English Prof Says Today’s Students Cannot Read or Focus on Lengthy Assignments
“My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded.”
This is because schools focus on unimportant nonsense instead of teaching the basics.
The College Fix reports:
English professor warns: Today’s students cannot read or focus on lengthy assignments
Another professor has joined the chorus of scholars warning that students’ reading skills and attention spans are abysmal.
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, literature Professor Tyler Jagt told of an assignment for his rhetoric and writing class that asked students to read a 20-page paper. Not one student finished the paper.
“It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago,” wrote Jagt, who has taught literature and critical writing at Mercer University, James Madison University, and Wake Forest University.
“When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.”
Jagt is not alone in sounding the alarm on students’ lack of reading skills and attention spans today. As The College Fix has previously reported, some college students struggle to read even a handful of sentences. Some Ivy League students can’t finish an entire book. In fact, some students do not have enough of an attention span to finish a movie anymore.
Jagt, in his piece in the Chronicle, cited three main problems contributing to the situation: the ramifications of smart phones, AI, and common core.
“My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact,” he wrote. “My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded.”
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Comments
Just one grumpy old bear’s opinion. If classrooms returned to books, desks, pencils, pens, chalk, blackboards, phonics, times-tables, and dedicated adults that can teach, our kids would do just fine.
MAYBE the 21st century equivalent of a 16mm projector with useful material two or three times per semester.
they would just destroy those
they wont do the same to their own phones/computers
You’re not wrong, but that school would close as the students would all try to avoid it and make fun of it.
thats why standards have been lowered to accommodate the 3-7th intellects of grade level of “champions”
I’m guessing the students couldn’t put their phones away long enough to focus on what they were reading. It has become an epidemic of addiction to cell phones. I see it everywhere, with adults as well.
These students and their teachers have been engaged for decades in social promotion, although the state of education in this country is so poor that there are probably a fairly high number who can’t even spell that term.
You know things are bad when even uber-woke professors in the University of California complain that students who have been admitted after achieving near perfect math GPAs in high school are not proficient even at a middle school level, but at least one can make the observation with STEM that (as politically incorrect as it is to say it) there are intellectual differences among individuals that translate into different abilities to comprehend STEM concepts no matter how well taught. On the other hand, if we see that preparation in English is as poor as is described here and the ubiquity of social media and electronic devices has robbed developing minds of the capacity to concentrate on the written word, big trouble awaits.
Robert Heinlein wrote about this situation two generations ago. It hasn’t improved since, and has arguably deteriorated.
My grandson’s middle school stopped giving out homework three years ago. It’s easier for the modern crop of lazy teachers to remove requirements than to train the kids until they can endure challenging mental work.
Do these students not know how to make AI do it for them?
They don’t have the attention span to “just read the instructions”.
SAT vocabulary sections have been simplified because today’s youth can’t be expected to know “words”…basically same reason given for not being able to do “math”.
SAT reading comprehension has gone from multiple paragraphs to a few sentences because today’s youth don’t have the vocabulary or attention span to read or understand more than what might be contained in a text message.
On June 20, 2001, the Institute for Policy Innovation published an article based on a study by the Brookings Institution called “Does Money Matter” which thoroughly examined the question of whether increased funding would result in better educational outcomes.
One of its findings was that, by 2001, honors high school texts were equal in reading difficulty to pre-World War 2 eighth grade readers.
I recently read portions of a copy of the 1911 Boy Scout Handbook. Scouts are usually from 11 to 17 years of age. The book was written at what today would be considered an adult reading level. So, in 1911, 12 year-olds were expected to read at that level. One wonders if many high school graduates could manage that today.
Many newspapers today are written to an eighth grade level of reading comprehension.
Let us look at a reverse order bibliography of books written or strongly influenced by
British General Robert Baden-Poole to enhance his income.
Youth audience:
1910 Boy Scout Handbook
1908 Scouting For Boys
Adult audience:
1899 Aids To Scouting For NCOs And Men
1885 Cavalry Instruction
1884 Reconnaisance In Scouting
“Scouting For Boys” was written because youth groups were using “Aids To Scouting” as a basis for their woodcraft (now known as scoutcraft) skills instruction and activities.
Similarities to the US Army Cavalry look such as Stetson hats, neckerchiefs and red-white troop flags are not accidental. Baden-Powell served in Africa as a military scout with American born Chief of Scouts Major Frederick Russell Burnham who left the U.S. for adventure in Rhodesia. Burnham was born on a Dakota Sioux reservation in Tivoli, Minnesota.