This is where I think AP testing might be more useful. At least when I took it, we had to write essays that required us to analyze the works we had read that were relevant to the question at issue. We had a little extra time at the end due to test scheduling, so my teacher squeezed in Waiting for Godot in the last couple class sessions, since she said it was one that was versatile in writing responsive essays. But consistent with the article, I would estimate that D24 read far fewer works than I did.
But now that I think about it, I took two AP Literature courses. Maybe American and European? I absolutely did not have a class comparable to AP Lang on responding to non-fiction texts.
Good point. I know D (an English major) took AP Lang and AP Lit in HS and I believe both included essay writing. This is probably better than the SAT writing sample (although she took that, too, since she was HS class 2020 and SAT scores (including the writing) were required by the schools she applied to before the pandemic. She read a fair number of books and also did a huge research paper for one of her English AP classes that required a lot of reading and synthesis. She felt like her AP classes were good prep and she did very well on the SAT verbal and the writing portion. She also said that she felt better prepared than many of her college peers in terms of reading large volumes of material and writing papers. She attended private K-12 and as the article noted, private schools might be pushing a bit harder than publics when it comes to reading and writing.
My d was also in a private and she read a ton of the classics throughout high school. Huge summer reading list as well and plenty of essays. She actually did as well in the English and reading sections for both act and sat as she did in math, and she is a STEM kid.
No version of the SAT or ACT had book length readings, since they would consume too much time out of the three hours even for faster readers.
Older versions of the SAT tried to proxy being well read with vocabulary questions, but then test takers tried to game that with lists of thousands of SAT words to learn (there were SAT prep books of that).
So I just went back and read the transcript of the NPR story on sustained immersion in a text. It was not really about empathy though it touched on that idea. The discussion was more about what the experience of deep reading feels like and why it is so difficult to do, particularly when reading is competing with various distractions. The author and interviewer talked quite a bit about the dangers of skimming, which was interesting to me because even as I read the transcript, I was continuously tempted to skim and just grab the gist of the conversation. I had to fight against the impulse.
In discussing skimming, the author talked about the different paces individuals need to “read deeply,” which once again brings me back to thinking about the value placed on speed in standardized testing. I am a very fast reader even when I am not skimming and that helps my performance on certain types of test, but am I good reader when I read quickly? Not really. I get the gist but not much more.
One of the parts that I found most interesting is when the author talks about revisiting a Herman Hesse text that she once loved and finding that she no longer had the patience to read it. She wrote:
… I, who had once loved this and appreciated it, was quite capable of rejecting it now because of my new skimming reading mode. My brain didn’t want to give that kind of time to every word, to the sentences, to the build-up, to the evaluation, to the monitoring of my comprehension. I didn’t want to do this because you have a - built up a desire that’s almost affectively saying, hurry up. Get through this. Get to the bottom of the page or the bottom of the screen. Move on - instead of entering and thinking about the beauty or sometimes the negative feelings that a character elicits in you.
She also talks about why she mostly reads hard copies. I’ve been struggling with this issue because I don’t want to waste paper or bring more magazine or book clutter into my house. Yet I do think that reading and taking notes in a hard copy makes the experience more meaningful and memorable to me.
And finally, I loved the sentiment expressed at the end of the interview. It is here that she touches on the empathy factor a bit.
LIMBONG: So to wrap up, what’s the beauty of deep reading? Without it, what do we lose?
WOLF: We lose two best thoughts - the author’s and our own. And you see; the real beauty is that we discover ourself. Deep reading, at its ultimate, is a place of discovery of other, a discovery of beauty and a discovery and even appreciation for our ability to think outside the bounds of our everyday lives.
As for the AP Lit test, I do recall my son and daughter both saying that there was a question this past Spring asking for an essay about a character from a full-length book—they were to choose among a few novels that are part of the common AP Lit curriculum. Maybe the question was something about how a character achieves their goals through the course of the narrative?
I recall my son did Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse—a nice choice; forget what my daughter picked.
But the Atlantic article is corroborated by my kids’ experience this Fall. They’re now first-years at a very selective/rejective university, and notice that about half the class just isn’t doing the reading in the required literature course, and aren’t contributing to class discussion.
To be fair, when my generation was growing up, there were not a lot of ways to be entertained/distracted. 3 TV stations. Kids in the neighborhood. And books. I’m guessing I was not alone in having had a book on my lap during class to keep myself happily distracted. Reading was essential to my happiness.
DS was old enough to have had gaming options, but smart phones were evolving as he was. Not surprisingly, he was, and remains, a reader. He also attended a private school with lots of required literature, including over the summer.
I understand why many kids might not have developed a love of reading. For me, an assignment simply meant someone else was choosing the book. For these kids, someone else is choosing the activity.
Having said that, it’s a pity they’re missing out on the joy of stepping into other worlds.
The thing that I find unacceptable is the way literature and humanistic study in general are thought of as “entertainment,” or as something one loves in one’s spare time.
They are serious and demanding intellectual activities. No less serious and demanding than science and math, and no less difficult (—more difficult, by some measures, at least for students today).
It’s tremendously frustrating that so-called “top” students are not held to the same rigorous intellectual standards in humanities as they are in math and science when it comes to admission to college.
This is a completely different take than what’s in the article, but my high school senior daughter, who does read both in her high school and for pleasure, was talking about how much she has come to hate her English classes – and she is in a very thoughtful high school that chooses great books to read, right now they are reading James Baldwin essays. They read a mix of classics and more modern works, fiction, nonfiction, essays, poetry.
What she hates is the focus on close reading and symbolism and minute word choices. It takes all the joy out of reading for her, or so she says. She also thinks it makes class discussions less interesting when you’re not focusing on themes and character and the big picture. So often, she says, students’ takes feel arbitrary (e.g., what it means that the author repeated a certain word) and she’s just not interested.
I was a literature major in college in a very theory-heavy department in the late 1980s; it was a weird way of approaching “texts” … as they say. I wonder how much of that approach trickles down through a certain style of educated teachers into high school classrooms where students may be less engaged as a result.
I read this article this morning in a rather receptive mood, after watching my son struggle for hours last night to string together two consecutive sentences in a bog-standard college admissions essay (along the lines of “why do you want to study x and why here?”) Lest one believe this is limited to writing, I’ve also struggled to get him to opine over things he’s read or experienced. “Why do you like LOTR? Why did you enjoy that Anne Tyler novel?” “I don’t know…good story? well-written?” It was hard to go to sleep after that.
He’s gotten a 770 on the verbal part of the SAT and 5s on the three AP History and English Lang exams and extensive evaluation revealed a sky-high verbal IQ and no issues beyond mild ADHD.
He’s not going to be an English major as I was but I do wonder about attention span and the ways in which our brains (all of us, probably, but especially our kids) struggle with open-ended assignments, longer reading and writing projects, and blank space.
He CAN read long texts, and has, but he needs to basically be in a sensory deprivation chamber (in the mountains with no cell service; on a plane with no movies, etc.) And truth be told, this applies to me too, now. I do appreciate @Momof242729’s moral panic argument, but I also think @Motherprof 's anecdotal evidence is compelling.
Not trying to hijack the thread here – in our suburban public high school I think they are reading whole books, albeit rather slowly (nothing like the book/week/class that was expected of me in college, but probably not that different from my own suburban high school experience.) Just observing that to someone who remembers the before-times, it feels different and slightly alarming. Now I’ll go holler at those kids who are on my lawn.
I noticed nearly 15 years ago the dumbing down and lightening up of the reading assignnents. Of mice and men, instead of east of eden or grapes of wrath. The things they carried, instead of catch 22 or slaughterhouse 5. Books that were short, and just had fewer words in them, rather than dense long ones. And never were they asked to compare and contrast two books. Instead, they were asked to compare a short book and a poem, photo or painting.
Yes, I know that the SAT has always used shorter passages, but I would expect a strong reader of full length books could do well on the reading comp portion. I remember the vocab book very well: “1000 Words You Need to Know” – it even included idioms. I probably still have it somewhere in my basement.
I’m skeptical of anything that claims, with little to back it up, that something “builds empathy.” For example “builds empathy” is one of the big selling points for grade school language immersion programs. Call me cynical, but I can’t keep from thinking about all the multi-lingual leaders of genocidal campaigns throughout history.
So this is not about reading, but a friend of mine teaches grad school. She was dismayed at the number of students who want information in a neat little PowerPoint for every lecture. We talked about the “old days” when we had to listen to a lecture, while simultaneously discerning what information was important enough to write down - and then later re-writing and organizing notes. It’s amazing what that did to help retain information, but she said her students seemed to want to be spoonfed instead.
Not a shock. Kids are spending 3-8 hours per day on their phones, and this starts at a young age. The value on reading has changed.
Also, funding has changed and schools often don’t have money for novels or novel sets, but they can find PDFs of short stories, articles, etc. for kids to read.
During the pandemic, it was very difficult to get books to students for class, so there is a slump from that too.
I will say, I was fairly shocked that my kid only had to read 5 novels during all of high school English, but they also read from a variety of genres and read more excerpts. And the life of a high schooler is so different with activities taking up more time.
I graduated from HS in 1993, in a public school then considered one of the best in NJ, and we didn’t read Catch 22 or Slaughterhouse 5 (or, for that matter, The Things They Carried). We read both Of Mice and Men (10th grade), and The Grapes of Wrath (11th, I think), though the teacher had us skip the intercalary chapters. We also read a smattering of, but not all of, the Canturbury tales. I recall reading one, maybe 2 books a quarter.
Within that context, my kids’ experiences don’t seem all that different than my own (30+ years later in a different state). Every year since at least 3rd grade, they’ve had to read multiple whole books as part of their classes. In middle/high school, it’s been 1-2 books or more a quarter.
I know anecdotes aren’t data, but I am just not convinced that there’s suddenly a nationwide problem of kids not actually reading books. And this article does nothing to prove it true or not.
