Thread by @aldenejones

Yes, college students have lost their ability to read. I have taught lit for 24 years; the threshold started to decline in the late aughts and nosedived during Covid. A thread with observations + how I get my students to read ALL (or at least most) of the reading I assign: 🧵

For lit classes, I require PAPER TEXTS. I email students ahead of the semester and explain this so they are not horrified on day 1. They can opt out and use e-texts if they come to me with a reason (disability etc)--but they have to provide a reason. (I never say no)

For creative writing classes that require shorter readings, I stand at the Xerox machine and copy every. single. thing we will read & distribute a packet at the beginning of the semester. They appreciate this very much. They never have to chase down an assignment and it's free.

I emphasize writing in texts. I teach/review how to annotate a text. Pens or pencils are also required. We start every text by reading aloud in class. The seal is broken, the book is easier to get back into next time. We discuss what the book is telling us about how to enter it.

Every time reading is due I give a reading check. 5-10 questions, no analysis - just to make sure they've read to the end. They swap quizzes with a classmate and we go over the quiz and they grade each other. Conscientious students love the easy A. Slackers can't hide.

Being mad at students for not being more into reading helps no one. They have been trained by their devices to seek quick pleasure hits, not the slow pleasures of reading. I am a writer who grew up in the analog age, and I can't give a book the same attention I once did. 🥺

Colleges made it so much worse during Covid by lifting the consequences of not showing up/not doing the work. My institution has yet to bring back attendance policies and students are used to calling the shots now. Once students asked me for permission to miss a class;

now they tell me they are going to miss a class, or even an exam, and then sign their emails "Thanks for understanding." This is where we are now.

I also give exams - with blue books! I provide them. (remember when students had to buy their own?!) Students need WAY more help preparing for exams than they used to, and they crave very exact "rubrics," so we do a whole practice exam the week before, slowly and together.

When I first taught my Literature of Photography class in 2009 I taught 9 books. One of them was Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. They read this monster. No pushback. It is unfathomable to imagine teaching a book like that in a 100-level class today.

In that class I also taught Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables. It is a weird but gratifying book that teaches so much about the early days of photography, and it's thematically pertinent to so many things this gen cares about. But they can't do it anymore.

So I pick my texts with the objective of challenging them where they are. I still assign Barthes and Sontag, and they enjoy them - but they are short texts. I have reduced the # of pages, but still teach an array of texts, more stories/essays/poems, fewer novels/long books.

For some reason some educators expect students will lose it if you ask them to read on paper. This is not true. My students thank me every semester. They know they've lost something in the digital age. They WANT reading to be easier, more pleasurable.

On a final note, if you are an academic who thinks written texts are racist, and therefore expecting students to read them is in the spirit of white supremacy, you are part of the problem.

The suggestion that we should have lower expectations of the reading abilities of college students who are POC, poor, caregivers, etc. actually sounds pretty racist to me.

Wow this is wild! I wish I had something to hawk right now haha. But really, the response to this crisis in learning is heartening, and it is very meaningful to me that the one and only viral tweet of my Twitter life is on the subject of teaching methods. I love what I do.

I do want to clarify that I was speaking mainly about undergrads in a 100/200-level lit class who are not necessarily lit majors. I also teach upper level undergrads and MFA students, and while the specifics of their reading histories are all over, they read/love reading A LOT.

If you have school-aged children and think paper texts are important or that cell phone and other devices should be kept out of classrooms, I urge you to send a quick email to let the school know.

This is a book I wrote which articulates the methods I use to teach creative NF, as well as being a close reading of Cheryl Strayed's WILD, if of interest. Ironically my publisher recently folded and I'm not sure if you can still get it in print! amazon.com/Wanting-Was-Wi…

Someone let me know print copies still available here! I am not sure what is happening with @FictionAdvocate but if paper copies are still available this is the best and least expensive place to buy them. fictionadvocate.com/product/the-wa…