Assign entire books. Period.

From the Chronicle, a philosophy professor shares his nightmare of the future:

My own peculiar worry about Academe 2020, offered with less than 20/20 foresight, may seem less catastrophic: the death of the book as object of study, the disappearance of “whole” books as assigned reading. Does that count as a preposterous figment of extreme academe, or is it closer than we think?

I don’t mean the already overwrought debate over the crisis of the book as codex—the daily New York Times announcement that electronic readers stand primed to eliminate paper books. (This shift, of course, plays into the problem, since any shrewd publishing type can see how the paper book’s demise might make it easier to digitally trim, abridge, and repackage texts in more “appealing” forms than their benighted authors envisaged.) The issue isn’t the decline in book sales, though it, too, remains an element of the big picture. I am talking about the growing feeling among humanities professors—intuitive and anecdotal, shared over lunch like an embarrassing tale about a colleague—that for too many of today’s undergraduates, reading a whole book, from A to Z, feels like a marathon unfairly imposed on a jogger.

Personally, this one doesn’t worry me. A history class cannot exist without history books. Even more so, a class on literature cannot exist without reading literature. Sure, you could go to the University of Phoenix and probably avoid reading anything longer than a web page, but any degree that includes the humanities has to include reading entire books or it isn’t the humanities.

And just in case I’m wrong the solution is easy: Demand better. There’s another article up at the Chronicle right now about how to write up a distinctive teaching philosophy. Perhaps “I assign entire books.” should be everybody’s first sentence.

The solution to reading comprehension problems is more reading.

For some reason, ever since I started blogging, I spend more time than I ever expected writing about reading. While this probably shouldn’t surprise me as it is one of my favorite activities, I am continually surprised by the many thoughtful articles I run into precisely upon this subject. Here’s one from the American Prospect (via Brainstorm) which is well worth reading in its entirety. This strikes me as the core point:

The culture of testing treats reading ability as a broad, generalized skill that is easily measured and assessed. We judge our schools and increasingly individual teachers based on their ability to improve the reading skills of our children. When you think about your ability to read — if you think about it at all — the chances are good that you perceive it as not just a skill but a readily transferable skill. Once you learn how to read you can competently read a novel, a newspaper article, or the latest memo from corporate headquarters. Reading is reading is reading. Either you can do it, or you cannot.

This view of reading is only partially correct. The ability to translate written symbols into sounds, commonly called “decoding,” is indeed a skill that can be taught and mastered. This explains why you are able to “read” nonsense words such as “rigfap” or “churbit.” Once a child masters letter-sound correspondence, or phonics, we might say she can read because she can reproduce the sounds represented by written language. But clearly there’s more to reading than making sounds. To be fully literate is to have the communicative power of language at your command — to read, write, listen, and speak with understanding. As nearly any elementary schoolteacher can attest, it is possible to decode skillfully yet struggle with comprehension. And reading comprehension, the ability to extract meaning from text, is not transferable.

The solution, the authors suggest, is to spend more time providing the cultural background needed to make sense of texts:

If our schools understood and acted upon the clear evidence that domain-specific content knowledge is foundational to literacy, reading instruction might look very different in our children’s classrooms. Rather than idle away precious hours on trivial stories or randomly chosen nonfiction, reading, writing, and listening instruction would be built into the study of ancient civilizations in first grade, for example, Greek mythology in second, or the human body in third. Recently, the Core Knowledge Foundation has been piloting precisely such a language-arts program in a small number of schools in New York City and elsewhere. Initial results are promising; however, building domain knowledge is a long-term proposition. All reading tests are cumulative. The measurable benefit of broad background knowledge can take years to reveal itself.

There’s no way you’ll ever find me objecting to that solution. At a time when history gets increasingly short shrift from secondary schools the idea of doing history in reading class sounds like an excellent idea. Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder if these folks are misstating the problem.

When I was growing up, I almost never used a dictionary. I learned new words by seeing them repeatedly in books and by playing Scrabble. There are many words that to this day I can’t define well because I picked them up entirely by context. Context is key. That’s why so many English teachers will make their students use the vocabulary words they’re learning in a sentence as part of class.

If you read the whole article I’ve quoted above, you’ll see the authors use a baseball analogy to indicate the importance of context for understanding blocks of text. That hits home for me right now because I happen to be deep into the process of initiating my son into the wonders of baseball. Understanding the language of the game is essential for appreciating it. [I for one say that any American who does not like baseball has or had at least one parent who laid down on the job.]

While learning more about any subject should help students comprehend texts on that subject, to me the real problem is that is that most students simply don’t do enough reading. The solution to reading comprehension problems is more reading. If practice makes perfect, then the necessary background information needed to understand any word or text should be discernible from its context.

Glenn Beck has not been to the mountaintop.

One of my Facebook friends just posted Martin Luther King’s speech from the Lincoln Memorial 47 years ago today. It was a nice touch in the face of that Glenn Beck rally, but I think the greater contrast between speeches from these two very different people is with this one:

If Beck’s “people” ever made it to the promised land, Beck would be out of business.

Update: Oh boy. Thank goodness for peer review.

Our crushing debt is better than theirs.

The first thing you have to do is go watch this. Click the link right now! You won’t be sorry.

Welcome back. Let me use that bit of hilarity as a starting off point for getting at some stray thoughts that have been circling around inside my head:

1. Andrew Hacker, who thinks that higher education is failing its students, still thinks its worth the money because it’s a ticket to the middle class. It certainly can be, and you’re probably not going to make it to the middle class without a college education. If college is like a casino, you’re better off playing than just watching the floor show. [Graduate school, on the other hand is a different game entirely.] I didn’t think college was a good bet, I wouldn’t feel comfortable participating in it.

2. Like any good casino, just about everyone is welcome in the door these days. This is from the Daily Beast:

It may be easier to get into college this year than it has been in a decade.

Yes, you read that right. True, more Americans are expected to attend college this fall than ever before….

If history is any indication, this slump will yield good news for families. Applicants could soon find lower admission standards, a slowing of tuition increases, and fewer college dropouts.

For once, I don’t mean to sound sarcastic here. It’s a good thing that colleges like mine are open to nearly everyone because someone has to serve students in need.

4. The bad thing is that whether you can go depends entirely upon how much money you have. College really is flippin’ expensive (says the guy whose 16-year-old daughter has recently expressed a desire to go to Oberlin), even with financial aid. As Washington Monthly notes:

A family that earned $75,000 a year should save $190 a month for a public university and $410 a month for a private school.

That’s awfully close to my household income and I don’t have $410/month to save.

5. Of course, Oberlin, Colorado State University – Pueblo or any college may turn out to be a bad bet in the end. But if you’re in a casino, you really ought to play the odds:

A study in April by the College Board found that 53% of for-profit-college students finish with more than $30,500 in debt, compared to 12% of students at four-year public schools.

And for-profit students are much more likely than other students to default on student loans. According to federal data released in December, about 21% of for-profit-school students defaulted within three years on loans they began repaying in fiscal year 2007; the figure for all student borrowers was just 12%.

Seriously, when’s the last time you heard a real success story about a University of Phoenix graduate? The school has been around for at least a couple of decades now and I don’t see their graduates storming the Fortune 500. CSU-Pueblo, at least, has Dana Perino. [Don't laugh. You know she could buy and sell all of us on what she's making as a Beltway pundit right now.]

6. Of course, if there were still a viable union movement in this country people wouldn’t have to go to college to get a decent-paying job, but that’s probably a subject for another post or perhaps an entirely different blog.

Private Snafu in “Fighting Tools.”

Thanks to AHA Today I found this at the National Archives YouTube page (but got the embed code elsewhere):

It’s particularly funny to hear Bugs Bunny’s voice cursing.

A “C” student from Princeton is still a “C” student.

Thanks to Inside Higher Ed, I just saw this relatively old Huffington Post article for the first time. It reminds me of something I’ve known since I graduate from Penn back in the day, namely that an Ivy League education is no guarantee that you actually learned something:

As president of a DC-based think tank, I have over the years hired many recent college graduates and interviewed many more. Because the quality of so many of the graduates was so poor, ITIF has taken to giving the small share of the most promising applicants (based on their resumes and cover letters) a short test that we email them to complete at home in one hour. The questions are pretty simple: “Go to this person’s bio online and write a three or four -sentence version of their bio for us to include in a conference packet,” or, “Enter these eight items in a spreadsheet and tell us the average for the ones that end in an odd number.”

What is amazing, at least to me, is how few can do even these very simple tasks adequately. In our current hiring process (for an office manager/research assistant) we have so far given the test to approximately 20 college grads. Only one did well enough to merit an interview. And most of the 19 are not from “second tier” colleges, but rather, from top-ranked institutions. One applicant, a recent Princeton grad, submitted a test that was full of spelling and grammar mistakes. Didn’t they teach “spell check” at Princeton? A Boston University grad couldn’t accurately complete a simple excel spreadsheet. (By the way, I am not picking on these particular schools but just citing actual examples.)

By now, every professor in America has seen such problems. The question then becomes, what do you want to do about it? the author’s solution is implicit in this diagnosis of the problem:

Colleges are focused on teaching kids content, not on teaching them skills, and too many students are focused on passing the multitude of tests in the multitude of classes they take, rather than really learning. One of the best college grads I ever hired (a graduate of Dartmouth) majored in history. In his job at ITIF (a technology policy think tank) he didn’t need to know history. What he needed to know was how to think, how to write, how to speak intelligently, how to find information and make sense out of it, how to argue coherently, and how to do basic math. Fortunately, he had acquired these skills. But other graduates of colleges such as Kenyon, Bowdoin, Bates, or the University of Pennsylvania, whom I have hired over the years, clearly had not, or at least not nearly as well.

I have a lot of sympathy with this position. Indeed, I’ve changed all my courses over the years to increasingly emphasize the teaching of skills that I haven’t seen from my students. Indeed, I recently came to the shocking realization that I’m going to have to start teaching reading as a skill since every other skill (let alone most of the content knowledge) that I teach flows from that one.

However, let us not hang this one entirely on higher education. The teaching of the kinds of skills that this guy has been testing his job applicants for should have begun in high school. If it’s new to them when they hit college, things will get very difficult for students very quickly.

That said, college professors certainly do have some responsibility for making sure that their students have the skills to survive in the workplace, but it’s only our fault if we keep giving them good grades without learning what they have to learn.

After all, a “C” student from Princeton is still a “C” student. Maybe he should ask for transcripts the next time he wants to hire someone.

Korean food that moves.

I’ve started recording No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain and this one is by far the best segment that I’ve seen:

“The Future of Food” (Historical Section).

The entirety of this great documentary is here. This brief historical section from the beginning is for my class on the history of food in America.

Free stuff without the middle man.

Randall Stephens is my new hero. Yes, his post on maps is good for finding maps to use as slides for class (which I needed), but what I hadn’t realized until I started clicking his links was that publishers had started giving their slides away for free on the Internet rather than requiring me to take a copy of the book through their representatives and then get them from the disc that goes with it.

This is wonderful news to me because I’ve been aspiring to double my supply of slides fast so that I can change the way I lecture. My goal is to work off the pictures rather than my notes so that I can be more spontaneous. Having such large slide libraries available at my fingertips is much more efficient than just using Google Images to find everything that I need.

If there are any publishers doing the same thing that aren’t in Stephens’ post (I found the Bedford St. Martins image library myself but lost the link), please drop me a note in the comments.

Your pre-semester reading assignment.

Via College Misery (of course), the best posts of all time at the late, sorely-missed Rate Your Students.