Back in the day, we all used cliff notes.
Posted on 10/05/2024 11:02:40 AM PDT by Morgana
Students at prestigious colleges are finding it increasingly difficult to finish entire books because they do not have the attention span.
Some professors claim they have been forced to reduce reading assignments and lower their expectations to stop students becoming overwhelmed - even though the workload is often less intense than in previous years.
It is not that students are illiterate, they say, but rather that youngsters are not used to ploughing through lengthy texts and struggle to focus for long periods of time - often due to the distraction of social media.
UC Berkeley literature professor Victoria Kahn told The Atlantic she used to assign 200 pages of reading each week, but has now had to half this requirement.
She told the outlet: 'I don't do the whole Illiad. I assign books of The Illiad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing.
'It's not like I can say, "Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Illiad," because they're not going to do it.'
Meanwhile, Greg Wrenn, an English professor at James Madison University, wrote an alarming opinion piece for Al Jazeera about students with TikTok 'addictions' and the 'devastating crisis of attention' this has caused.
Wrenn wrote: 'In my environmental literature classes, I’ve seen firsthand the long-term effects of digital cocaine like TikTok on my undergrads.
'I’m on a mission, probably doomed, to get them to be more present – to appreciate the written word and the natural world, sometimes wearing my wetsuit and dive mask to get their attention when we’re discussing coral reefs and Ralph Waldo Emerson.'
Wrenn said his students often struggle to get through the essays or excerpts he assigns.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Kids today can't even do that?
No, sadly.
Very sad situation.
When I went to MIT, I read entire books, especially for my Humanities courses! I got an A in every one of these courses!
Later, I wrote a book-length original-research PhD thesis for my degree from Harvard!
Gen Z has it much too soft! No wonder all too many of them support the Dims and demonstrate against Israel! Shame!
My guess is there are functionally illiterate college graduates from the formerly just fine lesser colleges, such as the one I attended.
Too much screen time has rewired kid’s brains and destroyed their attention span and ability to reason and imagine.
I wonder if frustration over being totally unprepared for college work is what drove that black female student to stab a fellow student last week at ASU.
“She told the outlet: ‘I don’t do the whole Illiad. I assign books of The Illiad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing.“
Remember when we used to boot people who couldn’t shoulder the load. You know, do the work. Absorb what must be absorbed. In what subjects is all of this dumbing down happening?
When I was in the Yale PhD program in English, I took the Austen-Dickens seminar. Yep, we read all the works of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in one semester, plus criticism and biography....and wrote three ten-page term papers.
Occasionally unaccompanied young women come into my local bar. Almost with exception they stare at their cell phones the entire time. At McDonald’s, I see groups of young people sitting at a table, all staring at their cell phones. I see them walking down the street - seemingly oblivious to their surroundings - staring at their cell phones.
Did you ever have the teacher Paul Fry while at Yale?
Perhaps these “elite” colleges should embrace the transformational power of an “F” in the course.
Oh, forgot, no grade other than “A” is permitted.
Back in the day, we all used cliff notes.
I call it the Tik Tok generation, good for only 90 seconds at a time.
Oh poor wee darlings...
I guess they also cant manage Daddy’s car and the trust fund...
Looks like the Amish may have a point after all.
Yeah but the exam was on the parts that werent included...
:)
I’m sure these “elite” students have read “The communist manifesto” and “Das Kapital”.
He must have been there when I was there, but he relatively junior at the time. The big hitters were Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and Hillis Miller.
This is why they enter the workforce unable to compose simple, coherent sentences and whine about having to do actual work.
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