shadowkat | (no subject)

(no subject)

I probably don't need to be posting in this thing daily? Hopefully, if all goes well no reason why it shouldn't, I'll be gone next week. Visiting Mother for her birthday next week in Hilton Head Island, SC. And working ~~Columbus~~ Indigenous Peoples Day Holiday Weekend into the mix.

Back hurts, heating it up. Also digesting a bunch of pills, I just took - which appear lodged in the old esophagus. A fat lot of good the Magnesium Citrate and Vitamin D will do there.

Tried. Got maybe 5 and a half hours of sleep the night before. According to my watch it was 5 hours and 42 minutes. The device breaks it down into deep, core, and REM, with most of it falling under Core.

So, overall goal is to get to bed earlier tonight. Maybe by 10 at the latest?

Lack of sleep makes me irritable. As does boredom. And I tend to get myself into trouble on social media platforms when I'm bored. I've many to choose from now, so it's usually one of them? And people can be annoying when one is sleep deprived and bored. Well, they can be annoying anyhow, just more so, when one is sleep deprived and bored.

I should go to bed now, but can't - heart-burn and digestive issues. Have to wait a bit. Frigging internal plumbing is not being cooperative. My father used to complain about the plumbing and how they needed to root it all out - I think he was talking about his own.

***

On Facebook, someone introduced an "Atlantic" article in a misleading manner.

FB: In the Atlantic, a Professor discusses how his students told him that books will soon go the way of vinyl records.
Me: Well, considering Vinyl Records are making a come back, and being sold at B&N now. Also there are at least four book stores that have popped up in my area, with extensive children's literature sections. And various people are reading them on the trains...I'm not worried. Although I continue to be concerned about serious journalism and our educational system...

Read or skimmed the article? And honestly, I was right. It's not about what she said it was about. It's about...

Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

"Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
Explore the November 2024 Issue

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to."

I think part of the difficulty is the Humanities Lit Professors insist on assigning the same books. Folks? Assign something other than 19th Century and 18th Century and early 20th Century literature.

Let's face it most high school and college kids are not going to understand The Great Gatsby, or get through Pride and Prejudice or Moby Dick. There are other novels you can assign. Such as "The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison" or "Kindred by Octavia Butler" or "Dubliner's by James Joyce" or "Neuromancer by William Gibson" or better yet Pattern Recognition.

When I was in college - I got a much broader spectrum. And if I were teaching literature? I'd pick from a slew of different writers, and centuries, decades.

My impromptu list of literary works:

1. The Ghost Stories of MR James
2. The poetry of Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Plath
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Twelth Night by William Shakespeare
5. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
6. Member at the Wedding by Carson McCullures
7. Dubliner's by James Joyce
8. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
9. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
10. Bram Stoker's Dracula
11. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein
12. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
13. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
14. Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
15. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
16. Murders in the Rogue Morgue and The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe
17. Curtain by Agatha Christie
18. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
19. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
20. Dune by Frank Herbert

I never understood people who don't love books, or reading. I had to work hard to learn, and once I did, I devoured. I wonder sometimes if something comes easily to someone, and they don't have to earn it - they take it for granted and don't bother?

Also, I'd expand the above list to include foreign translated works and graphic novels. Along with YA.

Such as:

1. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
2. Persepolis - Graphic Novel
3. 100 Years of Solitude by Gaberiel Garcia Marquez
4. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
5. Candide by Voltaire
6. Kafka on the Shore

and so on.

Off to bed.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, back in the stone age when I was in high school, I think we read about one book a year for class. Sophomore year my class read To Kill a Mockingbird. I may have read a book for junior English class from cover to cover, in fact I think I did, but I can't tell you what it was. (Whoops, I think it was Lord of the Flies.) Mostly I remember kids proudly showing off the Cliff's notes they'd bought instead of reading the book, and me not being able to decide whether that was stupid or genius. Return of the Native was our book senior year, which I don't think I finished. I read four or five novels a year, mostly classics in those days, and I preferred not have to read them for class.

Other English classes read different books, including several on your lists. I enjoyed reading Shakespeare plays, "Romeo and Juliet," "Macbeth" and "Hamlet." I'm sure I read the ones that were assigned, before there was a hint of them being assigned for class. Some kids hated reading plays.

I remember being startled at how many books the English majors were supposed to read for one semester when I started college. But it didn't seem like a burden to them as the first semester wore on. I can image what a shock it would be if you'd never been asked to read a whole book before. But I can't imagine applying to Columbia University, and taking "Humanities" without having read a lot on one's own. I suppose George W. Bush's idea of teaching all kids mostly concentrating for the college entrance exams may be partly to blame.

Edited 2024-10-10 04:05 (UTC)

I think it may depend on the quality of the high school or school system? For example? A PA school suburban public school district in the 1970s was rated very low and among the worst in the US. We weren't assigned much to read there - and teachers read to us, most of the time in elementary school. Then in 1978, I moved to the Kansas City suburban public school district, which was rated among the best in the US, and was assigned books to read in grade school. And during recess, my mother lead a Great Books discussion group, which I continued to attend in Junior High. We had to do book reports on books that we read, and read so many books a year in various classes throughout elementary and high school. In high school - we had to read so many pages per year. That was on top of assigned readings, either short stories/essays (in the Daniel Monihan Reader - a State Senator who put a bill in place requiring it in school districts, it contained essays by him, as well as various short stories by everyone from Eudora Welty to Mark Twain), or books such as Huck Finn, Separate Peace, Vision Quest, The Great Gatsby - it was very male centric. Other courses required the same? By the time I graduated, I'd read Chaucer, over 1000 plays (for Drama class, I read everything by Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Lillian Hellman, etc...), Shakespeare (also performed Shakespeare and seen it - due in part to extracurricular activities), and across the genres. But I went to a good public school in an upper middle class suburban area. It wasn't quite as a good an education as friends who went to private and prep schools. So reading was encouraged in my high school, partly due to the area in which it was located. It was at that time, rated around number 1 among public school districts in the nation. And the difference was night and day. It had better materials, educators and curriculum, plus funds for extracurricular programs.

I suppose George W. Bush's idea of teaching all kids mostly concentrating for the college entrance exams may be partly to blame.

That pre-dated Bush. That was during Ronald Regan. The school I went to was highly focused on that (1980-1985). We had reading assignments because of it and had vocabulary exams weekly to prepare. We were taught how to write essays. Etc.

We were taught how to write essays.

That was good. The high school I went to didn't do that well in English class, nor in the writing class I took there. Fortunately for me, my high school journalism teacher did teach that skill very well. My Freshman year of college, over and over in many classes after tests, the professors would gripe about how bad the Freshmen in the classes were at writing essays, before returning the test papers. I'd shiver at the thought of how badly I'd done, only to find I wasn't one of the Freshmen the professors were griping about.

Yes, we all had a required composition writing class as Freshmen in college. But that came too late for many kids to avoid tongue lashings.

That was taken care of at the application stage for the college I got into. But I also went to a private Liberal Arts College and not a university or State College. The University's application department didn't require essays, while the private colleges did. So, the school that I got into? We didn't really have any multiple choice tests at all. Everything was essay and short answer, except for a handful of science courses here and there, which I mostly avoided. As a result, if you couldn't write - you were gone.

Not understand the Great Gatsby? We had to do that at O-level - age 15 - 16, and did not have trouble. It's a short book for goodness sake. But my niece says they don't have lockers at school any more because they do everything on tablets, so they are not thought to need anywhere to keep books!

How well do you remember the Great Gatsby? The book, not the multiple film productions (also a Bway show now, sigh.) I read it in high school, in the 1980s, and I remember it - because I wrote an essay on it that got an A, and I was over the moon. Also, if I write about and analyze something - I tend to remember it. It also helped that I saw the Robert Redford, Sam Waterson, and Mia Farrow 1970s film version which stuck in my memory, soon afterward.

An old college friend, who taught honor's English in high school (this was back in the 1990s) and did her thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald, asked me to explain the plot of the Great Gatsby to her. We'd both read it. She had read it more recently than I had. But she didn't understand what it was about and was confused as to what had happened.

The difficulty with the Great Gatsby isn't the length. There are very long books such as say any number of Stephen King novels, that are breeze to read. You can skim half the book and still know what happened. There's no precision of language. This isn't true of The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald was at the top of his craft at the time he wrote it - and is precise. You can't skim that book, or you will miss what it is about. It's not like the Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, where you can legitimately jump over bits here and there and still be fine.

It is told in a confusing manner, with a lot of misdirects, and Fitzgerald doesn't help the reader by choosing an obnoxious and kind of remote narrator. It's told in first person, but not by the protagonist (Gatsby), but by the protagonist's friend/neighbor/hanger on, who is a bit of a cypher of a character. To such an extent, that I no longer remember his name. We see the entire story through the unreliable gaze of the neighbor. Who is a wealthy, somewhat spoiled cousin of Daisy, Gatsby's lost love. Throughout the book - Fitzgerald holds up a mirror to his readers via his narrator. The antagonist in the novel is the class social structure, and the narrator is such a cypher because he's a stand-in for Fitzgerald's readers. Gatsby is a biting social satire about the American Class System in the 1920s, and it still resonates today, because that Class System is still in effect in a different way.

But not everyone will get that. Most people won't get past the plot, which is confusing and I can barely recall it now. (I think Daisey, while driving Gatsby's car, runs over a lower Middle Class woman, and Gatsby takes the blame - resulting in his eventual suicide.) But Fitzgerald wasn't interested in the plot - and a lot of readers won't get that. One of my cousins, a nuclear physicist
couldn't understand the Great Gatsby. He didn't think metaphorically, he thought literally. Poetry, and fictional prose were lost on him. (He died in a hiking accident in 2022). And my former college friend didn't get it either - she thought more literally. She switched out of Honor's English to help the Reading Impaired and Special Needs Students, which worked more to her liking.

But my niece says they don't have lockers at school any more because they do everything on tablets, so they are not thought to need anywhere to keep books!

They can read all their books on the Tablet. It's actually cheaper and easier to do so? You can enlarge the words, highlight, and save paper. My niece did that too. Heck, I read most of my books now digitally - on e-book or tablet, I can enlarge words, it has a light, and it's easier to travel with than a huge book.

Well, Rupert Giles would not approve of abandoning books!
I remember it very well, in fact - I still have the copy I studied at school, but hadn't seen the film until a couple of months ago. A couple of my favourite quotes ever are at the beginning and the end of the book. Plus, something like that Daisy's voice was "full of money." I honestly don't see what's so difficult about it.

And I don't understand why you can't figure out why people would not be able to get through the Great Gatsby. Honestly, it's not rocket science, although there are quite a few rocket scientists who can't read Gatsby. It's simple. People do not think the same way you do.

I get why you did love it - you relate to the subject matter, and it is about a world that makes sense to you. The metaphors work for you, and you clearly think metaphorically not literally. So when the writer states Daisy's voice was full of money - you don't think, oh, WTF? Is money coming out of her mouth? This makes no sense.

When we read a book, watch a television show, a movie, listen to music - we experience it differently. We do not hear, read, see or visualize the same things. Our brains focus on different items. We process it differently. Some people when they listen to music see notes, some see colors, some feel the energy, some feel things, some see a movie...and so on.

People do not think the same way. And that's a good thing.

Edited 2024-10-11 13:15 (UTC)

Somebody ought to tell Mr Humanities Professor that 'anecdote=/=data'! The other day I posted a link to a blog post from an irate high school teacher who was misleadingly cited in the article.

I do wonder, if he's been doing this for nearly 30 years, that the trouble is he's stale and phoning it in and not engaging the students. I'm sure some of them are omnivorous readers, they are probably just bored rigid either by his choices or the way he teaches them.

Edited (tyop) 2024-10-10 09:10 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't see your post or missed that link. I've noticed a distressing trend with journalistic writing - they don't fact check/investigate it well, or if they do? They present it so poorly, it's impossible for the reader/listener to care, understand, or believe them. (see Tortoise Media for example). I blame the internet and tech for this - it's rushed. People throw it out there to meet faster deadlines and are told to punch it up - to get people to click on it. Too many acquisitions editors not enough line editors.

In this article - it appears that the journalist interviewed one frustrated Humanities Professor, then hunted around for back and took quotes out of context or twisted them around to support the complaints of the Humanities Professor - in order to write the article. Ugh. The Atlantic should know better. I hope the high school teacher sues them and requests a retraction.

I agree, he's probably just been doing it too long, and no longer engaging his students.

Edited 2024-10-10 13:29 (UTC)

Hope your back feels better and you have a good trip!

I agree with you. I do feel like the 'books are dying' narrative has been going on for years and it still doesn't feel any more true than it did then. I go to the local library and there's always people of all ages there. In fact, they even managed to expand their hours in the past few years. I don't know how it is everywhere, but I do believe that people still and will continue to enjoy books.

Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

To me the issue of focus is really critical. I think there's an entire generation who can't focus on anything in any depth or length of time because they are so constantly distracted by things that it's difficult to do if the material is any way challenging. It's an ADD generation gone boom. And that probably explains the declining reading comprehension that seems to exist anywhere, both in classrooms or anyplace where people have to read information they need for something.

I agree. People skim a lot now. I find my own sense of focus compromised. Too many distractions. Everywhere I go - there's a phone. I now have one attached to my wrist. And we are all inundated with ads and marketing.

It's information overload. People are overwhelmed by it - to the point, that they just skim things. And don't want to focus too closely on anything. So seek out content that doesn't require it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only