Brilliant article. I have absolutely seen this over my last fifteen years in higher ed. I have had long discussions with colleagues who are so frustrated with students' ability that they are totally reinventing their syllabus year after year because what's the point of a syllabus that a student cannot do?
As a theatre educator, we have seen an enormous dive in interpersonal skills -- down to the ability to make eye contact. So much of our work is catch up on teaching young people how to operate as human beings. And yes, it is absolutely due to our relationship with reading and comprehension growing up, but also the phones, the technology that goes faster than human rhythm, the social media, the advertisers who infiltrate our very psyches.
As a playwright, I have also see this trend in vocabulary. Many young people today do not understand the same vocabulary that was standard ten years ago. I see lots of commentary - even quips in Notes - about keeping vocabulary simple to connect with your reader. This is short-sighted and it directly relates to your point below:
"The complexity of a text should stem from the complexity of the ideas it is trying to convey. If we limit students to simple texts—or to forms of oral language that are less complex—we’re preventing them from developing the ability to grapple with or originate complex or nuanced thoughts."
Language and thought are interconnected. Thought and self are interconnected. Self and other are interconnected.
If we want to build a society capable of coming up with nuanced, innovative ideas, we need the vocabulary to have them.
My son was born in October and had to wait until the next year to start kindergarden even though he was already reading words off bilboards. When he got to first grade in another state that had a cut off date in January I asked if they could move him up a grade to be with his peers. The answer was uniquivocally no yet a bare two weeks later my son's teacher told me how she explained to him that he needed to use smaller, simpler words at recess because the children didn't understand him. Also he had to be in a reading group with his teacher due to his advanced reading skills...in first grade. There is definitely something broken with the public school system.
These are humanities/liberal arts profs complaining it seems.
Somehow this generation didn't have problems with Harry Potter. Maybe the students are checked out because they are only there so they can tick the job application box labelled "has a degree". Maybe years of choosing students based on DEI credentials is now having an impact. And perhaps if they pay less attention than in the past, might we also suspect the material has got worse rather than the students, hmm?
The Slate article by Kotsko is quite something. It's supposedly about the reading abilities of students but in his very first sentence he attacks the Republicans. From the blurb of his most cited work: "By tracing the political and theological roots of the neoliberal concept of freedom, Adam Kotsko offers a fresh perspective, one that emphasizes the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality. More than that, he accounts for the rise of right-wing populism ......" yada yada yada. He says he was making the students read Hegel! In another article he wrote, bizarrely published in a Korean journal of theology (a true sign of quality there), he rants about the "anti-democratic machinations" of Donald Trump:
Jesus Christ. I both read and write for fun, which I can do largely thanks to my laptop and phone. Have done for years, hence me being here, commenting on Substack. Yet I wouldn't be able to focus for more than 30 seconds on Kotsko's academic output, which comes across as some sort of satirical pastiche of far-left academic fever dream word vomit.
Where's the intellectual growth in such material? I find it heartening that students refuse to focus on his lessons! Good! Smart students who get lecturers like him will inevitably do the bare minimum required to graduate, and then spend the rest of their time reading more insightful and vital contemporary social commentary, like their Instagram feeds.
The Insider Higher Ed article is also a laugh. "College students typically use quotations from the first page or two of a source and cite that source only once in their own work." Only using a source once! Awful. They should do it like proper academics and copy/paste as much as they can from each source they find, ideally without attribution, then set up a citation ring with their coursemates for good measure.
Academics are really in no position to complain about student's reading skills when they so visibly aren't bothering to read each other's work either. The story Kotsko gives about the train ride is very telling: he heroically managed to read for an hour without playing with his phone, and his academic friends all praised his incredible stamina. Nobody actually wants to read that stuff, not even them.
The picture you paint of academia does not resemble the one that I have worked in for the past 30 years. I certainly think that various aspects of the academic world are flawed and even broken. But most instructors in the front lines are simply trying to encourage students to read with comprehension and to write with clarity. The right-wing talking points attacking faculty nationally are straw-man arguments that demonstrate no awareness of what actually happens in the classroom.
Bravo! I totally agree with the viewpoints you've written here! Give the students something pertinent to their being that they will then enjoy reading about. Keep politics out of the classroom unless, of course, it's a class with that emphasis, by definition. I've long heels the form belief that if you expect more from the students, they'll rise to the occasion. Lower your expectations and you'll get only that effort from them. Students seem to no longer be taught they can be anything they dream of, rather they just need to" get through school" to get on with life. Thank you for your common sense, intelligent observations.
I don't blame the Common Core. I blame the internet. My students' capacity to read long assignments has dropped like a rock but... so has mine. I genuinely struggle to get to the end of my own assigned readings at times (I always re-read everything I assign, and it's surprising how differently I read every time, what I notice and how sometimes what once seemed clear to me now seems unconvincing). These are readings that are totally normal and which I swallered like tic-tacs while I was in graduate school: glup glup glup. Now I find myself feeling like SO MANY WORDS SO MANY PAGES and I know why: I'm used to short pieces on the intertubes.
I don't think it's *all* bad. The prose style of Substack gets to the point quickly: the kind of academic article that makes you read 6000 words to get one or two interesting arguments or findings in was not some sort of Platonic ideal. All the same, seeing your own brain re-trained to impatience even in middle age does seem sort of worrisome for younger people who are never encountering the first training.
The Common Core is beautiful in conception. I know the Language Arts standards very well and I'm always struck by how beautifully they were developed. I love them.
The application of the Common Core is another thing altogether.
I teach in a UK university, we see the same problem here. So while the specific teaching methods at US schools may be partly to blame, they can't be the whole story. Here, last ten years or so have seen reforms in high schools that were supposed to produce a more knowledge-rich curriculum, and yet we've still seen a fall in reading and writing ability at undergrad level. However, we still have the problem of "teaching to the test," because of how schools' performance is assessed.
I’ve noticed the same thing over several decades of teaching undergrads at the University of Arizona and the University of California. Able to teach half the amount. Scary and discouraging.
"It may take more than simply directing students to, for example, write a summary by including all the “important” points. They may need explicit guidance in how to determine what is important."
There's no maybe about it. The hardest literacy component I've taught to grades 3 to 12 is determining importance. And the beauty is that paragraph structure, syntax, and vocabulary instruction are all embedded in the process. Learning how to determine importance is important!
Here's how I explain it in my instructional guide to reading, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense:
"If we teach students how to use titles, headings and subheadings to come up with a focus question to guide their reading (providing one until they can do this independently), then determining importance becomes a more manageable task. Does the information given provide interesting details that don’t directly pertain to the focus question? Or is the information directly related to answering the question, thereby signaling importance?
The Important vs. Interesting anchor chart provides a student-friendly way to code text as it is read. Students can choose their code and apply it based on a focus question. Then, groups of students can compare notes and share-out their findings with the whole class. For example, if students are reading about sharks with the following focus question—What features make sharks powerful predators?—then information on oceanographers or geographical locations might be interesting but not integral to answering the focus question. Therefore—since we’re always circling back to an integration of skills, in this case reading and writing—the topic sentence for a summary of the article might be: A shark’s keen senses help it hunt its prey."
In my content area reading course I taught for 17 years, a required course for high school credential candidates, decisions about important textual information is a function of the reader’s purpose. At a foundational level, disciplinary teachers teach readers to size of the reading task (your reference to title etc.—is part of the sizing up). If the reading work is aesthetic or literary, the importance task is not the same as an efferent or informative task (you are focused on efferent reading). Readers must first decide whether they are going to read aesthetically and invoke the imagination of efferently and invoke reason, one-to-one correspondence with external reality.
It’s possible for readers to take up a text about sharks, for example, from one or both stances. For example, a reader could approach a shark text rich in factual detail for the purpose of gaining background for creating a painting or writing a short story. This type of project offers a metacognitive laboratory that becomes a sandbox.
On a basic level where the readers purpose is simply to remember the content, readers decode signals the author has embedded in the text to indicate authorial importance. Readers are also on the alert for textual elements of significance/importance for their own unfolding interpretation. Part of the work is to unravel what is important to the reader from what the author offers. The notion of importance is nuanced. I spent several hours on this topic and worked with teachers to assemble a toolkit of practical pedagogical strategies (for example, metaphorical analysis, letter to a character, flow chart, matrix, conceptual mapping, open mind analysis, tableaux, hot seat—a ton of them.)
You are describing a very basic, text-centric reading task for an informational purpose assuming that importance is a function of the text. The reader’s purpose is to consume the text. I used to joke with my students that nobody can eat a text. No, we have to read a text. No one can read a text for us. On this basic view, a text has an unambiguous set of important ideas which should be mapped in identical ways by every reader—a text-based mental representation. Situation-based representations are more powerful and durable. Your use of “interesting but not important” still grants the text all of the authority. The readers purpose is irrelevant, and interest becomes something of a nuisance. The text asks and answers all the questions. Readers are basically reading like AI.
In the case of reading about sharks, readers can have a purpose different from the text as the author set it down. Before even looking at the title etc., readers can engage in a knowledge inventory activity (there are lots of them that have been researched since Donna Ogle’s seminal research in the 1980s). A simple brainstorm—what do you know about sharks? What do you want to learn?—can foster an interest in the topic which may very well lay hidden until readers activate it. Then a survey of the text (title, boldfaced words, intro and conclusion) followed by a discussion of prior knowledge and interests in relation to what the text offers allows each individual to come up with two different assessments of importance:
Type 1: Important to the author (if there will be a quiz, the reader reads with particular attention to the author’s important ideas—finding important information is the purpose not because the author says so but because the teacher says so. This is a subtle point. I cautioned high school teachers to avoid the suggestion that readers are slaves in a diamond mind, subservient to the text. Once this mindset has hardened, sophisticated and complex reading performances are hard to come by.
Type 2: Importance to the reader. Far more than “interesting details” (see the research on “seductive details” which are problems writers embed sometimes unwittingly in text), a text may “speak to” one student with a particular instantiation of prior knowledge and interests in an entirely different way than it speaks to another student. Knowledge is built in unique ways in human brains, and granting students the right to make decisions about importance vis a vis their own long term memory develops motivation and understanding about how to learn my way, not your way.
Is the acquisition of knowledge about sharks or geysers or penguins the goal of reading? Is reading an instrumental protocol leading to a protected “right answer”?
Writing summaries tied closely to the text on the surface seems a logical tact if the goal is to learn facts about sharks. But it promotes shallow reading. The real bang for the buck happens when readers are in charge of their thinking—which they can be taught to do—and integrate what they read with their own developing interests and expertise. Once this begins you have the seeds for lifelong learning. Knowledge is not sturdy when it is made without serious knitting together the new with prior knowledge and self-investment.
Just to clarify, with the help of ChatGPT, is this the dichotomy you're proposing?
"Formalism/New Criticism: This theory asserts that meaning is inherent in the text itself. According to Formalism and New Criticism, the text contains all the necessary elements to understand its meaning, such as structure, themes, and literary devices. These theories emphasize close reading and analysis of the text without considering external factors such as the author's intent or the reader's personal response. Key figures include John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and T.S. Eliot.
Reader-Response Theory: This theory posits that meaning is created by the reader through their interaction with the text. Reader-Response critics argue that a text does not have a fixed meaning until it is read and interpreted by an individual. The reader's personal experiences, emotions, and imagination play a crucial role in the interpretation of the text. Prominent figures in this theory include Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, and Louise Rosenblatt.
These two theories represent opposing views on where meaning resides: within the text itself (Formalism/New Criticism) or in the interaction between the text and the reader (Reader-Response Theory)."
Not really. I’m not proposing a dichotomy. I’m saying that readers have the right and the responsibility to establish a purpose and read texts against the grain. Have you read Stanley Fish? You should. Though he is really really extreme (Is there even a text in this class?) he is provocative and taught me a great deal about reading figurative language and poetry. T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, whom I adore, contributed the significant notion of the objective correlative, is boring and arrogant, and I have to tamp down my heated responses to acknowledge his brilliance. Louise Rosenblatt is a treasure. Her Literature as Exploration (I think I’m not misremembering her title) is seminal re aesthetic reading. Wolfgang Iser helped a colleague teaching a great books course to Gen Ed students in a completely new more effective way after years of unsatisfying teaching.
I’m very interested in text structure from both a rhetorical and pedagogical perspective. There is a lot of research suggesting that teaching rhetorical structures improves convergent comprehension of the sort the traditional summary writing measures. But these structures are complex in themselves and suffer from the law of diminishing returns.
If by “fixed meaning” you mean “autonomous text,” I can’t square the notion with my own experience as a reader. Gadamer and the hermeneutical philosophers posit that all of the information needed to comprehend a text is in the text. Bringing in material from outside the four corners of the text violates the text. Of course, Gadamer is not making a political point about power. He is describing what he believes.
A text is not an empty space in which I can see whatever I like. A text about sharks as predators is about sharks, not buffaloes. But a text does not contain all of the information necessary for comprehension. Readers must bring prior knowledge, and this prior knowledge is not fixed nor is it shared. Reading for me is about using what I know about the world, about intentions writers have, about language, about textual dynamics to add to what I know about the world, about intentions, language, text.
I’m not an ideologue, and I’ve read enough about reading at this late date in my life to require informed and reasonable positions before I
express agreement. Your statement that students can read a passage and write a topic sentence with details as a pedagogical strategy I can’t agree with. It ignores
complexity in a way that could have unintended consequences if it were played out at scale
A composition theorist examined thousands of paragraphs from the universe of written discourse and published a paper documenting that a very small percentage of paragraphs actually have a topic sentence. I’ll look up the facts of publication if you’d like. The paragraph itself is an artifact of 19th century pedagogy, an algorithm that the bot applies religiously. Try this. Ask the bot to write an essay about sharks. You’ll get topical paragraphs clearly articulating a topic sentence and unnaturally unified, complete, ordered, and coherent. It will not sound human because humans don’t write that way. Humans don’t think that way.
"a very small percentage of paragraphs actually have a topic sentence."
Totally agree! From my book: "The important point is that focused paragraphs do have a controlling idea (whether it is stated at the beginning or not) and offer enough explanation and elaboration to illustrate the importance of that idea."
I'm taking about introducing 8 year-olds to multi-paragraph essay writing.
From ChatGPT on turning a focus question (What features make sharks powerful predators) into a thesis statement:
"Sharks possess a variety of physical and behavioral features that make them powerful and effective predators in the ocean. These features include:"
Right. My question is important to me. I’m working to make it important to you. If you were in my class and I had the power to report a weakness in your ability if you didn’t find the same things important that I do (pressure to comply, brainwashing) you would have to find it important too or suffer the consequences (remediation).
I am starting a doctorate and I was a bit taken aback that our first course is "how to research and write." I kinda thought that was a prerequisite for people seeking terminal degrees.
Standardized testing is the problem. Students aren’t allowed to think complex thoughts that take them in different directions. They must all be pointed in the same direction for testing reasons. This places limits on what teachers can cover, which in turn, limits vocabulary, limits the broadness of topics, ties the teachers hands to authentically teach in a passionate way anymore.
I’ve made this argument as a teacher and professor for 40 years. At a deep level the source is the search for the quick fix, the silver bullet. This persistent search leads to charlatans selling snake oil.
Curious that a college that consistently appears in the list of 20 colleges with the worst professors in PR's "Best 389 Colleges" is consulted to find out what's wrong with the students. From my experience as a veteran high school teacher and student at said college, here are some observations. Rubrics in high school can mean lack of judgment in college. Block scheduling in high school can mean poor time management in college. Learning by doing in high school can mean having to play catch up with content in college. Peer instruction in high school can mean more content needs to be relearned in college. Project-based learning in high school can mean a greater knowledge gap to fill in college.
On the flip side, the aforementioned college allows professors to provide minimal feedback and varied practice, and to fail to identify and target common misconceptions. American-born professors get high marks for teaching but they often move on. Meanwhile, a professor's odd use of an English word, use of a policy claimed to be in the syllabus that isn't, or defense of odd deductions from correct answers with a rubric the students never see can cost native speakers a letter grade.
In both settings, I've found instructors adopting the students' view (though probably for different reasons) that the lecture slides are a proxy for the textbook reading, rather than a stepping stone or review. Instructors may underestimate how much narrative and logical development was compromised in their abridgment of the material.
Fads that have been adopted by teachers less because of their demonstrated effectiveness to prepare students for the first two years of college than because they reduce the teachers' workload continue to be enforced by school administrators, including in classrooms in which the teacher has improved on or been selective of the fads adopted. Zombie fads that won't die are kept alive by many administrators who themselves chose a less than rigorous path in higher education and so have had little opportunity to develop judgment as to which buzzwords refer to genuinely effective methods and which are predictably holding students back in the administrators own field, never mind in the full range of subjects their employees teach.
Beautiful. Powerful. You nailed it. All my years of teaching at the university—after ten years teaching fourth and seventh grade—taught me one thing. When professors tell me about how poorly students read and write and blame it on the high school, they are secretly happy because they get to lecture. Professors love to hear their voices, especially under conditions of real power. This is college, kid.
We are also seeing a generation of teachers who completed their own education in the era of standardized testing. These teachers were *explicitly* taught that the tests measure learning with accuracy. Now we are at a point where many people within education can't see the difference between the assessment and the skills purportedly assessed.
I never, ever hear people talking about the role of the rise of the popularity of graphic novels and their effect on reading habits, except in glowing terms that ring hollow to me.
As a librarian, teacher, and parent, I think graphic novels are a lovely medium, but I also see them as increasingly being the only books kids read. Kids never get used to reading paragraphs, to discerning vocabulary words in context (a skill necessary for college level reading), and they find descriptions boring and hate reading them. Graphic novels are one sentence at a time, virtually no description, and advanced vocabulary tends to be spoon fed. Kids don’t have to get used to visualizing what they read, or fitting the words into some sort of practical worldview, because they can just glance at the picture and move on to the next sentence of dialog. They are literally reading fewer words, and most of those words are dialog, and every teacher knows that spoken vocabulary in English tends to be very limited.
The stories can be great! I’m not discounting that! And the art! Dave Pilkey makes dyslexic kids feel seen! Raina Telgemeier humanizes complex issues of mental health! These are great things! But they are a different experience from more traditional books, and they don’t let kids practice the skills they’ll need for higher level reading.
I constantly hear my fellow librarians, most of whom don’t have their own kids or their kids are grown up, talking about how great graphic novels are for encouraging reluctant readers to read longer books. I see the opposite: they take eager readers, and turn them into kids who CAN’T read longer books. I’ve seen it with my own kids and with my students.
This theory would definitely reflect pretty much everything in this essay. I don’t think it’s all of it, but I do think it’s part. In school, kids just read single paragraphs for test prep. At home, they only read one line of dialog at a time in graphic novels. It’s not class or education based: maybe wealthier families even have more money to spend on graphic novels. But I think we, as parents and teachers and librarians, need to push more word-heavy recreational reading, and treat graphic novels as fun diversions, and not the meat of reading.
All these reasons and no one has mentioned the pandemic, which has had a measurable effect on education. It's not the only source, for sure, but should be considered. Perhaps it exacerbated existing weaknesses.
I have also wondered whether the shift of academic institutions from places that value academia for the sake of academia to pursuing academia to get ready for the corporate world is a factor that has also shifted the value of the academics and reduced it to just a means to an end. Something that is relevant in the premise of why students decide to go to college, and why parents and teachers urge students to gain a degree in the first place.
I am sorry but if some of the bloated rhetoric seen in a few of the comments here is representative of what today’s kids are rejecting I can’t say that I blame them. 😎
As a reading interventionist, I know that student can be asked and do read and find themes and inferences in whole books, or novels. If you match the lexile level to student reading ability, students as young as 1st grade can access literature. The students want whole books, they want to to write about and understand the themes in the novel.
Brilliant article. I have absolutely seen this over my last fifteen years in higher ed. I have had long discussions with colleagues who are so frustrated with students' ability that they are totally reinventing their syllabus year after year because what's the point of a syllabus that a student cannot do?
As a theatre educator, we have seen an enormous dive in interpersonal skills -- down to the ability to make eye contact. So much of our work is catch up on teaching young people how to operate as human beings. And yes, it is absolutely due to our relationship with reading and comprehension growing up, but also the phones, the technology that goes faster than human rhythm, the social media, the advertisers who infiltrate our very psyches.
As a playwright, I have also see this trend in vocabulary. Many young people today do not understand the same vocabulary that was standard ten years ago. I see lots of commentary - even quips in Notes - about keeping vocabulary simple to connect with your reader. This is short-sighted and it directly relates to your point below:
"The complexity of a text should stem from the complexity of the ideas it is trying to convey. If we limit students to simple texts—or to forms of oral language that are less complex—we’re preventing them from developing the ability to grapple with or originate complex or nuanced thoughts."
Language and thought are interconnected. Thought and self are interconnected. Self and other are interconnected.
If we want to build a society capable of coming up with nuanced, innovative ideas, we need the vocabulary to have them.
Yes! The vocabulary -- students ask me the meanings of words now that make me feel embarrassed for them.
My son was born in October and had to wait until the next year to start kindergarden even though he was already reading words off bilboards. When he got to first grade in another state that had a cut off date in January I asked if they could move him up a grade to be with his peers. The answer was uniquivocally no yet a bare two weeks later my son's teacher told me how she explained to him that he needed to use smaller, simpler words at recess because the children didn't understand him. Also he had to be in a reading group with his teacher due to his advanced reading skills...in first grade. There is definitely something broken with the public school system.
These are humanities/liberal arts profs complaining it seems.
Somehow this generation didn't have problems with Harry Potter. Maybe the students are checked out because they are only there so they can tick the job application box labelled "has a degree". Maybe years of choosing students based on DEI credentials is now having an impact. And perhaps if they pay less attention than in the past, might we also suspect the material has got worse rather than the students, hmm?
The Slate article by Kotsko is quite something. It's supposedly about the reading abilities of students but in his very first sentence he attacks the Republicans. From the blurb of his most cited work: "By tracing the political and theological roots of the neoliberal concept of freedom, Adam Kotsko offers a fresh perspective, one that emphasizes the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality. More than that, he accounts for the rise of right-wing populism ......" yada yada yada. He says he was making the students read Hegel! In another article he wrote, bizarrely published in a Korean journal of theology (a true sign of quality there), he rants about the "anti-democratic machinations" of Donald Trump:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=24GmYcMAAAAJ:M05iB0D1s5AC
Jesus Christ. I both read and write for fun, which I can do largely thanks to my laptop and phone. Have done for years, hence me being here, commenting on Substack. Yet I wouldn't be able to focus for more than 30 seconds on Kotsko's academic output, which comes across as some sort of satirical pastiche of far-left academic fever dream word vomit.
Where's the intellectual growth in such material? I find it heartening that students refuse to focus on his lessons! Good! Smart students who get lecturers like him will inevitably do the bare minimum required to graduate, and then spend the rest of their time reading more insightful and vital contemporary social commentary, like their Instagram feeds.
The Insider Higher Ed article is also a laugh. "College students typically use quotations from the first page or two of a source and cite that source only once in their own work." Only using a source once! Awful. They should do it like proper academics and copy/paste as much as they can from each source they find, ideally without attribution, then set up a citation ring with their coursemates for good measure.
Academics are really in no position to complain about student's reading skills when they so visibly aren't bothering to read each other's work either. The story Kotsko gives about the train ride is very telling: he heroically managed to read for an hour without playing with his phone, and his academic friends all praised his incredible stamina. Nobody actually wants to read that stuff, not even them.
The picture you paint of academia does not resemble the one that I have worked in for the past 30 years. I certainly think that various aspects of the academic world are flawed and even broken. But most instructors in the front lines are simply trying to encourage students to read with comprehension and to write with clarity. The right-wing talking points attacking faculty nationally are straw-man arguments that demonstrate no awareness of what actually happens in the classroom.
Bravo! I totally agree with the viewpoints you've written here! Give the students something pertinent to their being that they will then enjoy reading about. Keep politics out of the classroom unless, of course, it's a class with that emphasis, by definition. I've long heels the form belief that if you expect more from the students, they'll rise to the occasion. Lower your expectations and you'll get only that effort from them. Students seem to no longer be taught they can be anything they dream of, rather they just need to" get through school" to get on with life. Thank you for your common sense, intelligent observations.
I don't blame the Common Core. I blame the internet. My students' capacity to read long assignments has dropped like a rock but... so has mine. I genuinely struggle to get to the end of my own assigned readings at times (I always re-read everything I assign, and it's surprising how differently I read every time, what I notice and how sometimes what once seemed clear to me now seems unconvincing). These are readings that are totally normal and which I swallered like tic-tacs while I was in graduate school: glup glup glup. Now I find myself feeling like SO MANY WORDS SO MANY PAGES and I know why: I'm used to short pieces on the intertubes.
I don't think it's *all* bad. The prose style of Substack gets to the point quickly: the kind of academic article that makes you read 6000 words to get one or two interesting arguments or findings in was not some sort of Platonic ideal. All the same, seeing your own brain re-trained to impatience even in middle age does seem sort of worrisome for younger people who are never encountering the first training.
The Common Core is beautiful in conception. I know the Language Arts standards very well and I'm always struck by how beautifully they were developed. I love them.
The application of the Common Core is another thing altogether.
I teach in a UK university, we see the same problem here. So while the specific teaching methods at US schools may be partly to blame, they can't be the whole story. Here, last ten years or so have seen reforms in high schools that were supposed to produce a more knowledge-rich curriculum, and yet we've still seen a fall in reading and writing ability at undergrad level. However, we still have the problem of "teaching to the test," because of how schools' performance is assessed.
I’ve noticed the same thing over several decades of teaching undergrads at the University of Arizona and the University of California. Able to teach half the amount. Scary and discouraging.
Well what do you expect down there at the dirty T?
(Sorry; just a bit of good natured ribbing from the wife and mother of Sun Devils 😄)
"It may take more than simply directing students to, for example, write a summary by including all the “important” points. They may need explicit guidance in how to determine what is important."
There's no maybe about it. The hardest literacy component I've taught to grades 3 to 12 is determining importance. And the beauty is that paragraph structure, syntax, and vocabulary instruction are all embedded in the process. Learning how to determine importance is important!
Important to whom?
Here's how I explain it in my instructional guide to reading, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense:
"If we teach students how to use titles, headings and subheadings to come up with a focus question to guide their reading (providing one until they can do this independently), then determining importance becomes a more manageable task. Does the information given provide interesting details that don’t directly pertain to the focus question? Or is the information directly related to answering the question, thereby signaling importance?
The Important vs. Interesting anchor chart provides a student-friendly way to code text as it is read. Students can choose their code and apply it based on a focus question. Then, groups of students can compare notes and share-out their findings with the whole class. For example, if students are reading about sharks with the following focus question—What features make sharks powerful predators?—then information on oceanographers or geographical locations might be interesting but not integral to answering the focus question. Therefore—since we’re always circling back to an integration of skills, in this case reading and writing—the topic sentence for a summary of the article might be: A shark’s keen senses help it hunt its prey."
In my content area reading course I taught for 17 years, a required course for high school credential candidates, decisions about important textual information is a function of the reader’s purpose. At a foundational level, disciplinary teachers teach readers to size of the reading task (your reference to title etc.—is part of the sizing up). If the reading work is aesthetic or literary, the importance task is not the same as an efferent or informative task (you are focused on efferent reading). Readers must first decide whether they are going to read aesthetically and invoke the imagination of efferently and invoke reason, one-to-one correspondence with external reality.
It’s possible for readers to take up a text about sharks, for example, from one or both stances. For example, a reader could approach a shark text rich in factual detail for the purpose of gaining background for creating a painting or writing a short story. This type of project offers a metacognitive laboratory that becomes a sandbox.
On a basic level where the readers purpose is simply to remember the content, readers decode signals the author has embedded in the text to indicate authorial importance. Readers are also on the alert for textual elements of significance/importance for their own unfolding interpretation. Part of the work is to unravel what is important to the reader from what the author offers. The notion of importance is nuanced. I spent several hours on this topic and worked with teachers to assemble a toolkit of practical pedagogical strategies (for example, metaphorical analysis, letter to a character, flow chart, matrix, conceptual mapping, open mind analysis, tableaux, hot seat—a ton of them.)
You are describing a very basic, text-centric reading task for an informational purpose assuming that importance is a function of the text. The reader’s purpose is to consume the text. I used to joke with my students that nobody can eat a text. No, we have to read a text. No one can read a text for us. On this basic view, a text has an unambiguous set of important ideas which should be mapped in identical ways by every reader—a text-based mental representation. Situation-based representations are more powerful and durable. Your use of “interesting but not important” still grants the text all of the authority. The readers purpose is irrelevant, and interest becomes something of a nuisance. The text asks and answers all the questions. Readers are basically reading like AI.
In the case of reading about sharks, readers can have a purpose different from the text as the author set it down. Before even looking at the title etc., readers can engage in a knowledge inventory activity (there are lots of them that have been researched since Donna Ogle’s seminal research in the 1980s). A simple brainstorm—what do you know about sharks? What do you want to learn?—can foster an interest in the topic which may very well lay hidden until readers activate it. Then a survey of the text (title, boldfaced words, intro and conclusion) followed by a discussion of prior knowledge and interests in relation to what the text offers allows each individual to come up with two different assessments of importance:
Type 1: Important to the author (if there will be a quiz, the reader reads with particular attention to the author’s important ideas—finding important information is the purpose not because the author says so but because the teacher says so. This is a subtle point. I cautioned high school teachers to avoid the suggestion that readers are slaves in a diamond mind, subservient to the text. Once this mindset has hardened, sophisticated and complex reading performances are hard to come by.
Type 2: Importance to the reader. Far more than “interesting details” (see the research on “seductive details” which are problems writers embed sometimes unwittingly in text), a text may “speak to” one student with a particular instantiation of prior knowledge and interests in an entirely different way than it speaks to another student. Knowledge is built in unique ways in human brains, and granting students the right to make decisions about importance vis a vis their own long term memory develops motivation and understanding about how to learn my way, not your way.
Is the acquisition of knowledge about sharks or geysers or penguins the goal of reading? Is reading an instrumental protocol leading to a protected “right answer”?
Writing summaries tied closely to the text on the surface seems a logical tact if the goal is to learn facts about sharks. But it promotes shallow reading. The real bang for the buck happens when readers are in charge of their thinking—which they can be taught to do—and integrate what they read with their own developing interests and expertise. Once this begins you have the seeds for lifelong learning. Knowledge is not sturdy when it is made without serious knitting together the new with prior knowledge and self-investment.
Just to clarify, with the help of ChatGPT, is this the dichotomy you're proposing?
"Formalism/New Criticism: This theory asserts that meaning is inherent in the text itself. According to Formalism and New Criticism, the text contains all the necessary elements to understand its meaning, such as structure, themes, and literary devices. These theories emphasize close reading and analysis of the text without considering external factors such as the author's intent or the reader's personal response. Key figures include John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and T.S. Eliot.
Reader-Response Theory: This theory posits that meaning is created by the reader through their interaction with the text. Reader-Response critics argue that a text does not have a fixed meaning until it is read and interpreted by an individual. The reader's personal experiences, emotions, and imagination play a crucial role in the interpretation of the text. Prominent figures in this theory include Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, and Louise Rosenblatt.
These two theories represent opposing views on where meaning resides: within the text itself (Formalism/New Criticism) or in the interaction between the text and the reader (Reader-Response Theory)."
Not really. I’m not proposing a dichotomy. I’m saying that readers have the right and the responsibility to establish a purpose and read texts against the grain. Have you read Stanley Fish? You should. Though he is really really extreme (Is there even a text in this class?) he is provocative and taught me a great deal about reading figurative language and poetry. T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, whom I adore, contributed the significant notion of the objective correlative, is boring and arrogant, and I have to tamp down my heated responses to acknowledge his brilliance. Louise Rosenblatt is a treasure. Her Literature as Exploration (I think I’m not misremembering her title) is seminal re aesthetic reading. Wolfgang Iser helped a colleague teaching a great books course to Gen Ed students in a completely new more effective way after years of unsatisfying teaching.
I’m very interested in text structure from both a rhetorical and pedagogical perspective. There is a lot of research suggesting that teaching rhetorical structures improves convergent comprehension of the sort the traditional summary writing measures. But these structures are complex in themselves and suffer from the law of diminishing returns.
If by “fixed meaning” you mean “autonomous text,” I can’t square the notion with my own experience as a reader. Gadamer and the hermeneutical philosophers posit that all of the information needed to comprehend a text is in the text. Bringing in material from outside the four corners of the text violates the text. Of course, Gadamer is not making a political point about power. He is describing what he believes.
A text is not an empty space in which I can see whatever I like. A text about sharks as predators is about sharks, not buffaloes. But a text does not contain all of the information necessary for comprehension. Readers must bring prior knowledge, and this prior knowledge is not fixed nor is it shared. Reading for me is about using what I know about the world, about intentions writers have, about language, about textual dynamics to add to what I know about the world, about intentions, language, text.
I’m not an ideologue, and I’ve read enough about reading at this late date in my life to require informed and reasonable positions before I
express agreement. Your statement that students can read a passage and write a topic sentence with details as a pedagogical strategy I can’t agree with. It ignores
complexity in a way that could have unintended consequences if it were played out at scale
A composition theorist examined thousands of paragraphs from the universe of written discourse and published a paper documenting that a very small percentage of paragraphs actually have a topic sentence. I’ll look up the facts of publication if you’d like. The paragraph itself is an artifact of 19th century pedagogy, an algorithm that the bot applies religiously. Try this. Ask the bot to write an essay about sharks. You’ll get topical paragraphs clearly articulating a topic sentence and unnaturally unified, complete, ordered, and coherent. It will not sound human because humans don’t write that way. Humans don’t think that way.
Richard Braddock (1974). The frequency and placement of topic sentences in exposiitory prose. Research in the
Teaching of English (Winter, 1974) pp 287-302
Paul Rodgers (1966). A discourse-centered rhetoric of the paragraph. College Composition and Communication (February, 1966). pp. 2-11
"a very small percentage of paragraphs actually have a topic sentence."
Totally agree! From my book: "The important point is that focused paragraphs do have a controlling idea (whether it is stated at the beginning or not) and offer enough explanation and elaboration to illustrate the importance of that idea."
I'm taking about introducing 8 year-olds to multi-paragraph essay writing.
From ChatGPT on turning a focus question (What features make sharks powerful predators) into a thesis statement:
"Sharks possess a variety of physical and behavioral features that make them powerful and effective predators in the ocean. These features include:"
I dare say important for the point you are trying to make.
Right. My question is important to me. I’m working to make it important to you. If you were in my class and I had the power to report a weakness in your ability if you didn’t find the same things important that I do (pressure to comply, brainwashing) you would have to find it important too or suffer the consequences (remediation).
It’s the electronics.
Haha
I am starting a doctorate and I was a bit taken aback that our first course is "how to research and write." I kinda thought that was a prerequisite for people seeking terminal degrees.
Standardized testing is the problem. Students aren’t allowed to think complex thoughts that take them in different directions. They must all be pointed in the same direction for testing reasons. This places limits on what teachers can cover, which in turn, limits vocabulary, limits the broadness of topics, ties the teachers hands to authentically teach in a passionate way anymore.
I’ve made this argument as a teacher and professor for 40 years. At a deep level the source is the search for the quick fix, the silver bullet. This persistent search leads to charlatans selling snake oil.
Curious that a college that consistently appears in the list of 20 colleges with the worst professors in PR's "Best 389 Colleges" is consulted to find out what's wrong with the students. From my experience as a veteran high school teacher and student at said college, here are some observations. Rubrics in high school can mean lack of judgment in college. Block scheduling in high school can mean poor time management in college. Learning by doing in high school can mean having to play catch up with content in college. Peer instruction in high school can mean more content needs to be relearned in college. Project-based learning in high school can mean a greater knowledge gap to fill in college.
On the flip side, the aforementioned college allows professors to provide minimal feedback and varied practice, and to fail to identify and target common misconceptions. American-born professors get high marks for teaching but they often move on. Meanwhile, a professor's odd use of an English word, use of a policy claimed to be in the syllabus that isn't, or defense of odd deductions from correct answers with a rubric the students never see can cost native speakers a letter grade.
In both settings, I've found instructors adopting the students' view (though probably for different reasons) that the lecture slides are a proxy for the textbook reading, rather than a stepping stone or review. Instructors may underestimate how much narrative and logical development was compromised in their abridgment of the material.
Fads that have been adopted by teachers less because of their demonstrated effectiveness to prepare students for the first two years of college than because they reduce the teachers' workload continue to be enforced by school administrators, including in classrooms in which the teacher has improved on or been selective of the fads adopted. Zombie fads that won't die are kept alive by many administrators who themselves chose a less than rigorous path in higher education and so have had little opportunity to develop judgment as to which buzzwords refer to genuinely effective methods and which are predictably holding students back in the administrators own field, never mind in the full range of subjects their employees teach.
Beautiful. Powerful. You nailed it. All my years of teaching at the university—after ten years teaching fourth and seventh grade—taught me one thing. When professors tell me about how poorly students read and write and blame it on the high school, they are secretly happy because they get to lecture. Professors love to hear their voices, especially under conditions of real power. This is college, kid.
We are also seeing a generation of teachers who completed their own education in the era of standardized testing. These teachers were *explicitly* taught that the tests measure learning with accuracy. Now we are at a point where many people within education can't see the difference between the assessment and the skills purportedly assessed.
I never, ever hear people talking about the role of the rise of the popularity of graphic novels and their effect on reading habits, except in glowing terms that ring hollow to me.
As a librarian, teacher, and parent, I think graphic novels are a lovely medium, but I also see them as increasingly being the only books kids read. Kids never get used to reading paragraphs, to discerning vocabulary words in context (a skill necessary for college level reading), and they find descriptions boring and hate reading them. Graphic novels are one sentence at a time, virtually no description, and advanced vocabulary tends to be spoon fed. Kids don’t have to get used to visualizing what they read, or fitting the words into some sort of practical worldview, because they can just glance at the picture and move on to the next sentence of dialog. They are literally reading fewer words, and most of those words are dialog, and every teacher knows that spoken vocabulary in English tends to be very limited.
The stories can be great! I’m not discounting that! And the art! Dave Pilkey makes dyslexic kids feel seen! Raina Telgemeier humanizes complex issues of mental health! These are great things! But they are a different experience from more traditional books, and they don’t let kids practice the skills they’ll need for higher level reading.
I constantly hear my fellow librarians, most of whom don’t have their own kids or their kids are grown up, talking about how great graphic novels are for encouraging reluctant readers to read longer books. I see the opposite: they take eager readers, and turn them into kids who CAN’T read longer books. I’ve seen it with my own kids and with my students.
This theory would definitely reflect pretty much everything in this essay. I don’t think it’s all of it, but I do think it’s part. In school, kids just read single paragraphs for test prep. At home, they only read one line of dialog at a time in graphic novels. It’s not class or education based: maybe wealthier families even have more money to spend on graphic novels. But I think we, as parents and teachers and librarians, need to push more word-heavy recreational reading, and treat graphic novels as fun diversions, and not the meat of reading.
This approach-
Definitely longer books required!
https://www.amblesideonline.org/cm-intro
All these reasons and no one has mentioned the pandemic, which has had a measurable effect on education. It's not the only source, for sure, but should be considered. Perhaps it exacerbated existing weaknesses.
I have also wondered whether the shift of academic institutions from places that value academia for the sake of academia to pursuing academia to get ready for the corporate world is a factor that has also shifted the value of the academics and reduced it to just a means to an end. Something that is relevant in the premise of why students decide to go to college, and why parents and teachers urge students to gain a degree in the first place.
I am sorry but if some of the bloated rhetoric seen in a few of the comments here is representative of what today’s kids are rejecting I can’t say that I blame them. 😎
As a reading interventionist, I know that student can be asked and do read and find themes and inferences in whole books, or novels. If you match the lexile level to student reading ability, students as young as 1st grade can access literature. The students want whole books, they want to to write about and understand the themes in the novel.