On one hand, I’ve always been skeptical of professors pushing for insane reading schedules. If you expect your students to read Pride and Prejudice today, Crime and Punishment the week after and War and Peace by the end of the quarter, then you have unrealistic expectations. Besides showing no respect for the free time of your students. Most of the students will end up skimming through pages just to meet the deadline, and they won’t have time to absorb the meaning of such important novels. Assign less books and give students more time to read them, otherwise your students won’t learn anything more about the book that they can’t read from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page.
On the other hand, the volume of reading assigned by some professors seems to be the last of the problems. The biggest problem that also starts affecting top-level colleges apparently isn’t that students struggle to read War and Peace in a month, but that they also struggle to read a Shakespeare’s sonnet without getting distracted halfway. And high school has simply given up trying to keep students focused and read, so when then land in college most of them have literally read zero books in their lives - and their writing skills are also quite primitive and childish as a result.
This is a big problem. We’ve forged a generation too easily distracted to function properly, and with too many instant gratifications preventing focus time. And technologies like ChatGPT that amplify the illusion of knowledge at your fingertips are doomed to make things even worse. And that also applies to the kids who eventually end up in Yale or Cambridge. We have to undo this mess before it’s too late. If the solution is not to give a phone to your kid until he/she is of age, then it’s time to go for it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
Fabio Manganiello /
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"content": "On one hand, I’ve always been skeptical of professors pushing for insane reading schedules. If you expect your students to read Pride and Prejudice today, Crime and Punishment the week after and War and Peace by the end of the quarter, then you have unrealistic expectations. Besides showing no respect for the free time of your students. Most of the students will end up skimming through pages just to meet the deadline, and they won’t have time to absorb the meaning of such important novels. Assign less books and give students more time to read them, otherwise your students won’t learn anything more about the book that they can’t read from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page.\n\nOn the other hand, the volume of reading assigned by some professors seems to be the last of the problems. The biggest problem that also starts affecting top-level colleges apparently isn’t that students struggle to read War and Peace in a month, but that they also struggle to read a Shakespeare’s sonnet without getting distracted halfway. And high school has simply given up trying to keep students focused and read, so when then land in college most of them have literally read zero books in their lives - and their writing skills are also quite primitive and childish as a result.\n\nThis is a big problem. We’ve forged a generation too easily distracted to function properly, and with too many instant gratifications preventing focus time. And technologies like ChatGPT that amplify the illusion of knowledge at your fingertips are doomed to make things even worse. And that also applies to the kids who eventually end up in Yale or Cambridge. We have to undo this mess before it’s too late. If the solution is not to give a phone to your kid until he/she is of age, then it’s time to go for it.\n\nhttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/",
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