Philosophical Friday

I am out of the office today, so this is a pre-post

In this Issue: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are (What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again)

From time to time I like to share articles about higher education. My belief is that reasonable people might disagree on the article – and – I hope it is still interesting to explore these ideas nonetheless. And this one is about English literature classes (my undergrad major and first grad degree), so it resonated.

This article from The Atlantic has been shared on many of my higher ed friends’ social media feeds: Stop Meeting Students Where They Are (What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again). Here is a taste:

“When I walked into my American-literature class at Case Western Reserve University last fall, I looked at 32 college students, mostly science majors, and expected an uphill battle. As my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, ‘Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.’ One-third of the high-school seniors tested in 2024 were found not to have basic reading skills.

Yet by the end of the semester, as we read the last sentence of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, I regretted ever doubting my students. I am now convinced that I was wrong to listen to the ostensible wisdom of the day—and that teachers of literature are wrong to give up assigning the books we loved ourselves. There may be plenty of good reasons to despair over the present. The literature classroom should not be one of them.”

The article talks about what happened when this faculty member assigned the tough readings, and how his students met the moment. It is an interesting read (at least to me).

I am teaching this semester, and I find myself grappling with the challenges of scattered student attention and ubiquitous technology. Certainly those tensions in the classroom are real: students who seem to be scrolling the internet or having sidebar conversations via chat. Like the author of the article, I have adjusted some of how I teach to (hopefully) try to reach students better.

But I don’t think technology and the modern attention span is solely to blame. Remember this old scene from Animal House, where Donald Sutherland is trying to teach Milton to a class that is disinterested in the material? Perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same…?

As always, I love to hear your thoughts. You can hit ‘reply’ on any Daily Deac and they come straight to my Inbox.

Happy weekend to all!