berrybabby

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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

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so so tired of people trying to justify voting or not voting to each other. do it or don’t.

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applying for internships and i think the job market may be irreparable

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im an elite college student who actually read for homework AMA

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you make one (or two) fandom posts and they show it to you forever my god

now how do i get this ^ off my page

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now how do i get this ^ off my page

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columbia’s classics curriculum turned me off so bad there’s almost no authors of color on their list of books and it’s wholly centered on the archaic belief that western literature is the foundation of all good and necessary literature

like fuck off oh em gee

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like you asked people from columbia and expected them to be reading

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blaming this largely on phones feels a bit reductive…there’s many many factors contributing to this and professors need to take responsibility for their teaching habits as well

a lot of this is a bit specific to columbia. columbia’s curriculum requires all of their students to read classics for a large portion of their first and second years. other ivy leagues and colleges don’t do this or require this level of engagement with classic literature (i’ve had to read a full book maybe once or twice, while my roommate was an English major and read them all the time front to back)

my friend used to read her own books casually during college but almost never read the actual literature assigned to us, whereas i read almost every single text (mostly articles, occasionally full books) assigned to me. it’s really down to the college and the expectations from the professors you have. many of them don’t even talk about the book they assigned in class

to teach students you have to make sure you understand where they’re coming from. they aren’t just born with the ability to process large chunks of information, and with widespread access to the internet, students don’t see the need to read the full book…..so incentivize them to do so. i feel like it’s so much better to explain to children or high school teachers the necessity of developing the skill to read full books from now, rather than pointing to some abstract change in children (it’s also weird to act like kids only go to college for jobs now… both of my parents did because they were first gens)

The 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.

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.

[...] Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. [...] Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

[...] Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. [...] The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

[...] But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

[...] For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

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JW Anderson x UNIQLO

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Do not let an ozempic twink top! Dude slid in bones n all 😨

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when I was a kid I never realized this strip was a parody of some old child safety psas (“it is now 10pm. do you know where your children are?”) and that honestly made it funnier because it looked like calvin was doing this for no reason

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happy 4 year anniversary to the greatest twitter reply of all time

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FIDELIA BRIDGES

Milkweeds (1876)

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