Johnny Can't Read - now can we talk about the why's?

[acroyear]

From the 'Post, copied here intact (with all credit and apologies to Mr. Skube).
Writing Off Reading:

Writing Off Reading

By Michael Skube
Sunday, August 20, 2006; B03

We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college sophomores and I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite writers are. The question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice in the rear hesitantly volunteered the name of . . . Dan Brown.

No other names were offered.

The author of "The DaVinci Code" was not just the best writer they could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.

In our better private universities and flagship state schools today, it's hard to find a student who graduated from high school with much lower than a 3.5 GPA, and not uncommon to find students whose GPAs were 4.0 or higher. They somehow got these suspect grades without having read much. Or if they did read, they've given it up. And it shows -- in their writing and even in their conversation.

A few years ago, I began keeping a list of everyday words that may as well have been potholes in exchanges with college students. It began with a fellow who was two months away from graduating from a well-respected Midwestern university.

"And what was the impetus for that?" I asked as he finished a presentation.

At the word "impetus" his head snapped sideways, as if by reflex. "The what?" he asked.

"The impetus. What gave rise to it? What prompted it?"

I wouldn't have guessed that impetus was a 25-cent word. But I also wouldn't have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly recondite, either. I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain that today's college students carry a weekly planner. But they may or may not own a dictionary, and if they do own one, it doesn't get much use. ("Why do you need a dictionary when you can just go online?" more than one student has asked me.)

You may be surprised -- and dismayed -- by some of the words on my list.

"Advocate," for example. Neither the verb nor the noun was immediately clear to students who had graduated from high school with GPAs above 3.5. A few others:

"Derelict," as in neglectful.

"Satire," as in a literary form.

"Pith," as in the heart of the matter.

"Brevity," as in the quality of being succinct.

And my favorite: "Novel," as in new and as a literary form. College students nowadays call any book, fact or fiction, a novel. I have no idea why this is, but I first became acquainted with the peculiarity when a senior at one of the country's better state universities wrote a paper in which she referred to "The Prince" as "Machiavelli's novel."

As freshmen start showing up for classes this month, colleges will have a new influx of high school graduates with gilded GPAs, and it won't be long before one professor whispers to another: Did no one teach these kids basic English? The unhappy truth is that many students are hard-pressed to string together coherent sentences, to tell a pronoun from a preposition, even to distinguish between "then" and "than." Yet they got A's.

How does one explain the inability of college students to read or write at even a high school level? One explanation, which owes as much to the culture as to the schools, is that kids don't read for pleasure. And because they don't read, they are less able to navigate the language. If words are the coin of their thought, they're working with little more than pocket change.

Say this -- but no more -- for the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act: It at least recognizes the problem. What we're graduating from our high schools isn't college material. Sometimes it isn't even good high school material.

When students with A averages can't write simple English, it shouldn't be surprising that people ask what a high school diploma is really worth. In California this year, hundreds of high school students, many with good grades, faced the prospect of not graduating because they could not pass a state-mandated exit exam. Although a judge overturned the effort, legislators (not always so literate themselves) in other states have also called for exit exams. It's hardly unreasonable to ask that students demonstrate a minimum competency in basic subjects, especially English.

Exit exams have become almost a necessity because the GPA is not to be trusted. In my experience, a high SAT score is far more reliable than a high GPA -- more indicative of quickness and acuity, and more reflective of familiarity with language and ideas. College admissions specialists are of a different view and are apt to label the student with high SAT scores but mediocre grades unmotivated, even lazy.

I'll take that student any day. I've known such students. They may have been bored in high school but they read widely and without prodding from a parent. And they could have nominated a few favorite writers besides Dan Brown -- even if they thoroughly enjoyed "The DaVinci Code."

I suspect they would have understood the point I tried unsuccessfully to make once when I quoted Joseph Pulitzer to my students. It is journalism's job, he said, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Too obvious, you think? I might have thought so myself -- if the words "afflicted" and "afflict" hadn't stumped the whole class.

mskube@elon.edu

I will say that while I still don't read fiction very much, I do read far more now than I ever did 20 years ago, though every word Skube listed above I was well familiar with by the time I graduated.

This section gets to me, though:

College admissions specialists are of a different view and are apt to label the student with high SAT scores but mediocre grades unmotivated, even lazy.

How about bored out of our brains?  by virtue of our high scores, maybe they could discern that either 1) we're already overly familiar with the material being "taught", 2) we're already aware of the *real* lessons supposedly taught in the classes that have material we haven't yet seen, or 3) the material really has no purposes other than itself (take about half of American 19th century literature, for example...yeah, its "American", but like American music of the time, its really low quality stuff compared with Europe).

As for "unmotivated", the question is "motivated for what, exactly?"  From the perspective of the high school student, school exists solely for its own sake, not for any actual pragmatic understanding of the world, particularly when science and history's importance are all but removed from the curriculum and math is just a wrote set of either quickly discarded memorizations or excessively repetative "3 digits times 2 digit multiplication" worksheets.  (I knew I was good at maths when I once saw problem 38: 24x31, and wrote "see problem 11: 31x24" years before "commutative" was introduced in algebra 1.)

Yes, in hindsight I can see more use for what i "learned" than I expected to, but there's the problem - they don't expect to need this stuff, so they mentally discard it.  What needs to be done, and this is a parent thing not a teacher thing, is to raise that expectation, to actually get students aware that they will actually need and use this stuff daily in the real world.

Granted, that we have a generation of parents who don't know this doesn't give much hope for the next generation of students...

Comments

[johnbroadfoot.livejournal.com]

Granted, that we have a generation of parents who don't know this doesn't give much hope for the next generation of students...

That's for damned sure! Despite my degree and countless postgraduate studies, my education was largely delivered by my parents and grandmothers. Example: Not too long ago, my boss ( a college educated man 15 years my junior)walked with me out to my truck. When he saw the books on the seat he asked, "what are all the books for". I replied with the obvious, "for reading". He said (no, I'm not making this up, he really said this), "Books are a waste of time". "For SOME people", I replied and came home, then I banged my head against the wall.

[faireraven.livejournal.com]

You know, this kind of thing kills me.

When I was a kid, my mother actually had to take my books AWAY as a punishment, because if she sent me to my room, I would be quite content to pull out a book and read (my mother's an english teacher. I think it killed her to have to take reading away as a punishment, but I think I made her exstatic that reading was a joy, not a chore).

I can't fall asleep at night withough reading a chapter in a book. I'm slacking, used to be I would devour whole paperbacks in a night.

There's one thing to the current state of the world: Considering how much I intend to teach my child(ren) before s/he even gets to school, my child will be FAR ahead of the average student. With two highly intellectual geeks as parents (with the geeking being about far more than just one topic), I think a child will have no choice. ;)

Something I HAVE determined about rennies is that they tend to be far more intelligent than the average person. I think the real world bores them. :)

[johnbroadfoot.livejournal.com]

When next I see you both, hopefully in about two months, let us talk more about this.

[mandrakan.livejournal.com]

I don't think Rennies are more intelligent than the rest of the world. But there's no question in my mind that they are more intellectual. I know very few Rennies over the age of 24 who don't read for pleasure--and for those that don't, it's usually because they're doing so much reading for work that they can't bear to open another book.

The difference between the two is left as an exercise for the reader, but given the choice between highly intelligent, incurious people, and voracious readers of average intelligence, I know whom I'd rather converse with.

[faireraven.livejournal.com]

You are correct, intellectual rather than intelligent... But I find the two tend to go hand in hand. One is rarely likely to be intellectual if he is not also somewhat intelligent.

But yes, I agree. I'd rather be around a well-read person giving me a good conversation about the latest book she's read than a person who has an IQ of 180 but is interested in talking of nothing but her nails.

[caseylane.livejournal.com]

Yep, yep, yep. I once wrote a report on the history of a defect at work. I used the word "onus" and had 3 separate people, including the president of the company, tell me I had misspelled a word because it didn't make any sense. I could have changed it to make it easier for everyone but, damn-it, it's a four letter word. Instead I gave them each the definition and moved on.