Let’s Start Assigning the Hard Reading Again
The Brick came up in conversation with friends the other night. You know, this thing (?) that is heavily advertised as a way to curtail phone use. (Cue all the Brick ads in our feeds, starting now.) It was relayed that “I have my life back!” was the refrain from a person in his 20s who used a Brick. (Wow?) A few days later, the NYT had a story about school districts using products such as Yondr for students to deposit their phones in. Well, touché, because “…students had figured out that whacking the pouches against tables and railings at a particular angle would cause them to spring open, freeing the smartphones trapped inside.” These enterprising teens also figured out that they could purchase large magnets to open the pouches and then replace their phone with a decoy rock.
(My daughter and I had to put our phones in one of these pouches for a John Mulaney show. Which is kind of funny because between the dramatic “I have my life back!” and a chorus of teens banging pouches against cafeteria tables, I think I have the outline for a new bit for John Mulaney…)
You may remember an Atlantic article with this foreboding headline: “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Here’s a new take in the same pub, and I like this one better: “Stop Meeting Students Where They Are.” The more interesting subhed: “What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again.” Given that phones are here to stay, how does one tackle this issue?
Long story short: The author, Prof. Walt Hunter of Case Western, altered classes’ WRITING assignments instead of the READING assignments. “To give the students time to read, I had to change the way they wrote. I axed the take-home essays I’d assigned before—this wasn’t a ‘writing’ class, anyway—and assigned what I suspected were far more difficult in-class, timed ‘flash essays,’ with prompts I gave the same day.”
Although “reading well” and “writing well” *can* go hand-in-hand, they are different skills. Each helps bolster the other, but they are not the same. So, right, we’ve got this whole phone/attention span issue. Focusing on one basic strand — reading complex literature — sounds like a decent start to me.
originally published on instagram