It has come to my attention that some students don’t do all of their course readings. I don’t know what to say about this other than I’m completely taken aback by the concept. Luckily, (and the sarcasm stops here), we have Nancy Bunge to tell us how to work through this crisis of education. Make the texts harder!
A statistic is floating around that says that only 26 percent of students do their course readings and the basic argument that spawns from this is that we are living in a new age and today’s students don’t want to engage difficult texts when there are so many other shiny exciting ways to learn. With tools like Google and streaming media and all that jazz, who wants to curl up in a corner and read?
Nancy says that’s all bologne and I have to say I agree with her.
Here are a few choice quotes from her blog:
“My classroom experiences suggest that blaming university students for this depressing development makes little sense — and not only because faculty members have the power to challenge students’ self-destructive behavior. I’ve discovered that a sizable number of my students enjoy engaging hard books. When I ask them why, they give the reasons that researchers are beginning to validate: Students believe that complex reading nourishes their brains, and they find the experience satisfying. Or, as one of my students put it, “The books were tough but made me think.”
and:
“The students recognize the same thing as those who worry about the study by the National Endowment for the Arts documenting declining reading skills. Despite their affection for visual media and technology, my students realize that if they do not grapple with difficult, abstract texts, they will miss an important dimension of human learning and thinking. As one student wrote: “I like a challenge when I am trying to learn. Putting in more effort yields better results.”"
It’s not the quantity of the books that we read (although the more the merrier), but the quality of the book and the voracity with which we engage it. Only 26% of students do their course readings because only 26% of readings are of the level that they require close reading to understand the point and talk about them intelligently in class or in an essay.
I’ve been in courses that fail to teach me much because the readings were too easy. And to be fair I’ve also been in a course that fell apart because the readings were very difficult. However, I feel that the course failed because the students were not prepped appropriately. They assumed that it was going to be just another course that they could do a little bit of the reading an hour before class and coast on through. But by the time the students realized that these texts required a special level of engagement they had either soured on the course or were unable to catch up.
Another piece of advice that I have is to avoid easing students into difficult texts by progressing from easy texts to hard ones. Slam us right away with the hard ones so we can get a handle on the it while we are still figuring out how much energy we need to put into each course. Then you can ease up and let us apply the concepts to some more readable texts.
The moral of the story is that most students want to read difficult texts that change the way they see the world. Just be sure to wake them up when you assign one.
Am I wrong? Comment and let me know!
My .02,
The problem is most students don’t know how to read. Not in the literal sense of basic literacy, but rather they don’t know how to read seriously. Or call it professionally. In a sense, that’s what the English major is about: becoming a professional reader. For the faculty’s part, I suspect too many of us also neglect this basic point, and we assume our students already know how to read. Nothing doing. By and large they don’t.
So what do I mean by reading, or “professional reading”? Rereading, for one thing. Again and again. Got a sonnet assigned for tomorrow’s class? Fourteen lines, no problem. Well, sure, but the point is you should read those fourteen lines a dozen times before the class; read them aloud, read them first thing in the morning, read them before you go to bed at night. Read them on the bus, read them in a coffee shop. And while you’re reading, (yes, here it comes . . . ) keep a dictionary handy. Look words up. Look at etymologies. Keep an encyclopedia (or a Web browser) handy. Look stuff up there too. Follow links, follow connections.
Got a novel to read for class? No, you’re not going to read the whole thing through a dozen times. But you can still reread. Reread selectively, reread at random; books are random access devices, you can open them anywhere. Use that.
Also keep a pen handy. Make notes, underline stuff. Someone should be able to look at your text and know that it’s been read. Don’t fret about it, people have been writing in books for centuries. It’s what readers are supposed to do.
So read, reread, look stuff up, mark the text up. Make it your own. Have a paper due and don’t know what to write about? Spend a couple of hours rereading and underlining. I guarantee it’ll be time well spent. Texts should be hard for the right reasons–because ideas are hard, because language is infinite but imperfect, and because good writers tell all the truth but tell it slant.
That’s a point well taken and I think that a lot of professors are hip to that. At least 80% of my English courses so far have, assigned a reading, sometimes in the syllabus itself, that covers the topic of “how to read” which is a lot like what you have detailed in your comment.
For some reason, it’s just not happening. Personally, and I might be admitting something I shouldn’t here, I do around 80% of my assigned readings. I perform “professional reading” on anywhere from 5-50% of a course’s readings depending on the content of the reading and the structure of the course. Readings that I have to write an essay on I reread many many times. Readings that I’m being quizzed on might only get a single pass, as quizzes are usually quite topical. Readings that require neither might be skimmed for basic comprehension and then read fully if they really catch my attention. Poems almost always get read several times, fiction less so.
I do most of my reading outside of assigned readings in the form of blogs, web-based news media and sometimes I even read a book or two for *fun*. I probably read on average, 10 or more hours a day. I could, should and perhaps shall take your advice and work on increasing the percentage of readings that get the “professional” treatment at the expense of my less productive blog reading. However, thus far, my strategy has been more than adequate to max out my grades
And I think that’s the crux of it. I know, without a doubt, that in some of my English courses I could do less than 20% of the readings and still get an A. I could selectively bombard any reading that requires an essay, write a sufficient paper and simply disregard every other assigned reading. This isn’t to say I couldn’t write a better paper if I invested more effort into the other readings, I could, but I’m not being held to that standard.
I spoke to a friend, Malcolm Harris, about Nancy’s article and he said something to the effect that he does his readings out of respect for his professor. Such as to say “I trust you to know what is good for me to read”. I think that is an admirable way to look at it. But for the non-Malcolms out there, perhaps some English courses could stand for more accountability. Perhaps courses could benefit from shorter reading lists but higher expectations for demonstrating that what is on the list, is actually being read professionally.
My fellow English students are probably warming up their torches and sharpening their pitchforks so I’m going to stop here
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I think that as hopeful as one may be to get students reading harder texts, the truth is, not all texts are relevant or engaging. What Ken Macrorie described as “Engfish” or overly latinate vocabulary and sentence syntax that serves no more purpose than to present the text as “scholarly” is rampant through many textbooks.
There have been many studies done on reading motivation, and lo and behold, a major influence on student engagement in reading is whether or not they can connect the material as relevant to their lives. Sure, an intensely hard text is great to assign, but if the students can’t see how it relates to the course content (beyond the “because I assigned it you can assume it deals with course content” or “because it’s part of the course content, you’ll have to find the connection”) the student will never finish.
Also, as necessary as reading is, it also takes time. If one were only taking three credit hours, there would be absolutely no excuse to not have the readings done. That even goes for twelve credits, for that matter. But today’s students are facing tuition raises and a struggling economy. The typical student has to take at least 15 credits a semester to stay on top of things, and on top of that need to work to pay rent and loans. Factor in 4 classes with similar reading loads of respectable 50-75 pages per night, and it becomes a hefty amount, almost insurmountable.
So, I think we can take a page from Bronfenbrenner here: students aren’t reading because of a vast number of issues that are extra-curricular, and unfortunately maximizing the work load puts a strain on the cognitive processes, adds a lot of stress, leaving students who actually do the reading less likely to engage with the text, and less likely to recall what they have read, and thus unlikely (74% unlikely) to read professionally.