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 ...
Only if there's a video about it on TikTok.
The new “fight song” for all our ...er...”eleet” kolleges:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCQ0CUXjADQ
“...In my environmental literature classes...”
I think I see some of the problem right there.
Reading’s for fags.
+1
At MIT, we read the whole Odyssey (in English translation)! No excerpts, no cassette tapes! And I went there before the cellphone era.
My Humanities courses at MIT also taught me how to write. I didn’t find out how lousy my high school writing was until I went through these MIT courses. The writing I learned carried over into my science courses, all the way to my PhD thesis.
As for TikTok, it should be banned. If elected, Trump will do it!
Later on, in some job, they will not have the attention span to finish it.
It starts the moment parents or daycare "professionals" put a baby in front of a TV screen. Just the rate at which scenery changes in children's television is enough to cause this problem.
Assign the whole book, then test them on it. If they fail, then fail them. Fail them all if necessary, until they figure it out.
See spot run. Run spot, run. Run to Dick and Jane.
This os why I am installing a home phone. I am tired of dragging my phone around and getting sucked in
Maybe she read Catcher in the Rye and just snapped.
The world needs more ditch diggers and bartenders.
TikTok addicts are already close to being the blue-pilled cubicle people in The Matrix.
These are the useful idiot foot soldiers of the radical fringe in the culture wars. They believe everyone is entitled to his own “reality,” and their “reality” is curated by social media. They are infuriated with the real world because it is not as malleable as the digitally-based narratives with which they spend most of their time.
Less about attention span, more about self-discipline.
Remember the safe places when Trump won the presidency?
They couldn’t handle sidewalk chalk.
Kids today can’t even do that?
Ever see a stoner try and read a book or try to memorize a cassette.
Talk about no attention span indeed.
One solution would be shorter books, like that one on Jewish sports legends that the stewardess in "Airplane" was passing out to passengers.
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