Am I really going to have to start teaching my students how to read?

I just finished reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows last night. I picked it up because I really liked his other book, The Big Switch, but I was kind of disappointed this time around. It’s not that the book was dull. It was extremely interesting (so interesting that I might just do several posts about it over the next several days), but the argument that runs through the whole thing strikes me as extremely overblown.

I can give you the short version because Carr does over and over again: The Internet is changing the structure of our brains. All that stimuli it’s providing is turning us into the kind of people with attention spans so short that they can’t sit through a fifty minute lecture without checking their phones. Here’s Carr describing the effect of the Internet on himself:

“When I began writing The Shallows, toward the end of 2007, I struggled in vain to keep my mind fixed on the task. The Net provided, as always, a bounty of useful information and research tools, but its constant interruptions scattered my thoughts and words.”

So Carr unplugged, and got the job done. You can too. So can everybody’s students.

As you can see, I’m not sympathetic. While reading the book, I kept thinking, “Why am I reading a book about why nobody reads books anymore?” Take this clown, for example:

“I don’t read books,” says Joe O’Shea, a former president of the student body at Florida State University and a 2008 recipient of a Rhoades Scholarship. “I go to Google, and I can absorb relevant information quickly.” O’Shea, a philosophy major, doesn’t see any reason to plow through chapters of text when it takes but a minute or two to cherry-pick the pertinent passages using Google Book Search. “Sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn’t make sense,” he says. “It’s not a good use of my time, as I can get all the information I need faster through the Web.” As soon as you learn to be “a skilled hunter” online, he argues, books become superfluous.

Telling Joe O’Shea about the joys of reading fine literature wouldn’t work. Telling Joe O’Shea that it is impossible to get all the pertinent points about a book through Google Book search unless it’s “full view” wouldn’t work. How about this:

You are never going to get the kind of high-paying, white collar job that you undoubtedly aspire to if you have the same attention span as my Jack Russell Terrier. Once in a while just turn off the computer, leave the phone in another room and teach yourself to concentrate on something, anything, and it will help you in the long run.

I can’t help but wonder if from now on I’m actually going to have to start teaching my students how to read. You start at the top left-hand part of the page and then you move your eyes to the right…

Update: Wouldn’t you know that right after posting this I ran into a New York Times debate on “Getting Around Textbook Sticker Shock.”

Take a deep breath. Now think how much deep reading the average college student would do if ALL their textbooks were online. Are you depressed yet?

Howard Zinn’s FBI file was released today.

And you thought I read Gawker just for Lindsey Lohan updates.

There goes my next 24 hours or so…

Via Boing Boing, Cool Tools is listing and (this is what’s really amazing) linking to the best magazine articles ever written.

Some thoughts on how the list stands at the moment that I’m writing this:

– It’s fairly skewed towards the last twenty years or so, but there are still a few here that you’d have to consider historically significant like John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” and Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.”

– In a strange nod to historians, I had no idea that Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” first came out in Harper’s.

- The link I just sent them is to Michael Pollan’s “Power Steer,” which was the very first step in turning me into a vegetarian.

– There’s got to be more stuff that belongs on this list that came out before 1960. Oh yeah, most of Joseph Mitchell’s work! Since I just read Up In the Old Hotel again, I’d say that I’d definitely pick “The Bottom of the Harbor” from 1951. My second choice would be “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” from 1956.

- The list skews heavily towards pieces from The New Yorker, Harper’s and the NYT Magazine. I have subscriptions to the first two so I can read most of it. You’ll be blocked by firewalls in more than a few places if you don’t. Nevertheless, I still think there’s a lot of good stuff here. It looks like the five best Esquire magazine articles of all time are open to everybody and I’ve seen all of New York Magazine on Google Books.

– A lot of people really seem to like David Foster Wallace. I know he’s dead, but I still always thought he was pretentious for writing a gigantic book that nobody ever seemed to get all the way through. Perhaps I was wrong. Either way, it looks like I have some reading to do.

Happy reading, yourself.

Anyone who uses this concept from now on must send me five cents.

If I define a rule that proves particularly useful, I demand the right to name it after myself. So here is Rees’ Rule again: Any professor who thinks tenure should be scrapped must give up theirs first.

Today’s culprit (via Andrew Sullivan) is Andrew Hacker:

Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can’t be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We’ve seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don’t change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they’ve been trained to follow.

Presumably, someone who made it all the way to Professor Emeritus at Queens College had tenure before he retired. I can just picture him, seething all the way through his long career about how he wanted to strike a blow against this awful tenure system, but he was too busy following his disciplinary mode and just kept it anyway.

This, however, is extremely interesting:

At Harvard and Yale, senior professors get every third year off, not every seventh. This coming year—are you ready for this?—20 of the 48 professors in Harvard’s history department will be on leave.

Silly me, I always thought they called the adjuncts at Harvard assistant professors.

How should a good lecture be prepared?

When I started graduate school, I was determined not to be one of those professors who lectures off the same yellow notes for thirty years. In my upper-level classes, this is easy as they are almost always structured around discussions of some sort or another. In my survey class, I feel I have no choice but to lecture most of the time. There’s too much to cover and too many people to do anything else (although I try to run at least a few directed discussions when non-textbook reading is due).

I still remember how hard it was to write my first set of survey lectures during my first semester teaching. “Assign the second-best textbook and steal from the best,” I was told. I followed that advice too, but have changed those lectures enough since then that I know they’re all my own now. In fact, that doesn’t really matter anymore because I barely even look at my notes when I’m lecturing. I have them handy in case I have an early “senior moment,” as my older colleagues like to call them, but after ten years I can explain most of the important points in my survey class off the top of my head. I like doing it this way as I can concentrate on speaking slower, paying enough attention so that students don’t reach for their phones and seeing when hands go up with questions.

That said, this article (via UD, of course) got me thinking. The writer is explaining why her students don’t know how to take notes:

They told me that in their schools, teachers deliver content via PowerPoint. Teachers upload slides to the virtual learning environment and print them out for the students to revise. There is a reason for this attentiveness. So many schools are conscious of league tables that teachers cannot risk student failure. They not only teach (to) the exam, but give students page after page (after page) of PowerPoint slides so that they do not risk missing anything from their notes.

One consequence of their actions is that students do not learn how to take notes from research material. A dependency culture on teachers is created, facilitated by PowerPoint and its non-Microsoft equivalents Keynote and Impress. When these students arrive at university, many academics perpetuate the problem. A lack of planning and preparation for a teaching session means too many walk into a lecture with a memory stick of PowerPoint slides. They have not written a lecture. They have written PowerPoint slides. They think these two things are the same. They are not. We see similar problems in conferences. Researchers are meant to present scholarship to colleagues. Instead they project PowerPoint slides.

As I’ve written before in this space, I use PowerPoint like a slide projector: Almost all pictures with very little text. I hand the students nothing when I’m done. My aspiration is to redo my lectures so that all I need is a one page list of what each slide is in its proper. That way I can talk directly to students in an organized fashion off the top of my head without having to read anything verbatim.

Am I off my rocker? Isn’t that what a good lecture is supposed be? UD writes, self-referentially:

UD argues that the burgeoning popularity of both the mobile person-hiding machine and the PowerPoint machine involves a growing terror of public interaction in itself. Not merely public speaking. Public anything.

I, on the other hand, aspire to lecture without notes in order to facilitate interaction and spontaneity rather than avoid it. Isn’t it the reading verbatim that’s the problem rather than the PowerPoint per se?

Food posters galore.

Like Marion Nestle, I love food posters (although my tastes tend to lean towards WWI). She posts links to two wonderful online collections here and here. These are my favorites as I hadn’t seen them before:

Click the images if you need a closer look.

My new hero.

Like Inside Higher Ed suggests, she really is very good:

To the point. Well-informed. Compelling.

I as particularly struck by how well Von Dassow illustrates the importance of understanding your school’s budget so that you can see the big picture. If you don’t, bad things will happen and you won’t even know it. Indeed, it sounds to me like she’s an AAUP member, which of course I always advocate.

I was also struck by this response to the speech from that Inside Higher Ed article:

“Professor von Dassow’s perspective is one of many faculty perspectives at the University of Minnesota. We certainly appreciate her taking the time to express it. The University Senate overwhelmingly supported the president’s plan for temporary pay cuts and his operating budget was unanimously supported by our Board of Regents.”

Did the University Senate even have a choice or was it presented to them as a fait accompli as these things usually are? I’m guessing the latter. And I wonder why they didn’t ask the faculty at large…

Icebox w/ circulation arrows.

Yes, I know you don’t care, but posting this here is the best way that I’ll be able to find this again.

Coney Island before the fall.

Via Harper’s:

New Rule: Any professor who thinks tenure should be scrapped must give up theirs first.

Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy:

One of the interesting aspects of the tenure system is that even many of its principal beneficiaries — tenured professors — agree that it is a severely flawed institution that should be scrapped.

Really? All I see are the same bunch of conservative gadflies making the same argument over and over again but never putting their money where their mouth is.

I always though it would be a cold day in hell when I agreed with Tyler Cowen about anything, but I certainly agree with this:

Traditionally I’ve been sympathetic to tenure (disclaimer: I have it), in part because the schools which have done away with it — the for-profits — have carved out a big niche but they have not displaced traditional non-profit, tenure-driven higher education in most fields. Few parents dream of sending their kids there. My point today is simply to note that tenure critics have yet to spell out what the alternative — and thus the debate — really looks like.

Somin responds to Cowen’s argument this way:

Tyler also makes the reasonable point that before we abolish tenure, we need to think carefully about what the alternative system would look like. There may not be any one system that would be best for all institutions. Competition and experimentation could lead to useful innovations.

It could also lead to hundreds, if not thousands of people ending up taking huge pay cuts or even jobless. That’s why I’m waiting for every professor who wants to abolish tenure to put their head on the chopping block first.

I expect to be waiting for a very long time.