In the 1970s. We were assigned multiple books per semester, had to write reports, were tested on them.

We had 6 week sessions devoted to Shakespeare, to Medieval English literature, to modern English lit, to early and modern American lit. We also had required composition classes with research papers.

A few students struggled, but most of us loved the reading, the exposure to great books and plays. My town is Southern, still very small, yet we had phenomenal English teachers.

If they're not reading actual books in high school, what are they doing?

Sad, but true.




Snip:

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests.

and with AI doing their work for them, we'll have a generation of know nothings who can't even read instructions.

commented that novels and long form journalism may be on the way out due to new short form writing influenced by the internet and social media. For what that's worth.

It's a huge change if true and a loss for longer writing forms. I also think it's linked to shorter attention spans.

Part of the problem reaches back to the Bush era and I was pleased to see it covered here in this article.

My nephew who teaches at the college level is in his late 30s and sees the combination of standardized testing, iPhones, the constant connection of social media and then covid disruptions did not help at all.

It is a mess.


SNIP:
But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests.

From the cited article:

Last edited Wed Oct 9, 2024, 11:10 AM - Edit history (1)

Does anyone see the connection?

Those of us in the Boomer generation - and even most of our kids - graduated high school before Dubya. We grew up knowing how to read actual printed books - both for learning AND for enjoyment.

Any child born after 1990 or so, can't say that because they were all taught to pass tests and nothing else. Now those kids are teaching the next generation.

with hundreds of books. Now she doesn't read books at all. I read books but not as much. Everything is on the computer and there are so many more distractions. We are overloaded with info. Also both of our jobs require extensive technical reading so partly we don't have the energy for much reading outside of work.

Started learning Russian at age 16, self-study; first actual exposure to a native speaker was at age 17.

As a junior in college I had 2 weeks for Crime and Pushment--in Russian. This after an onslaught of Lomonosov, Pushin's Onegin, a lot of Lermontov, Tiutchev, and followed by a Saltykov-Shchedrin novel (Oblomshchina) and I don't know what all. Again, in Russian. Lectuers in Russian tests and essays in Russian. 30 weeks, and I had to read thousands of pages of "stuff" in a language I'd been learning for 4 years in an English-speaking country and understand it.

I have kids who take 45 minutes to read a page--but at the end, it's marked up in 8 different colors of highlighters ... And they understand nothing. (Granted, it's pop-science, but still--it's *after* all the vocab's introduced and just before or even after the test.)

Years ago I was shocked to hear tell that some English teachers assigned novels but then played audiobooks of them in class to spare their students' actually reading all those words. And yet they focus on "what do you think the characterization is?" or "Does this use mostly logos or pathos?"

Some of my juniors and seniors consider Cliff Notes-type things to be too long and daunting. They watch a Youtube or TikTok video and hope for the best. (And yet others, all girls, wade through long romances or young-adult novels ... And seem stuck there; the guys prefer to watch sports videos or random-scroll through videos or play video games.)

He was featured on our local NPR in the last few days. I tried to find the link to the interview but couldn't. I might think of it and if I do I will be back to post it.

Anyway, they talked about this Atlantic article and also this person's effort to get people to go back to reading full-length books.

It was very, very interesting, especially to me as an English teacher.

A long time ago, and I mean only about 4 years after we'd had the internet, the NY Times published interviews with professors who had noticed their own reading curtailed because of the way the internet disrupts attention. It has to do with the little seratonin boost the brain gets from doing a click. As soon as I read that, I began a program for myself of sustaining attention to long written pieces. It's been very, very hard.

There’s a lot of snobbery in the literature community regarding certain genres. There’s nothing about what’s traditionally considered “literature” that makes it better than many other novels. Jane Austen and Dostoevsky aren’t the only authors out there.