The print errors screw up the teacher's and students if they aren't careful (there are some really bad ones, omega=2πT is one, white light to diffracted spectrum color order being reversed).

            4. Bad mark schemes cause a lack of confidence for students when checking their own work, and a lack of confidence from the teacher when trying to explain the why. Sometimes you just can't figure out why they went with 2 instead of 3 sig figs, and then on the next problem why they did the opposite. Or why something that takes half a page of easy, but long algebraic manipulation is 2 points, while another question gives you 3 points for solving a basic 3 variable equation (1 point for equation, 1 point for a random bit of work, 1 point for correct answer).

            Calculus. This needs it's own section. Pure maths covers "everything", calculus is treated as a part of this "everything". But then it is taught in bits and pieces scattered between all the other stuff. Numbers and linear equations. Then some Limits. Then geometry, then derivatives, then algebra then geometry again, then maybe some vectors, then integrals, then maybe some more graph shit, then ratios, then area and volume , ....then derivatives again? It's absolute chaos if the teacher goes by the book. This is all a made up order of topics, but google the pure maths cambridge university press textbooks, and look at the ToC's, they are nuts. Something we would spend a month on in AP calc, they spend maybe a week or two on then switch to a completely unrelated topic.

            With the AP system, there is far more detailed focus on specific topics. Prior to that you learn everything individually for a year, sometimes with occassional scaffolding (algebra 1 and then later on 2). Before calculus you do precalc, which basically ends up being a year long review of the last ~4 years of math to prepare you for calc the next year. Overall it feels far less chaotic than the whole IGCSE core/extended "all the math" & Pure Maths "all the math again but more detail we promise" method.

            I think I'll stop there. Hope you enjoyed my rant/wall of text.

            Edit: The Triangle of Dhoom

                 #
                #b#
               #---#
               #a|c#
              #######
            

            This apparently means a = b/c, or b=ac because --- is division, and | is multiplication, and then you get to figure out where the = goes based on some Cambridge black mathgic.

            9 votes
            1. [5]
              sparksbet
              Link Parent
              My high school math curriculum was very similar (I graduated high school 10 years ago): algebra 1 (taken in eighth grade so technically middle school math), geometry, algebra 2, pre-calc, calc. My...

              My high school math curriculum was very similar (I graduated high school 10 years ago): algebra 1 (taken in eighth grade so technically middle school math), geometry, algebra 2, pre-calc, calc. My school let some students takes stats instead of pre-calc, and calc was fully optional, but taking stats instead was very much something only "dumb kids" did, from my memory. I left the school to do post-secondary enrollment my senior year, so I didn't take calc with the same group, but my mother was friends with a local math tutor and I can thus say with certainty that the vast majority of even the "smart kids" who wanted to be engineers needed math tutoring prior to college.

              This was behind what the local public schools did with their math (though I don't know in detail what they did differently) because it didn't include AP courses. For my senior year of high school I took a first-year calc class at a nearby college, and the professor said this was roughly equivalent to the easier "AB" AP calc class, and much easier than the more advanced "BC" AP calc class. We didn't have to take any AP tests since it was an actual college course, so I can't speak to any difference there. I found that college calc class a huge breath of fresh air compared to my previous education. Part of it was probably unrelated to the specifics of that calc class (the amount of freedom and respect you're treated with in even low-level college courses is night and day compared to what I was used to as a high schooler at a private christian school) but part of it was that it felt like the concepts actually connected to each other and built on each other in a way that had never been the case in my earlier math courses. Can't say whether this is true for all college math courses, but it was a HUGE difference from my high school ones.

              "Pre-calc" was definitely where it really broke down at my old high school. It was a bunch of totally unconnected ideas explained very poorly and did not leave me with a good foundation for calc. Literally we spent a few weeks on matrices and never even touched on why the fuck you would ever need them, other than trivia about how they related to the Enigma code. My peers and I were not helped by the fact that our teacher did not grade our homework even for completion (he had us verbally report to him what we deserved for completing our homework) and spent much of the class telling off-topic parables. He was an actual engineer by trade but not a licensed teacher, and as such served as a phenomenal example of why you do actually need more than a career in STEM to teach it.

              4 votes
              1. [2]
                public
                Link Parent
                The same goes for my high school, though I graduated about five years before you did. IIRC, my sequence had two grab bag pre-calc courses, so if you didn't skip anything, you'd need to take Alg1...

                "Pre-calc" was definitely where it really broke down at my old high school. It was a bunch of totally unconnected ideas explained very poorly and did not leave me with a good foundation for calc.

                The same goes for my high school, though I graduated about five years before you did. IIRC, my sequence had two grab bag pre-calc courses, so if you didn't skip anything, you'd need to take Alg1 in 7th grade to have the full sequence before calc.

                Even in college, discrete maths is the dumping ground for grab-bag topics. My professor ranted at length that it was a disservice all around to include certain topics, yet they must be included and tested so that the university maintains its engineering school accreditation.

                4 votes
                1. Plik
                  Link Parent
                  Ugh, disco was a nightmare. I am terrible at stats and probabilities. I feel like the pre-req for teaching pre-calc should be 5+ years of teaching everything else (algebra up through calc, then...

                  Ugh, disco was a nightmare. I am terrible at stats and probabilities. I feel like the pre-req for teaching pre-calc should be 5+ years of teaching everything else (algebra up through calc, then you can do pre-calc) so that you actually remember how everything is interconnected. Even a math degree isn't enough, you need that teaching experience of all the things to do it justice IMO.

                  2 votes
              2. [2]
                Plik
                (edited )
                Link Parent
                This sounds about right. You should have had trig at some point I think. Going into pre-calc without trig would be a bit of a nightmare. I also did not enjoy pre-calc much, but I also think it is...

                This sounds about right. You should have had trig at some point I think. Going into pre-calc without trig would be a bit of a nightmare.

                I also did not enjoy pre-calc much, but I also think it is often not taught very well. It is basically allll the math in one year. It should technically be a review, but reviewing 4+ years of stuff is a lot. If taught well it can show the link between a bunch of different areas of math, which is pretty cool. When I taught it myself I learned a lot, and in the end really enjoyed it.

                If you can imagine pre-calc at it's worst, that is basically what I have found IGCSE and AS/A level maths to be like. Pretty much pre-calc 1, then 2, then 3 + mechanics and/or stats, then 4 + random interspersions of calculus.

                That's a shame about matrices, they are incredibly useful, and directly related to vectors. 3D graphics rely heavily on matrix transformations applied to vectors to draw the correctly translated/enlarged/rotated shapes on screen. You can also use vectors to solve simultaneous equations, which can even be used to solve equilibrium problems in physics.

                The links between different areas of math with each other, and other subjects is sorely under-taught.

                Edit: AP Calc AB should roughly be equivalent to Calc 1/2 in uni, BC would be calc 3. The big jump is basically going from 2D derivatives and integrals to 3D (so you are looking at graphs that look like 3D terrain maps), and then a bunch of other complicated topics that get lumped in (fourier transforms for example).

                2 votes
                1. sparksbet
                  Link Parent
                  I think what would've been in a trig class was part of our pre-calc class. We certainly spent a lot of time on various sin/cos/tan stuff -- that said, virtually none of it stuck, so I don't...

                  I think what would've been in a trig class was part of our pre-calc class. We certainly spent a lot of time on various sin/cos/tan stuff -- that said, virtually none of it stuck, so I don't remember what we did more specifically.

                  Luckily I did later take a course that taught me the basics of linear algebra as part of my master's degree (and I'm now a data scientist), so the usefulness of vectors and tensors wasn't lost to me permanently.

                  And yeah, I've only taken college Calc 1. Luckily, that covered enough calculus for me to understand what I needed in my master's, but we stuck with two dimensions afaik. I remember friends who did BC Calc complained a ton about Taylor Series.

                  2 votes
            2. [2]
              Tannhauser
              Link Parent
              Oh my, that sounds like a mess of a curriculum.

              Oh my, that sounds like a mess of a curriculum.

              3 votes
              1. Plik
                Link Parent
                There could be some very high level planning that I just don't understand, but I haven't discovered it yet.

                There could be some very high level planning that I just don't understand, but I haven't discovered it yet.

            3. [2]
              Aristetul
              Link Parent
              Another reason why Cambridge/GCSE's are so broad and just generally more "profit-motivated" is that the curriculum is also used by previous British colonies/Commonwealth countries for education on...

              Another reason why Cambridge/GCSE's are so broad and just generally more "profit-motivated" is that the curriculum is also used by previous British colonies/Commonwealth countries for education on English. Where I'm from, increasingly families of a middle class-upper class income will opt for Cambridge over the national curriculum in the local language because ultimately they want to send their kids to the West for higher education at least, if not long term immigration and white collar jobs. Even though kids from the national curriculum are consistently the ones who end up getting full rides at Ivy League schools and similar around the world, society at large is more interested in GTFO out of here and go somewhere in the West, so they believe this gives them the best chance at doing that. At least in my corner of South Asia, Cambridge doesn't seem too bothered with the quality of education and the international curriculum of Cambridge is the same everywhere except in the UK. But I'd be surprised if this also doesn't have an effect on British education somewhere down the line.

              I did my undergrad in a liberal arts college in the US and I fully agree that the American kids seemed way more well-rounded in their education compared to the rest of us internationals who largely came from a Cambridge background. Where at freshman year I already had junior year level knowledge of Economics, I knew very little about Physics and Chemistry outside of a 6th grade level. Whereas Americans knew much more about a wide range of topics they didn't possess "advanced" knowledge. It seems to me that the US curriculum promotes a far more holistic approach than Cambridge which has you start specialising from much younger. That being said, for us internationals across American universities, unanimously, the first year of US college seemed entirely redundant and we had gone over all those things since 7th grade. Because of this early committment to specialization, very few, if any, internationals come to university with an "undecided" major. Which is nearly never the case for those outside of the Western world. Asian attitudes to education are very different from the West, so it's almost as if this specialization is doubled down on from a young age. It almost seems insidious the way Cambridge doubles down and exploits these sentiments for profit.

              2 votes
              1. Plik
                Link Parent
                Yeah, I have seen it irl. I would say it depends on the country though. In China Western curriculum is also often seen as a fall back when the parents aren't sure their kids will score high enough...

                Yeah, I have seen it irl. I would say it depends on the country though. In China Western curriculum is also often seen as a fall back when the parents aren't sure their kids will score high enough on the national exam to go to a good uni in China. It'd also a possible gateway to residency/citizenship, which can then be used as a path for investment outside of China.

                In developing countries it is 100% seen as a GTFO card. The local curriculum may still have value because a local dimoma is basically required for any local government jobs (A levels/SAT/IB are an advantage, but will not get you in to a cushy government job on their own).

                I haven't seen the "specialization" you mention in the Cambridge curriculum, all the courses seem very broad and shallow. However, I have only ever seen 1-2 students go beyond pure maths on to further maths (and they were told to teach themselves xD). So if further maths is common in your country, maybe that is the difference? I don't know if there are similar higher level equivalents to further maths for subjects like physics, econ, and business...I don't think there are? For those three courses the content seemed fairly equal (except AP Physics BC which is beyond A Level Physics).

                Also, all of my comments are comparing honors diploma/AP track courses to the Cambridge curriculum, not your generic core courses that the majority of students would take. I think if you compare regular old HS physics to A Level Physics, then yes, A Level is better.

                Also yeah, Asian culture definitely tends to go for early specialization, and the Cambridge curriculum encourages this. I do not think it is a good thing, especially when you consider that the kids are forced into a track at ~15 when they are finishing IGCSE and picking their AS/A level courses for the next two years.

                And....off topic, but the AS/A level exams are kinda bullshit for some courses. The curves (grade thresholds) for each series can be ridiculous, e.g. the A Level Physics paper 4 usually has an almost 50% curve. Something like 40/80 points earns you an A....to me that says there's something wrong because you are literally not expecting students to understand 50% (or more if C is truly "average") of the content...so maybe some of the more specific questions or content should be removed?

                1 vote
            4. [4]
              sparksbet
              Link Parent
              Wait hold on the triangle of doom is literally, scaring me, are you saying they don't just learn to multiply both sides of an equation by the reciprocal?

              Wait hold on the triangle of doom is literally, scaring me, are you saying they don't just learn to multiply both sides of an equation by the reciprocal?

              1. [3]
                Plik
                Link Parent
                Sorta, yes. The Cambridge University Press textbooks place a little emphasis on applying operations to LHS and RHS, and then offer the triangle of doom as a crutch... Which then leaves it up to...

                Sorta, yes. The Cambridge University Press textbooks place a little emphasis on applying operations to LHS and RHS, and then offer the triangle of doom as a crutch...

                Which then leaves it up to the teacher to determine how much emphasis is placed on doing the "right thing". The less mathy math teachers tend to gloss over this, which ends up resulting in disaster in other/future courses that require some level of super basic algebra.

                It is scary, and the authors and publisher should be fucking ashamed of even printing such a crutch.

                1. [2]
                  sparksbet
                  Link Parent
                  That's legit kinda horrifying to me. My math education was bad enough that most of my peers needed remedial tutoring, and we still had basic algebra like that drilled into our heads before we were...

                  That's legit kinda horrifying to me. My math education was bad enough that most of my peers needed remedial tutoring, and we still had basic algebra like that drilled into our heads before we were even in high school.

                  1 vote
                  1. Plik
                    Link Parent
                    Yeah, I don't know if it is the case everywhere, it really depends on whether the teacher recognizes the issues with the textbook and adapts, or whether they do the lazy thing and go chapter by...

                    Yeah, I don't know if it is the case everywhere, it really depends on whether the teacher recognizes the issues with the textbook and adapts, or whether they do the lazy thing and go chapter by chapter with little thought as to the curriculum as a whole.

                    1 vote
      4. public
        Link Parent
        Points four and eleven are impacts of point eight. When schools are evaluated on graduation rate rather than quality of graduates, the bar will be lowered to the floor. There’s a doublethink where...

        Points four and eleven are impacts of point eight. When schools are evaluated on graduation rate rather than quality of graduates, the bar will be lowered to the floor.

        There’s a doublethink where lawmakers demand every student must pass and that their instruction was rigorous. Passing students along is what makes the visible numeric impact, so that’s what schools optimize for.


        Regarding the garbage early elementary reading instruction, it feels like a mirror of inadequate primary math education. The problem there is far too much rigor. The students make impressive gains month-to-month, but their yearly net learning is nothing because the class moves on to the next mandatory topic before the knowledge sinks in.

        2 votes
    2. [2]
      teaearlgraycold
      Link Parent
      I appreciate the skepticism of “kids these days suck”. I’m seeing a lot of that recently. And to be fair, the pandemic generation must have a deficit. And the “no child left behind” policy hasn’t...

      I appreciate the skepticism of “kids these days suck”. I’m seeing a lot of that recently. And to be fair, the pandemic generation must have a deficit. And the “no child left behind” policy hasn’t helped anything. But it seems like there are a lot of professors right now who are supposed to have the skills to analyze these shortcomings and aren’t coming up with much that is helpful.

      11 votes
      1. nukeman
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        Edit: looks like I screwed up the reply location @chocobean. You answered this question: With this one: It would be too controversial to cut significant white authors from the curriculum, both...

        Edit: looks like I screwed up the reply location @chocobean.

        You answered this question:

        Why, if Columbia's lit profs have observed a decline in reading abilities, did they expand the list to include nonwhite authors without remove white authors?

        With this one:

        Which ones are they going to trim and why?

        It would be too controversial to cut significant white authors from the curriculum, both academically and politically. But there was pressure to add minority authors to the curriculum, which couldn’t just be ignored. So, you get to the end result: adding more books without the needed trimming to ensure good course pacing.

        9 votes
    3. [5]
      Carrie
      Link Parent
      I haven't read the article, yet (the irony), because often my attention span is low for long form/linear based compositions. Your comment is spectacular and spot on. I would also wonder what the...

      I haven't read the article, yet (the irony), because often my attention span is low for long form/linear based compositions.

      Your comment is spectacular and spot on.

      I would also wonder what the rise of ADHD has in common with some of the phenomena that is being observed.

      I will chime in with my own anecdote to confirm your suspicions. I was a STEM major at an elite school, and even though we had requirements for language and arts, I definitely thought of them as "must do this, no inherent value, which ones can I fit in[to my schedule] easily and pass so that I can get on with my 'real' major and work on career prospects."

      Additional anecdotes, most STEM books and STEM writers really suck ass at writing anything entertaining. I learned the most from diagrams in those books and diagrams in publications. There is a reason many scientists start reading journals by going right to the "results" section, because the rest is often filler. I feel visual communication and arts has suffered and gotten really bad over time - I cannot tell you the number of power point based meetings I have sat through that have someone almost literally reading the slide to you without adding any new information via their "presentation" skills. We keep rewarding these people and this type of communication, even though people leave the meetings thinking, "well that was useless and a waste of my time."

      At the end of the day, it feels like the pervasive question on all US-Americans mind is always, "how will this help me get a job?" and we have very narrow views of that path and what success looks like.

      7 votes
      1. [3]
        sparksbet
        Link Parent
        The rise in ADHD being diagnosed is not the same thing as a rise in the actual rate of students that have ADHD. If anything, the "rise of ADHD" in this manner means that students who are capable...
        • Exemplary

        I would also wonder what the rise of ADHD has in common with some of the phenomena that is being observed.

        The rise in ADHD being diagnosed is not the same thing as a rise in the actual rate of students that have ADHD. If anything, the "rise of ADHD" in this manner means that students who are capable of reading and even enjoy it are more likely to be diagnosed. I was only diagnosed as an adult, but as a child I was a voracious reader. No one would label a child who enjoyed reading like I did with something like ADHD back then, even though I would hyperfocus on the books I read after completing my classwork to the extent that I did not even notice when class started again (and would thus get in trouble, much to child-me's chagrin). Having untreated ADHD probably didn't help me get my reading done in undergrad, but it was that in addition to a lot of stress, a heavy workload, and a loss of my at-home support network that really resulted in my not being able to read for pleasure at that stage of my life.

        27 votes
        1. [2]
          DefinitelyNotAFae
          Link Parent
          We are the same person. I can still hyperfocus on books like this, usually, to the point that me not reading is a warning sign for my mental health. It did take me until after graduate school...

          I was only diagnosed as an adult, but as a child I was a voracious reader. No one would label a child who enjoyed reading like I did with something like ADHD back then, even though I would hyperfocus on the books I read after completing my classwork to the extent that I did not even notice when class started again (and would thus get in trouble, much to child-me's chagrin).

          We are the same person.
          I can still hyperfocus on books like this, usually, to the point that me not reading is a warning sign for my mental health. It did take me until after graduate school though which I got through by the skin of my teeth and because I test well.

          9 votes
          1. sparksbet
            Link Parent
            Lol we literally are the same person, it's kinda insane. Explains why I always like your comments here though 😉

            Lol we literally are the same person, it's kinda insane. Explains why I always like your comments here though 😉

            3 votes
      2. chocobean
        Link Parent
        Even "back in my day", the strategy for required courses was to swap notes on which professor was easy and didn't care, sign up and sail past. It was a game: not as in entertainment, but as in...

        Even "back in my day", the strategy for required courses was to swap notes on which professor was easy and didn't care, sign up and sail past. It was a game: not as in entertainment, but as in mechanics, and as in a gamble with our very limited time and money on the line.

        I was one of those keener lit kids, and I remember having to skim longer works I'd vow to return to. there was just too much going on in my life that I needed to handle: part time work, moving out, social life, figuring out what I wanted to do with my life and how to afford it, housing insecurity, food insecurity due to extreme price gouging from the university. I went from the kid who read all night for fun to the strategic do minimum faker because I had to. The ADHD probably didn't help, but it didn't stop me from being able to read before or after university. It's just a strange time in a young person's life, probably. You can't read a novel when you're on the Titanic going down. I can even imagine how insane of an ask it is for today's youth.

        12 votes
    4. Carrow
      Link Parent
      I think you've hit the nail on the head between needing to ask the students themselves and the dungeon grind. It seems to me not reading dense books fully and critically within a week is a natural...

      I think you've hit the nail on the head between needing to ask the students themselves and the dungeon grind. It seems to me not reading dense books fully and critically within a week is a natural consequence of turning colleges into grinds for jobs. Previously, folks going to higher education were more motivated to learn, of course they're more interested in engaging with the content than folks there to get the degree to get a job paying nominally better than minimum wage. The students wanting to learn are still there, but they aren't the bulk of the classrooms. Add to that the growing cost of college and more and more students needing jobs to stay afloat, and yeah, they're not gonna have time to read and critically analyze literature properly while completing other coursework too.

      There is room for discussion on the quality of public education our youth are receiving and the impact of technology on attention spans, but seems to me we're jumping the gun getting to that before just asking students why and examining the change in student populations and how it may relate.

      6 votes
    5. [2]
      Sapholia
      Link Parent
      I went (for about half a year) to a public high school in the US that called itself [Name] College Preparatory School. It was a magnet school, and of the five total high schools I went to, it was...

      What is the American prep school? An after-school program that aims to give high schoolers an Advance Placement credit? Or is it just high school but paid? Either way thats pretty shocking to have only read one Austen in a dedicated course.

      I went (for about half a year) to a public high school in the US that called itself [Name] College Preparatory School. It was a magnet school, and of the five total high schools I went to, it was the only one that was part of the International Baccalaureate program. I don't know the stats at the time I was in school, but currently only four high schools in that whole county are IB schools. In another state where I also went to high school, only one school in the entire state is an IB school currently.

      All of which is to say, if a school calls itself a prep school, it's a full curriculum school attempting to aim at the highest academic standards and to be a pipeline to college admission. (Though I don't think there are any sort of standards around naming a school a "college prep" school.) It seems the one I went to may have been an outlier in being a public school without any tuition fees, but they do exist.

      2 votes
      1. chocobean
        Link Parent
        Very interesting.... When I was in highschool, the only way to get into a school with an IB program was to live within its catchment. It became this ridiculous thing where one's family has to be...

        Very interesting....

        When I was in highschool, the only way to get into a school with an IB program was to live within its catchment. It became this ridiculous thing where one's family has to be able to afford the $1-3m+ mansions within the catchment to attend.

        1 vote
  3. [10]
    oliak
    Link
    Paywall Bypass: https://archive.is/fuR6S

    Paywall Bypass: https://archive.is/fuR6S

    14 votes
    1. [9]
      sharpstick
      Link Parent
      How come these archive.is links never work for me? It starts to load the page and then never completes.

      How come these archive.is links never work for me? It starts to load the page and then never completes.

      4 votes
      1. [2]
        saturnV
        Link Parent
        It might be due to using cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1)

        It might be due to using cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1)

        9 votes
        1. Carrow
          Link Parent
          They must've resolved that beef, I use CloudFlare DNS and can access them fine now.

          They must've resolved that beef, I use CloudFlare DNS and can access them fine now.

          2 votes
      2. chocobean
        Link Parent
        How strange. Do they work on another device or browser? Perhaps there's sometimes a check box to see if you're a robot and your device/browser setting gets tripped up by then? Eg, the above link...

        How strange. Do they work on another device or browser? Perhaps there's sometimes a check box to see if you're a robot and your device/browser setting gets tripped up by then? Eg, the above link works for me. What happens if you go straight to archive.is ?

        1 vote
      3. [3]
        tomf
        Link Parent
        which dns are you using? when i was on quad 9, none of them worked

        which dns are you using? when i was on quad 9, none of them worked

        1 vote
        1. [2]
          frostycakes
          Link Parent
          I use Quad9 and have no issue with them.

          I use Quad9 and have no issue with them.

          1 vote
          1. tomf
            Link Parent
            oh nice. good they fixed that. I had issues with .is and .ph I believe. I switched to adguard, but I run Diversion on my router anyway... so it doesn't do a lot. Quad9 is quick.

            oh nice. good they fixed that. I had issues with .is and .ph I believe. I switched to adguard, but I run Diversion on my router anyway... so it doesn't do a lot. Quad9 is quick.

  4. [3]
    umlautsuser123
    Link
    True to form (though I'm years out of college) I skimmed the article! I would ask, what exactly is the point is reading? I enjoy reading as a means of ingesting communication: it's fast. And I...

    True to form (though I'm years out of college) I skimmed the article!

    I would ask, what exactly is the point is reading? I enjoy reading as a means of ingesting communication: it's fast. And I grew up doing more reading and writing than probably a younger version of me would have. Videos bore me, podcasts lose me because I can't understand them well without seeing their lips or manner.

    They mention the classics and how you can't understand things without the classics, but that's separate from reading as a hobby. What is the point of reading a book? Is it to communicate information? Do we receive less empathy if we watch a movie with excellent acting and cinematography than if we read the passage?

    I remember doing a very close reading of Paradise Lost. The teacher was delighted to have someone who participated. But I don't think I got anything special from how difficult it was to read. I've gotten more emotional depth from most manga. Are we just proud of language?

    I do think the actual crisis is that people are bad writers / orators (myself included). I feel like there are so many published books out there, or even podcasts, where people take 10 minutes to relay a thought poorly. I see stuff online like "it's very demure to have a rent-stabilized apartment" or "You know, it's got that vibey vibe, you know that aesthetic" and wish to perish. There's not much discipline or elegance in how thoughts are communicated. I do occasionally read self-help books (popular ones, too), and I often leave them thinking "this really could have been a short-form article."

    11 votes
    1. [2]
      Akir
      Link Parent
      I was a nerd as a kid and was always reading things above my grade level. When I had a section on Beowulf, everyone else was reading the modernized version and I was reading the original one...

      I was a nerd as a kid and was always reading things above my grade level. When I had a section on Beowulf, everyone else was reading the modernized version and I was reading the original one complete with thorns and yoghs.

      I think it's a good skill to be able to read difficult things, but I think sometimes we might focus too much on the language and not enough on communication. I remember in high school I was very disappointed to find out that most of the English classes they offered were on the rote mechanics of the language instead of literature or speaking. I'm constantly amazed at how many adults I have come across who do not have the ability to write coherently. It's not that they don't have the mechanical knowledge to compose sentences, or that they have bad language skills, it's simply that they do not have a firm grasp on the ways they communicate with speech connect with the way they should show up in writing.

      tangent on essay writing

      I wonder how much of this disconnect is related to how students are taught to write? It seems to me that the vast majority of writing assignments that need any sort of detail are essays, and those essays are usually graded on an extremely strict rubric that states very specific structures. I've always thought that those structures made writing feel massively worse in quality; any time I tried to use them it made my words feel very stilted and the end result felt like it was written by someone else. I think that for many students it weren't clear that they were supposed to be temporary; something that was meant to go away after they were confident in how to structure their thoughts. So to these people, anything you have to write outside the extreme casual social media post must be fairly painful to them.

      11 votes
      1. public
        Link Parent
        Regarding your point on essays, I am a much better editor than writer. Thanks to that, I ended up rewriting many grad school application essays for my friends & family. Some of them read more like...

        Regarding your point on essays, I am a much better editor than writer. Thanks to that, I ended up rewriting many grad school application essays for my friends & family. Some of them read more like a MadLib with proper grammar than ChatGPT. Extraordinarily formulaic and repetitive sentence structure. Optimized for the clarity of each individual sentence at the expense of paragraph-level coherence.

        1 vote
  5. [3]
    mordae
    Link
    Have you noticed how Japanese anime funnels people into reading manga and eventually light novels? It's kinda obvious that when the visual media do not compete with the literally works, people...

    Have you noticed how Japanese anime funnels people into reading manga and eventually light novels? It's kinda obvious that when the visual media do not compete with the literally works, people tend to follow up by reading once in a while.

    Game of Thrones and Harry Potter did this as well.

    9 votes
    1. [2]
      crialpaca
      Link Parent
      I refer to this as a "gateway" effect but I'm sure there's a better term for it. I actually purposefully funneled myself back into reading via manga and webtoons. I missed reading, but I felt...

      I refer to this as a "gateway" effect but I'm sure there's a better term for it. I actually purposefully funneled myself back into reading via manga and webtoons. I missed reading, but I felt super intimidated by the idea of diving back in after a decade of hardly touching a non-required read.

      I got burned out of reading by reading the A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) series while going to college for creative writing at the same time. The intensity of that period turned me off reading for fun for the rest of my college career, and I'm finally reading again, several years after finishing my degree. I started with manga and webtoons, then a few lightweight Kindle reads, and am now back to reading selective full novels in text form. Books that I expect to be difficult I'll pick up as audiobooks instead of trying to force myself through them in text form. Then, if I enjoy something enough as an audiobook, I will also read it in text. I'm trying to enjoy reading - making it easier on myself and not suffering for the sake of completing a huge text read has been a big perspective change for me that has really enhanced the quality of my reading life.

      7 votes
      1. chocobean
        Link Parent
        When used intentionally in an educational setting, the effect might be similar to "instructional scaffolding": We all experienced a form of it, from when our parents/teachers laid the first forms...

        When used intentionally in an educational setting, the effect might be similar to "instructional scaffolding":

        Similar to the scaffolding used in construction to support workers as they work on a specific task, instructional scaffolds are temporary support structures faculty put in place to assist students in accomplishing new tasks and concepts they could not typically achieve on their own. Once students are able to complete or master the task, the scaffolding is gradually removed or fades away—the responsibility of learning shifts from the instructor to the student. Link

        We all experienced a form of it, from when our parents/teachers laid the first forms of letters and phonics, to reading in groups and among peers like circle time or library hour, to eventually ourselves choosing easier then more complex books for ourselves.

        I'm not sure if there's specially a better term for gateway books though lol libraries: first hit's free.

        3 votes
  6. [3]
    TonesTones
    Link
    This is a compelling article. I read it when posted and was a bit surprised, but largely accepted it. Pedagogy is one of my areas of interest (I work full-time in pedagogical research), and this...

    This is a compelling article. I read it when posted and was a bit surprised, but largely accepted it.

    Pedagogy is one of my areas of interest (I work full-time in pedagogical research), and this article did the rounds.
    However, I was recently referred to this blog post by Carrie M. Santo-Thomas, who was interviewed for this piece.

    That this teacher was taken so explicitly out of context (specifically, she provided evidence to the reporter that her high schoolers did read full-length novels) and that the reporter still chose to include her in the final piece makes this seem like lazy journalism. They seemed to want a headline that they knew would get clicks and formed a narrative around it, even when evidence presented itself to the contrary.

    I'll let the piece speak for itself, but I wanted to highlight two sentences.

    The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences. So when we force-feed yet another vanilla canonical dust collector, and then complain that they aren’t playing along, it’s just not a good look for us.

    The world is changing. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are being taught by the Internet about the issues with the world in a way that hasn't occurred in the past. While I haven't done any literary analysis on the classics mentioned (I'm in STEM), I think the author's take that students could be much more interested in reading books that speak to their (new) perception of the world makes a lot of sense.

    6 votes
    1. [2]
      Interesting
      Link Parent
      Regardless on whether a particular teacher was misquoted, the reddit discussions of this I saw on /r/teachers and /r/books included many teachers chiming in that they were not permitted to teach...

      Regardless on whether a particular teacher was misquoted, the reddit discussions of this I saw on /r/teachers and /r/books included many teachers chiming in that they were not permitted to teach any full length books, or that they were limited to one novel study a year.

      Reguardless of whether that one book is a classic or modern pageturner, it's still far fewer full length novels than a student should be exposed to in a year.

      3 votes
      1. TonesTones
        Link Parent
        It’s good to hear the article has substance from the primary and secondary education perspective. While the “earlier schools aren’t teaching kids to read” narrative was only one piece of the...

        It’s good to hear the article has substance from the primary and secondary education perspective. While the “earlier schools aren’t teaching kids to read” narrative was only one piece of the article, it was already weakly supported in the piece, and reading one of their sources critique the article so harshly was shocking.

        I understand the need to focus on the professorial body, but I wish they had found some of those Reddit teachers if they were claiming primary and secondary school as the cause.

        1 vote