Honest question. How is someone supposed to read books like The Illiad in like a week or two?
henryclay1844 on
How many books can your average 50 year old make it through? Functional illiteracy is only going to rise. No wonder we are on the path we are as a society.
lydiardbell on
This is probably the problem:
>This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
Because it leads to:
>Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; **they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot**.
Reading books all the way through is a skill that fewer schools are teaching.
pine-cone-sundae on
I can both believe- and not believe, at the same time- that this is where we are. I can name ten, maybe fifteen, that I had to read in school before HS graduation. Hell, one of my most rewarding classes was contemporary lit. I still remember how strange the Metamorphosis seemed, and crying through Steinbeck novels in 11th grade. It’s a perspective every human *needs-* deep exploration of the lives and thoughts of others. It’s as good an explanation as any of our modern crises- inability to empathize, misunderstanding of the big issues our species is facing.
Appropriate-Duck-734 on
I teach at a public school. Most of my students never read a book, in a class of 30, just two or three may have a habit of reading. I try bringing a variety of short stories to them (the school don’t give us books and the library doesn’t even work), some get engaged by the stories, but lots of them get unfocused very quickly and have no interest at all on reading. They also complain about the size of the story, if it’s one page, they don’t say anything, but when it’s 3 pages onward ‘this is too long’. It’s quite challenging, yes. They themselves admit that unless it’s a short video they have difficult paying attention.
The article talks about schools not stimulating reading as a habit, but I also wanna remark how parents contribute majorly on this, kids learn their habits first at home (schools most of the time are dealing with that aftermath). So parents just shoving kids at screens, don’t read or buy them a single book and miraculously want them to pick up on reading….
I think in general reading is increasingly seen as having little value, with people preferring other ways to either learn or have fun. Which to me is very sad.
5 Comments
Honest question. How is someone supposed to read books like The Illiad in like a week or two?
How many books can your average 50 year old make it through? Functional illiteracy is only going to rise. No wonder we are on the path we are as a society.
This is probably the problem:
>This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
Because it leads to:
>Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; **they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot**.
Reading books all the way through is a skill that fewer schools are teaching.
I can both believe- and not believe, at the same time- that this is where we are. I can name ten, maybe fifteen, that I had to read in school before HS graduation. Hell, one of my most rewarding classes was contemporary lit. I still remember how strange the Metamorphosis seemed, and crying through Steinbeck novels in 11th grade. It’s a perspective every human *needs-* deep exploration of the lives and thoughts of others. It’s as good an explanation as any of our modern crises- inability to empathize, misunderstanding of the big issues our species is facing.
I teach at a public school. Most of my students never read a book, in a class of 30, just two or three may have a habit of reading. I try bringing a variety of short stories to them (the school don’t give us books and the library doesn’t even work), some get engaged by the stories, but lots of them get unfocused very quickly and have no interest at all on reading. They also complain about the size of the story, if it’s one page, they don’t say anything, but when it’s 3 pages onward ‘this is too long’. It’s quite challenging, yes. They themselves admit that unless it’s a short video they have difficult paying attention.
The article talks about schools not stimulating reading as a habit, but I also wanna remark how parents contribute majorly on this, kids learn their habits first at home (schools most of the time are dealing with that aftermath). So parents just shoving kids at screens, don’t read or buy them a single book and miraculously want them to pick up on reading….
I think in general reading is increasingly seen as having little value, with people preferring other ways to either learn or have fun. Which to me is very sad.