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Americans Are Closing the Book on Reading, Study Finds

by Jennifer Howard

Sneak Preview:

Americans aren't just reading fewer books, but are reading less and less of everything, in any medium. That's the doleful conclusion of "To Read or Not to Read," a report scheduled for release today by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Fighting for the throne
Transgender student elected

by Caroline An

PASADENA - For Andrew Gomez, the month of November was one of firsts.

First, he broke the news to his mother that he was transitioning from a female to a male. Then the 24-year-old transgender student was elected Homecoming King at Pasadena City College.

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What's college for?

Since we've been talking about colleges and universities over the past few weeks, I've been meaning to write a bit on this notion of the liberal arts education. We had this one fascinating discussion in class a week or so ago about the McUniversity. That conversation is going to stay with me for some time. What struck me was the way that the class was so shocked about the McDegree. And yet, given the career-minded focus of most college students today...why would a McDegree not make sense?

There was something I read recently that said that something like 70% of college students consider career preparation to be among the most important reasons for their decision to go to college. This number was up, I think, from maybe somewhere in the 30% range in the 1980s. There are a few things I want to say about this. First, if I was consuming a product valued at $35,000 per year, I would probably want to make sure that what I was consuming was going to help me get a job when I graduated as well. $35,000 x 4 = $140,000. That's an insane amount of money to pay for a college education.

So, in some ways, I can't blame college students for their singular, career-minded focus. At RWU, I notice this especially--with all the "construction management," "justice studies," and "architecture" students. These are all very practical and pragmatic programs of study, as is, say "education" or "teacher training" and we've got a couple of those students in our class as well. They're all good students.

Having said this, what I think is amazing is that some students don't know or can't imagine college or the university as existing for any other reason than career preparation. This is the sort of strange thing. They've been hearing for so long that you go to college to prepare for a career that they're like those horses w/blinders that you see in cities that pull the carriages--they are incapable of seeing the university as having any other purpose than preparing them for work.

There are two things to say about this. First, it's sad that we have taught our young people that colleges exist for them. Yes, part of what colleges/universities do is educate students. But they have a larger mission--to foster discussion, to create debate, to further knowledge, to provide a service to the community, state, nation, to provide a social good to the society and, hopefully, to create opportunities for groups of people who might not otherwise have had opportunities and who have been restricted from a college education in the past. And these purposes have little to do with individual students who come to colleges and universities expecting to get trained to become an architect or teacher or...whatever. If students don't understand this, and I'm not sure I understood it when I was an undergraduate, we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Still, right here at RWU, we've got important work going on that has nothing to do with career preparation. We've brought an Iraqi teacher over and we're providing him with a place to work while he pursues a doctorate (at Brown). We have labs and facilities that conduct marine research, given our unique location and the accessibility of the ocean. We have featured speakers galore...all these interesting people coming to campus to talk about their experiences and the world. We have a group of Afghan students to whom we've given scholarships so that they can obtain a college degree--a virtual impossibility in their home country. The mission of the university, of this university, RWU, is so much LARGER than what students imagine it to be. Too many students see the university as a place that exists to service their needs. Somehow, I think we've got to do a better job helping them see that colleges and universities are about a lot more than just job training. Again, I don't necessarily blame students for their ignorance. We, professors, administrators, must finds ways to make discussions about the mission of universities and colleges more clear to students so that they don't just think of this place as...something very small, selfish, and limiting.

Second. The focus on job training obscures something else that should, I think, be taking place on a college campuses: learning for the sake of learning. Ideas for the sake of ideas. Discussion for the sake of discussion. For so many students, they want to know how they're going to "apply" what they are learning. Well, on one level, I can't blame them. Students are always wondering about this--not just in college. They want to know: what is this good for, this thing you're asking me to learn. Why should I learn it? What am I going to need it for?

These are important questions--but the thing is, it's hard to explain why everything you are asked to learn you are going to "need." I remember being frustated, as a student, when taking classes that didn't interest me. I remember that same feeling: why do I need to know this? It's an important question for teachers and professors to keep front-and-center. Too often, teachers just drag students through material and/or information without conveying why they are doing it. Sometimes teachers are charged with teaching "intro" courses in which they must teach a large body of "background" material to students who are newcomers to a discpline, in which case they have no choice but to do their best and "cover" as much as possible.

So, perhaps students have a right to demand to know why they are learning something. IN fact, I think they do have a right to demand to know. And teachers have an obligation, I think, to try to convey why learning something is important.

But I guess what I'm getting at is that that thing you're learning may not have an applicability to your life...tomorrow, or the next day...or ever.

And I want to argue that that's okay. That not everything we learn needs to have an immediate application. That that's not what education is for or should be for.

And besides, there is the ludicrousness of setting up a system in which you educate people in a discipline or subject area in which they "think" they have interest, but at 18, having never worked in the field that the discipline leads to...how do they know? And given how fast workplaces change these days, and how much workplace training the average worker experiences over the course of his lifetime...well, this is just another argument against setting up college as "career preparation."

In the end, I get discouraged sometimes by students' lack of curiosity about the world. How is this going to help me become a... (fill in the blank)? That's what so many want to know. Well. Fine. But what questions do you have? And what should you know as a citizen--not as a worker. What should you know in order to participate effectively in this democracy in which we all live? We rarely frame our discussions of what college is for in terms of educating "citizens." And what about just a person? What about students' emotional and psychological growth? Students want to talk about future workplaces and teachers, I suppose, want to talk about their academic disciplines. What I want to know is--what are you curious about? And where can we go from there?

Sorry this was so long...as you see, I got on a bit of a roll here!

mm

Socrates Cafe (you should go to this!)

I saw this on MyRWU and thought of our class. Unfortanately, I don't think I'm going to be able to attend this event as I'm not usually in RI on Wednesday nights, but I thought this might be a very interesting event for members of our class, given the conversations we've had this semester. (I want you all to go so badly that I'm even trying to imagine ways to bribe you to go...Any ideas?):

Socrates Café will explore the pros and cons of liberal arts degrees

BRISTOL, R.I., November 2007 – If you’re a student considering a liberal arts degree, you might weigh the pros and cons of obtaining a well-rounded education versus a narrowly focused degree. Are degrees in subjects such as history, English, psychology or foreign language marketable in today’s work force, or not?

Members of the Roger Williams University community will gather to examine the those questions on Wednesday, Dec. 5, at the University’s next Socrates Café discussion, titled “What Good is a Liberal Arts Education?” Dr. Jeffrey Meriwether, professor of history, will moderate the discussion.

The event will begin at 7 p.m. in the Mary Tefft White Cultural Center in the University’s Main Library on the Bristol Campus at One Old Ferry Road. All Socrates Café discussions are free and open to the public as space allows.

Looking for Something to Read?

Here's a place to start.

I was moved by this piece. It's written by a professor from a small liberal arts school in the midwest. He's sharing and thinking through his experience, having worked his way up from a working class background and now, working in academe (higher education). He feels odd about his experience and he feels that he is a "traitor" in some way...interesting reading, especially in light of some of the conversations I've had with my CORE Lit/Phil class these past two weeks:

A Class Traitor in Academe

Wow, this is quite an article about the admissions process, its corruption, and...well, the belief by the author that the books he is reviewing miss some very important things. The article is long. It is a book review of four books on the college admission process, all of which, if I understand the review correctly, come to the conclusion that the admissions process is rigged in the favor of wealthy white kids. The reviewer, himself an admissions representative at a large southern flagship university, agrees with the arguments made by those whose books he is reviewing, but throws in his two cents as well! A good read, if you have the time and the attention span.

College Admissions as Conspiracy Theory

The following is a report on the civic engagement of college students today. Here's a blurb from the website, first:

"Today’s students—part of the Millennial Generation born between 1985 and 2004— are more engaged in their communities and feel responsible to become civically involved. They recognize the importance of being educated and involved citizens, but discard much of the information available to them because of its polarizing and partisan nature. They are turned off by intensely combative political debate, the report says. We also find that colleges and universities are providing very unequal opportunities for civic participation and learning.

Nearly 400 students convened in 47 focus groups on 12 four-year college campuses across the country to discuss their civic and political attitudes and experiences."

Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Civic Engagement


One more...this one needs no introduction, but here's a blurb from the first page or so:

Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may still see New York as a spiritual home. But today you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships. Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat.

Is this just the latest example of American cultural imperialism? Or is it the triumph of planetary feminism? Neither. The globalization of the SYF reflects a series of stunning demographic and economic shifts that are pointing much of the world—with important exceptions, including Africa and most of the Middle East—toward a New Girl Order. It’s a man’s world, James Brown always reminded us. But if these trends continue, not so much.

The New Girl Order

On Politics

In my experience, it is the rare college student who follows politics with any frequency (usually only those "nerdy" Poli Sci students are the ones who pay attention). This is sad, but not surprising. According to the
Center for Political Participation:

Nearly 85 percent of college freshmen volunteer. Yet just 40 percent of Americans under 25, on average, voted in the last three presidential elections.

I started to develop a sense of political consciousness when I was in college, sometime around my junior year. Before that, it was all Greek to me. For those who would like to learn more about politics, especially during this exciting time, with the '08 election coming up, I would point you to two websites I've learned about in recent days that are geared towards students.

Campus Politico

Scoop08


Enjoy!

Students' Words...(from blogs)

Here are some of the passages I found particularly moving/interesting/curious from this past week of blog reading:

Lit. Phil.

After being in Lit. Phil for the past 2 months , i think Ive learned something allot of people don't know to much about themselves. That is to take things and look at them at different perspectives. Maybe that's not even the function of the course but now i find myself asking myself questions within questions of my own. For example, the other day i was just thinking about something non school related. I was thinking about parents weekend and what i needed to do in general. I would say to myself, clean up room. But i would then almost contradict myself and say why exactly am i going to clean my room? Then i could answer it by saying so it makes myself look more mature or something along those lines. Then it would come down to, well i am in college and passing all my classes thus far, i am more mature now rather then back then. But this is all the rest random thoughts i consider and the way i look at them.

Next, i ask my questions about the works i compose for all my different classes. I ask myself, what exactly does the teacher want that will get me an A? These questions help me to think more about myself and what i know deep inside that i don't want to bring up because it will take longer. This knowledge i want to bring up is all the knowledge i need to get a good grade on a paper. A solid thesis, evidence to support your claim, no grammatical errors, proof or rereading. All these we know to do, when it comes time to do it, par seems satisfying because you do not want to take that extra 2 minutes to reread your paper or find a quote to support evidence.

So all in all, i think this course is teaching me about myself which seems to be one of the 3 goals of the course. What do i know, what can i know, based on what can know, what can i do. It seems like i am heading down the right path for achieving these goals.

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Those Who Should Not Teach

First off, none of this post refers to you Professor Michaud.
Growing up, we all have at least one of those teachers that we can not stand, and that for some reason appears to be really unfair and unhelpful when it comes to school work. You click, and you clash, and sometimes you just cant seem to understand what those teachers are asking for. Then there is always the really extreme case when you wonder how the hell this person ever got hired as a professor, and how could they themselves POSSIBLY think that they would make a good professor. I mean I think it's determinable enough that one should know if they are JUST NOT RIGHT for the job. I'm not a professor, but as a student of professors, I think I may be able to underline AT LEAST some key points to knowing whether or not you would make a good professor.

1. Do you like people, specifically young people?
2. Do you like teaching or helping others learn?
3. Are you patient?
4. Do you enjoy the subject which you teach?
5. Do you have ANY idea what you are talking about?.. maybe even the slightest bit?

I mean if you are really impatient with others, I feel that maybe teaching isn't the job for you. Some professors just don't belong.

It is so frustrating when you have an overflowing courseload filled with classes galore, and some of your teachers, they really help you out but SOME... ugh. They are those teachers that try to meet the student halfway, and do their best to profess the material in an understandable manner. And I think those amazing and incredibly generous professors make it that much harder to deal with the other kind. The professors who basically announce on the first day, this is a self taught class, and who require you to attend things that aren't even part of the class and or required by the school IN ORDER TO pass the class. The professors who preach about emailing for help and asking questions in class, but never email you back and when you ask questions in class they throw a fit about how "you should know how to do this" even though they never taught it to you in the first place.

I mean seriously, what is their deal? If you hate teaching so much, then don't do it. Don't torture the students who are there to learn about something that will help them with their future career. Or maybe, give a little bit. Don't be so darn stubborn and unwilling to teach. LEARN from the students.

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I'm sitting here right now with both of my roommates out for the night. Although I am alone, I can still hear the normal sounds of the boys in the room nextdoor playing halo, and the boys on the other side of me practicing for his acapello performance coming up, as he does every night. I can hear the rumbling of the washing machines, especially washer #18 which goes insane whenever it's down to the last 10 minutes. Lastly, I can hear all of the people waiting for the laundry to finish. So in a sense, I'm never really alone. That has been a huge change for me in college.

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Learning Experience

Tonight was a good example of experiences you only have in college.

Tonight the Red Sox won the World Series. My roommates and I heard screaming and chanting coming from outside as we tried to fall asleep; we all have 8am classes tomorrow morning. Yet here I am, still awake, writing in my blog.

My entire building that had spent the entire weekend arguing and wrapped up in excessive amounts of drama suddenly put all of it behind us as we went outside to join the screaming fans. I have never seen anything like it.

I grew up and spent the entire 18 years of my life in a small town in the middle of nowhere. I went to private high school with a graduating class of 56 students. Seeing everyone from Willow and Cedar outside tonight chanting and crowd surfing as the cops began to sworm was something I had never experienced before.

Every other World Series or Superbowl I spent at home, watching with my parents and my younger sister. It was so much fun to finally be out and celebrating with people my own age. At the same time though, it also made me realize how much I miss my family. I miss how my dad and I would guess outcomes of the game before the pre-game show even. I miss how my mom would use the games as an excuse to bake brownies, pastries, and other goodies. I miss how my sister used to sit next to me as we watched, pretending to know what was going on.

It's amazing how much you realize you have once it's gone. It's amazing how hard it hits you, too.

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Reading Is Easy!

I think I have settled in on a problem. Reading. Maybe it's less of a difference, but more of a fundamental difference? I think it's a problem. Other people would probably disagree.

Anyway, back to reading. Why don't people do it? I never really thought about it, but it seems like almost no one I talk to reads. I go to the library a lot, not just to steady, but to keep my rotation of books flowing. I try to cap off 2 a week at the least, depending on the length/subject matter/the week. As previously brought up, I suck at sleeping, so I tend to do a lot of reading late at night.

Whenever I come back from the library with this weeks crop of books, I always get weird looks and questions about what class it's for. Why is reading for pleasure such a foreign concept? I think it's pretty awesome. I learn a lot, it helps my writing immeasurably [I think it's probably the only reason I can write], it's just an enjoyable experience, and it makes me a much better dinner companion. But whenever the subject of why I'm reading a book instead of doing [x] comes up, I am always met with apathy.

Even for classes where you have to read, not everyone does. It is not like you are being asked to read Ulysses or something. Just read! It's good for you! What the hell people. Ugh.

Whatever, I'm not going to stop. Maybe it's the way I was raised? My dad always read, and always encouraged me to. That and crossword puzzles have taught me twenty times as many words as English classes ever had. In that respect, I'll add what I'm reading on the current day for whoever reads this blog (you poor, poor, soul). I plan on plowing through Stoppard's latest trilogy again, before some books I ordered through HELIN get here.

Maybe we should start a campus wide reading campaign. Like in 5th grade? Give out Trophies? I'm liking the sound of that.


An Interesting Survey...

Professional Development...what is it? In most, if not all, professional fields there is this "conversation" that takes place among practitioners about what they do. The "conversation" isn't literal--between two people. When I use the word conversation, I mean it in a different way. I mean it in a much bigger way. It is the way that people who do particular kinds of work--build commercial buildings, practice law, treat medical patients, provide human resource services, teach undergraduates, take care of children or the elderly--talk with one another about the work they do. How do they talk? Well sometimes they talk face-to-face. They do this in the literal workplace or, if they have worked elsewhere, they may keep in touch with former colleagues. They also talk face-to-face at various forums hosted by professional associations. So, in the field of commercial architecture or human resources, there are various professional organizations to which people who work in these field can join or become members. These professional organizations usually host "conferences"--sometimes they are international, sometimes they are national (U.S.) sometimes they are regional (i.e., New England), sometimes they are local (i.e. RI). At these conferences or gatherings, people with shared professional interests come together to talk with one another, face-to-face, about what they do. They ask each other questions, try to solve problems, try to learn about new techniques or new policies or new information. They network. It's a huge social gathering centered around a particular kind of work. Usually, if they are fun, they go out at night and have drinks and sometimes even party with one another (not the college professors though...they go back to their hotel rooms and read books by themselves :)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I attended a local/regional conference last month at the University of New Hampshire. I presented or shared my research there with other teachers on the teaching of writing. In another post, maybe I should go a bit more into detail on my research interests...but not here, today. I will be presenting my work at another professional conference in the spring, this one is the national conference for teachers of writing. It is, I am proud to say, the biggest and most important conference in the field of composition (my field) and it is attended by, literally, thousands of writing teachers. This will be, again, I'm proud to say (sorry if this is getting a bit arrogant!) the fourth year in a row I have had a proposal I submitted accepted by the conference (You have to write up a short proposal if you want to present your work at the conference. I learned recently that only about 1/3 of the proposals submitted get accepted:

The unoffical numbers for the 2008 conference: 1,645 proposals received, percentage accepted is about 31%.)

So, you have the face-to-face ways that people keep up with one another in particular professional fields, and then you have the discursive or written or non-face-to-face ways that they do it. For example, many professional organizations publish newsletters, magazines, trade publications, etc. People write things and submit them and the organizations publish them and then if you are a dues-paying member of the association, you get the publication sent to you on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly basis (whatever it is).

Another newer way that people in professions keep up with one another, non-face-to-face, is through email list-serves. I'm sure some, if not all, of you have subscribed to list-serves. I don't think I need to describe what a list-serve is, do I? (if so, let me know). Anyway, I subscribe to a list-serve for teachers or writing and receive frequent information about all kinds of things related to the teaching of writing and working in higher education. I came across this recently, and I thought I would share it with you. I'm sure that this data is not surprising for you all...but I thought it was interesting to see it collected in one place. The question I have is, given this data, what are the implications for all of us who teach undergraduates. What should we be doing, given this information? What more can we be doing? How should this data change the way we think about our teaching? (I hope you can see the ways in which I have tried to take such data into account with our course...?):

From the key findings ofThe ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and
Information Technology, 2006 comes the following paragraph:

Undergraduates are communicators. Nearly all (99.9 percent) create, read, and send e-mail, and more than 80 percent send instant messages, most of them doing it daily. They use their arsenals of electronics to write documents for coursework (98.8 percent), search the Web and institutional library (94.0 percent), and creat presentations (90.8 percent). Three-quarters of these undergraduates use course management
systems, most of them using it several times per week or more. Recreationally, 70.6 percent of responding students download music of video files and use social networks such as Facebook.com. Most of them (73.4 percent) play computer/video games. A smaller number of students appear to be engaged in new media. More than a quarter of respondents (27.7 percent) report using software to create or edit video and audio files, and 28.6 percent of them create Web pages.

"Undergraduates are communicators."

For full Key Findings, go to
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERS0607/EKF0607.pdf

The report is "a longitudinal extension of the 2004 and 2005 ECAR studies of students and information technology, this 2006 study is based on quantitative data from nearly 29,000 freshman and senior students at 96 higher education institutions." Full report is here: http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?PAGE_ID=12479&bhcp=1