When I walked into my American-literature class at Case Western Reserve University last fall, I looked at 32 college students, mostly science majors, and expected an uphill battle. As my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.” One-third of the high-school seniors tested in 2024 were found not to have basic reading skills.
Yet by the end of the semester, as we read the last sentence of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, I regretted ever doubting my students. I am now convinced that I was wrong to listen to the ostensible wisdom of the day—and that teachers of literature are wrong to give up assigning the books we loved ourselves. There may be plenty of good reasons to despair over the present. The literature classroom should not be one of them.
I haven't taken a college level literature class so I don't know how common this is, but this style of teaching really appeals to me. I don't mind writing, but I like that the focus of the class...
To give the students time to read, I had to change the way they wrote. I axed the take-home essays I’d assigned before—this wasn’t a “writing” class, anyway—and assigned what I suspected were far more difficult in-class, timed “flash essays,” with prompts I gave the same day. No trudging back from the library with 10 pages on Woolf in the special season of Cleveland weather we call “stupid cold.” Long, research-based essay assignments had always worked well for the top students in the class, the ones who were already trained to write. But I’ve rarely seen, over the course of my career, the kind of development I hoped for in the majority of students whom I asked to write that way.
I haven't taken a college level literature class so I don't know how common this is, but this style of teaching really appeals to me. I don't mind writing, but I like that the focus of the class is on the reading and understanding of the book, and less on the ability of the students to write. Not to mention it effectively sidesteps most of the shortcuts that AI can provide.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the author's thoughts and strategies here. I was impressed be their thoughtfulness to see that students have a lot of time-consuming responsibilities, and so if...
I was also pleasantly surprised by the author's thoughts and strategies here. I was impressed be their thoughtfulness to see that students have a lot of time-consuming responsibilities, and so if they were going to assign large quantities of reading, they needed to avoid also assigning significant amount of non-reading work.
In addition to the benefits you mentioned (which I agree with!), when forced to choose between the concrete, graded essay homework, and the unprovable, indirectly assessed reading homework, students will almost always choose the essay. It's a rational choice, even! It takes some humility to see this scenario and say "to fix this problem, I will have to change the environment that creates it", instead of "sucks, do both".
My son is in secondary school (high school) here in the UK, and I am finding myself surprised at how much read is assigned to and completed by the pupils. I don't think it's an amount that would...
My son is in secondary school (high school) here in the UK, and I am finding myself surprised at how much read is assigned to and completed by the pupils. I don't think it's an amount that would shock anyone, but given how much I read of the country's declining reading comprehension, it's something that pleasantly surprised me. This is of course just one anecdotal experience and I don't pretend this is representative of anything wider than my Son's year group at school.
I haven't taken a college level literature class so I don't know how common this is, but this style of teaching really appeals to me. I don't mind writing, but I like that the focus of the class is on the reading and understanding of the book, and less on the ability of the students to write. Not to mention it effectively sidesteps most of the shortcuts that AI can provide.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the author's thoughts and strategies here. I was impressed be their thoughtfulness to see that students have a lot of time-consuming responsibilities, and so if they were going to assign large quantities of reading, they needed to avoid also assigning significant amount of non-reading work.
In addition to the benefits you mentioned (which I agree with!), when forced to choose between the concrete, graded essay homework, and the unprovable, indirectly assessed reading homework, students will almost always choose the essay. It's a rational choice, even! It takes some humility to see this scenario and say "to fix this problem, I will have to change the environment that creates it", instead of "sucks, do both".
My son is in secondary school (high school) here in the UK, and I am finding myself surprised at how much read is assigned to and completed by the pupils. I don't think it's an amount that would shock anyone, but given how much I read of the country's declining reading comprehension, it's something that pleasantly surprised me. This is of course just one anecdotal experience and I don't pretend this is representative of anything wider than my Son's year group at school.
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