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 ...
This has been building for decades. It is NOT a product of the social media age - but social media makes it worse.
When I was teaching at a university 30 years ago i was shocked by how many students admitted never reading, rarely reading, etc. I remember my shock when I heard a graduating senior say, while standing in our grand old library with more than 2 million volumes, “I’m a senior and I’ve never been in here before.”
“What the hell is wrong with kids today???”
Parents.
She told the outlet: 'I don't do the whole Illiad. I assign books of The Illiad.UC Berkeley prof teaching Homer? Now and then a glimmer of hope peeps through the haze.
Even I don’t do Cliff notes! That is too lazy for me.
I got the unabridged book on cassette and would listen to it several times.
After reading (listening to) Inferno I said to one professor “there is a place in Dante’s Inferno for used car salesmen” That professor smiled and more or less agreed with me.
A slight glimmer of hope for studious types. Those “vidiots’ and thc smokers are basically incapable of succeeding in the unforgiving world. The studious hard workers are going to have all the jobs. And their kids will be a close second...
That’s what I was thinking. The adults set the standard and if you can’t cope, you fail. Welcome the the world.
Sad what we’ve become.
It took me 9 months to read The Brothers Karamazov. If it wasn’t for the innocent brother I would have ditched the book. I was going to read Dante’s Inferno, until I realized that it was written in prose.
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