Posted on 04/18/2016 3:18:12 PM PDT by daisy12
University students are increasingly unable to read a whole book as they simply don’t have the concentration spans required, nor are they able to understand complex, nuanced arguments, academics have said.
Lecturers at leading British universities are having to actively encourage students to read beyond the set texts, and have noticed that students are increasingly unwilling to read whole texts. They say they believe internet culture is to blame, as young people nowadays are used to receiving arguments in the form of 800-1000 word articles. Anything beyond that, they say, is now proving too challenging.
“Incoming undergraduates have had their attention habits fashioned in a totally different world than that of those who are teaching them,” Tamson Pietsch, fellow in history at the University of Sydney told Times Higher Education (THE).
“This can lead to a clash of expectations and also of abilities on both sides of the equation. In many ways, incoming students absorb information quickly, they understand the power of images, and are adept at moving between different types of sources and platforms. They are perhaps less used to concentrating for long periods of time and working through the nuances of an argument developed over the course of many pages.”
Jenny Pickerill, professor in environmental geography at the University of Sheffield, said of full length books: “students struggle with them, saying the language or concepts are too hard.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
I routinely have 3 books going simultaneously. Right now I have 4 plus 2 war games going as I prepare to teach a Leningrad class in the fall and Russian front class in 2017.
The Internet didn’t do anything. The Internet is a network. The cause is individuals not making the effort to read.
Agreed, but if you can't do calculus, you need to be able to read a whole book and understand it. Someone with limited reading and limited math is not going to get much out of college.
I suggest they read 1/2 of a book. Wait several hours and read 1/2 of a book. Problem solved.
How about the very next paragraph?
From the eighty–ninth fish genus in Lacépède's system of classification, belonging to his second subclass of bony fish (characterized by gill covers and a bronchial membrane), I noted some scorpionfish whose heads are adorned with stings and which have only one dorsal fin; these animals are covered with small scales, or have none at all, depending on the subgenus to which they belong. The second subgenus gave us some Didactylus specimens three to four decimeters long, streaked with yellow, their heads having a phantasmagoric appearance. As for the first subgenus, it furnished several specimens of that bizarre fish aptly nicknamed "toadfish," whose big head is sometimes gouged with deep cavities, sometimes swollen with protuberances; bristling with stings and strewn with nodules, it sports hideously irregular horns; its body and tail are adorned with callosities; its stings can inflict dangerous injuries; it's repulsive and horrible.
I was reading Herman Kahn and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in early high school.
Well, oh yeah ?
I’ve got one question for you:
WHAT ... is the sine of forty five degrees ? Exactly. You have five seconds.
Reading is hard, and hard is necessary. My middle school RLA students have no stamina when it comes to reading. We’ve basically gone to skill training...can’t expect them to read an entire book.
Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit
Can you read Latin?
They can call this news generation the “DUMBASSES”... which would be a followup to the “millennial” generation.
0.707
I read “Gone With the Wind” when I was 12.
Sorry about the delay, I had to reboot my internet connection. Sine of 45 degrees (or pi/8 radians if you prefer) is one of those things a person memorized, along with the sine of 30 degrees and 60 degrees.
Has anyone here run into educrats who viewed reading several years beyond grade level to be a “behavioral” problem?
I am afraid I am the greatest villain in too many books at once. Between 20 and 40 is typical for me. They generally stay in the room assigned to them until finished.
I have books at my cabin that stay there, unfinished, until I return once or twice a year. Some books have taken me over five years to finish with some requiring multiple restarts. However, most of my reading is history or political theory. Burke is still Burke even if sat down for two months. Waterloo still looms no matter where you are 200 years ago so it is easy to rejoin the narrative for me.
It is how I have read due to business travel. The books in the trunk or in the suitcase, don’t get unpacked, only the dirty clothes. The books stay there two to four days until I departed again.
My wife reads a single book, regardless of lack of appeal, from start to finish and then pencil dates the front fly page. Only when done does she start another other than cookbooks or reference works.
Hasn’t happened yet. If my grand daughter was confronted by such a thing, my science teacher son would dismember the cretan after demolishing his arguments with hammer and tong.
It is a behavioural problem. My oldest far frequently stay up far too late reading when they ought to be sleeping.
The young fellow was raised on Klingon. It is interesting to see him set aside a lot of science fandom for more mature interests. Introduced early and ready to set it aside early.
Hoot!
Nope, but my daughter can.
She had to take foreign language for high school, and she has a brain injury that caused terrible speech problems. The counselor recommended Latin. My daughter loved it, and got awards for it. She took 3 years in high school. She’s at community college right now, and she’s hoping to transfer to a 4 year that has Latin.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.