Posted on 12/05/2024 6:21:52 PM PST by Rummyfan
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Yeah, because reading is just so hard, dontchaknow?
When I was in jr and sr high, I’d go to the library every Saturday and get my allotted three books out and read all weekend.
One of my daughters is reading ‘Crime and Punishment’ for a 9th grade class. She doesn’t live NY state though.
Students can swipe right and left, and spend hours on end posting 10-word reviews on tiktok, but struggle to compose two related paragraphs? Why are they given a passing grade, then?
Everyone is addicted to technology.
The parents didn’t instill a love of reading in their children. Our home was filled with books. All my children loved reading from an early age. One of them found long novels boring, but he would curl up with other books.
With that said, even though I myself always loved books, too, I don’t think ‘literature’ should be a required course for all majors. JMHO.
Very.
The big ones, the ones you are almost guaranteed to read, are the Iliad (they gave us a free copy during Orientation, so that was nice), the Odyssey, the Genesis part of the Bible, Herodotus’ The Histories (highly underrated among students), something by Aeschylus, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Plato’s Symposium, the Aeneid, (pauses to breathe) Augustine’s Confessions (bleh), Dante’s Inferno (pretty cool), Montaigne’s Essays (this one actually seems to get dropped a lot), King Lear, Don Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, Crime and Punishment, and To the Lighthouse.
I hear they added one of Toni Morrison’s novels as well, though I can’t tell you how likely it is to be incorporated into a syllabus yet.
the Iliad
the Odyssey
the Genesis part of the Bible
Herodotus’ The Histories
something by Aeschylus
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War
Plato’s Symposium
the Aeneid
Augustine’s Confessions
Dante’s Inferno
Montaigne’s Essays
King Lear
Don Quixote
Pride and Prejudice
Crime and Punishment
To the Lighthouse
Douglas Dalgleish, a Professor at Arizona State, once assigned 18 books to read and in the next class I took with him as the Prof, he held back a little and only assigned 16 books. A great lecturer, his classes were fast paced and very dense with information. I can still read quite quickly because of him. He is sorely missed.
I thought those 600-page Harry Potter books gave all those kids a love of reading and of getting an education. What happened?
They need cliffs notes for the cliffs notes.
I’ve always loved to read, and used to consume them by the pound, almost. 600 pages, couple of days. Alot of information I have found valuable in my life came from reading for pleasure.
Having said that most “important literature” is dry as sand. IMHO, such emphasis on “the classics” is undeserved and unnecessary fluff to drive up tuition costs.
the Iliad
the Odyssey
Genesis
Dante’s Inferno
Don Quixote
Pride and Prejudice
“ The parents didn’t instill a love of reading in their children. Our home was filled with books. All my children loved reading from an early age. One of them found long novels boring, but he would curl up with other books.”
Why do they have to love reading?
They do not. They have to know how to read a book. They have to know how to follow the rules of a class, a job, a role in the family
Further, when people don’t read they are uneducated. They must know about characters, the pattern of a story, they are otherwise unfit for conversation, positions in running organizations, knowing how to behave
They do not have to know how to read books and do all of the normal things that adults do in society but if they don’t they will be losers
And they do not have to like reading. They just have to do it
I do not like going to my job. I don’t like the sick office mate that shirks her job, I don’t like working non stop 8-8 I don’t like answering my boss’s questions every hour.
But I learned how to act like an adult in high school. By the time I got to studying for a science degree, I knew how to write a research paper and read enough to not be one of the 56 that washed out of the 87 that went in
When I taught high school English I was given a stack of six books to teach for the year. I know some of the kids didn’t read it. And I didn’t expect the students to like any of the books. But one of the parents asked me why her two sons were quoting Shakespeare on the way home from school.
They had a clue at least. They graduated college.
Reading is racist, didn’t ya know?
Few homes are filled with books any more. They prefer the E-book or audiobook when they read at all. Which is fine for adults but does not work for kids.
You need to have physical media for your children. They need to have books to page through, chew on and bang on the floor long before they start to read.
You can tell which children are raised with actual books and who isn't rather quickly. And I am not talking about high brow books or classics. Just regular popular fiction works.
I used to read all the time and then the Internet came.
" ... And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!"
ADORED the Symposium. Still one of my absolutely favorite books.
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