College Reading Redux

reading tweets doesn't count

Source: John Benson from Madison WI, CC via Wikimedia Commons

In just the past month or so, there have been several public lamentations about the dearth of student reading. The Atlantic, Slate magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education have all published articles on the topic. It's as if, after a decade of social media addiction and decades of teaching to the test, educators are finally waking up to the fact that students just don't know how to read anymore.

Why do we care? Because good reading skills open the door to real learning—about self, about others, and about the world—beyond the classroom and beyond school, enabling us to become self-actualized and empathic humans.

Perhaps this is unfair. Students, of course, know how to read, you might argue, otherwise, what are they staring at on their phones all day long? Images mostly, on Instagram and other platforms. But I digress.

College students are functionally literature, of course, or they wouldn't be in college. But they're mainly reading texts and tweets, not books and articles. They want to glance at something and get the main idea. They're generally not up for hours of sustained, quiet reading, contemplating and evaluating an author's purpose in writing the book or appreciating a journalist's investigative prowess in a long, complex article about the neural circuitry involved in OCD.

This past spring semester, for my upper division writing course (Technical Communication and Design), which draws mainly Engineering students in need of upper division writing credits, I assigned Don Norman's 1988 masterpiece on the subject, The Design of Everyday Things. By all accounts (classroom discussions, essays, and presentations), my students read the book and enjoyed it. It was a triumphant moment for my evolving pedagogy.

In fact, they told me on the last day of the class, they'd suggest assigning some of Norman's other books, too, like Emotional Design and The Design of Future Things. To my delight, some students had gone on, unprompted, to read his other works on their own. But one student in the class remarked that it was one of the few books he was asked to read while a student at our university, and the only book, he added, assigned in a non-literature class (technically, my courses are writing courses, not literature courses).

So, Lesson #1 learned: Assign material students want to read. This might be easier said than done. What do they want to read? It takes some informed guessing. My freshman students this coming fall will read Jennifer Wallace's 2023 book, Never Enough: When achievement culture becomes toxic and what we can do about it, and I can almost guarantee they will like it because it's about them, the pressure-cooker children of Generation Z who always knew they had to work hard to get into a top-tier university and were too overscheduled to ever wonder why and to what end.

Hence, Wallace argues, the existential crisis of meaninglessness in Gen Z, a void quickly filled by depression, listlessness, anxiety, and a sense of not mattering. This fall, my students and I will workshop our way through the book together, processing in discussion their reactions to the content and writing about it in the classroom.

Lesson #2: Do what you can to discourage in young people (your students or your children) the "hit of crack" reading on social media, which does nothing for their personal development and—so much mounting literature is showing—is rot for their developing minds. So much so, in fact, that the federal government is considering slapping warning labels on social media apps just like they finally did with cigarettes that were rotting our lungs.

Instead, encourage real reading: long-form magazine articles and books on subjects they're curious about. For those not having done much reading growing up, it can take some time to discover what they're curious about. That's okay; I try to be patient because it's such an important thing.

Lesson #3: Model reading habits for your children and your students. I am constantly talking to my college students about which books I'm reading and inviting them to ask me for book recommendations. I read widely; I love true crime, historical fiction, nonfiction science and psychology and, occasionally, really good novels (like Russell Banks'). I just finished Rachel Lance's new book, Chamber Divers: The untold story of the D-Day scientists who changed special operations forever, and Geezer Butler's memoir, Into the Void: Fom birth to Black Sabbath—and beyond, about his life as the bass guitarist and lyricist for the first and arguably best heavy metal band of all time (which was one of the most enjoyable and funniest books I've ever read, and self-published, too!).

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My son wasn't a natural reader but I'd regularly take him to our public library and let him loose in the children's section, telling him to find five books that looked interesting to him before meeting back up with me at the circulation desk. He sees me and my husband reading a lot. We talk about books. And we read them aloud with him. One of my summer-session students tells me his grandmother (who was an anthropology professor) had a rule about keeping two books on her bedside table and, to this day, everyone in the family follows that rule.

If Mom jeans can come back in style and have purchase with Gen Z (when we Gen Xers know they were bad back then and still are), then I think we can bring back reading too, which is way sexier than Mom jeans anyway.