The Loss of Things I Took for Granted — Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively
slate | 2/11/24

…

I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch.

For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts.

Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.

Commenter:

When I was learning to read, my dad taught me something that helped me throughout my life. He would have me read a page or paragraph and then he would take away the book and say “now tell me what you read”. I would start to repeat something and he would say “no, don’t tell me the words you memorized, tell me what it said”.