RU Really Reading?

Well, after spending the day giving final exams to my AP English Language students and watching many of them sigh, shift around, and fall asleep while reading the close reading section, I can't help but wonder -- do students REALLY believe they will do well in college if they cannot stand to read?  The teenaged girl, Nadya in the "RU Really Reading" article seems to believe that "nobody said you have to read books to get into college."  That's true -- I'm sure the University of Phoenix or Robert Morris will be thrilled to have you.

I do believe though that a love of text and stories has developed from internet reading.  The Nadya girl loves reading Fanfiction, and although most of it is probably as badly written as the example the article provided, I also happen to know a well-educated colleague and British Literature scholar who regularly contributes stories to a FanFiction website.  It is also hard to argue with the statistics that show dyslexic kids doing better with the internet than they do with books.  And it's hard to argue with the logic that the Internet allows you to read many different points of view at once, interact with text, and develop an intellectual curiosity to learn more.  Bravo to all of that.  But, we also cannot ignore the fact that it is hard to keep the attention of today's youth in a classroom.

 As educators we almost have to switch gears every 15 minutes to keep up with the fragmented attention span of students.  And, if reading scores are going down -- I have to say it -- it is not because somehow the teachers are "bad."  It is because the internet generation does not have the attention span to read books anymore.  Books are assigned to them and they don't read -- they look up Spark Notes.  Students sitting in English graduate writing programs claim they want to be novelists but have not read any substantial authors.  That Nadya girl in the article who hates to read books wants to be an English major.  God help we English teachers and professors!  So, what is the problem?  This girl supposedly gets A's and B's but she and others like her think that books are too "one-sided" but what's really happening is what the debate on "Is Google Making Us Smarter or Dumber" is trying to argue.  The Internet is making our brains behave differently.  So whether that is good or bad it does seem those who are starting to hate books are losing the ability to use their imaginations and cognitive thinking skills to decipher complex meaning without clicking a mouse to take them to another window to give them bits and pieces of information that they don't have to wade through text to discover.  What reading tests ask students to do is a skill that they are losing because of the quick fix information they can get on the internet.  Internet searching and synthesizing of information is yes, indeed, a grand and valuable skill to have for higher education and for the job market.  However, if the skills acquired by using your imagination and comprehension skills to decipher lengthy bits of text are still valued by employers and still measurable in their link to greater success in higher education and brainier jobs, then "reading" on the Internet will not be able to replace reading books.  Nor should it. 

Beliefs About Writing and Learning

1.                  Writing is thinking on the page and that is the core of the reason why some people are “good” at writing while others struggle.  For some, the ability to articulate and organize their ideas is a struggle both orally and in writing.  If you cannot think well, you cannot write easily.  For others, they speak beautifully and thoughtfully, but cannot translate that to the page.  This could be due to the lack of exposure to written communication they can emulate or due to the fact that they are a more auditory rather than visual or tactile learner/thinker. The more familiar one is with the written word – in other words – if one has read much and from a variety of both formal and informal, classic and contemporary texts – the more comfortable one will be with mimicking that form of communication.  Thus, if one thinks clearly, reads a variety of texts, and becomes more and more familiar with successful written communication in any genre, one will struggle less with writing.

2.                  I do believe writing is more of a talent than a skill.  The more I teach writing to high school students, the more I realize that, although the “skill” can be practiced in terms of mechanics, organization, sentence structure, depth and clarity of content, the students that knock my socks off are also truly talented with a turn of phrase, a nuance, an effortlessly well-crafted sentence, a beautiful metaphor.  A skill is something that if done correctly, gets the job done.  You can teach a robot the skill to play a Vivaldi violin concerto, but will it move you to tears?  A talent is something that takes a skill to a level of beauty or excellence that goes beyond merely accomplishing the task.  A talented, creative writer may lack discipline, however, and that is where skill building turns talent into effective writing.  But, just as one might be able to teach anyone to paint a picture of a woman who definitely resembles a woman – it will still not be the Mona Lisa.

3.                  I think writing is best learned in a workshop rather than lecture situation.  Unfortunately, most people were “taught” to write by being lectured about proper structures, format, and grammar and given some examples of the kind of writing to emulate, some may have been given formulas or templates for a particular kind of writing and then, boom, go write the paper.  The rest of the more relevant teaching happened during the feedback and revision stage.  The biggest impediment, however, comes when writers do not understand the written feedback they get from their instructors about their work – or do not understand the rubrics they are given to justify a grade, and become frustrated without the actual tools or relevant instruction on how to improve their work.  The best way to improve writing is through feedback and revision and this takes more time than most writing curriculums have in place in elementary, high school, or even college.  Workshops work best with creative writers but I think they would also work well for any kind of writing.  Writers continually need to analyze examples of writing and receive relevant feedback on their own writing in order to improve what they do.

4.                  I’m sorry, but just more than one image comes to mind when picturing someone writing – probably because I am currently a working writer and a writer working as a teacher of writing at the high school level.  As a teacher, I picture a teenaged boy, struggling to write an essay in long hand. It is early morning and he is seated by himself at a table in a nearly empty school library.   Furiously just getting words on a page, letting his mind spit words faster than he can write them, he is cursing the prompt, cursing the teacher, cursing himself for waiting until the last minute to get this done. He is rambling on about the plot of Beowulf, trying to write himself into an essay that will satisfy the writing prompt about heroism.  He is writing in a spiral notebook with a black felt-tipped pen.  His handwriting is large, scrawling, and looks like a combination of printing and cursive writing.  He will turn this work in to his teacher in a flurry of unstapled, curly-edged, hastily ripped disarray. As a writer, I picture a woman at a laptop computer in a sunny, well-lit room, surrounded by books.  Instead of fingers flying furiously, that woman is staring past her computer and out the window at the snow-covered trees.  Her thoughts are in her work – not yet in her fingers.  That person might be me.  Although sometimes, being a literature person as well, when I think of someone in the act of writing, I think of Hemingway (young version) typing away at a black Underwood typewriter in a charmingly dingy apartment in Paris.

5.                  As a teacher, I picture students struggling with writing.  I wonder why I pictured a boy first since girls struggle just as much.  Maybe because I just helped a boy recently in our writing center whose work looked like the work I described.  I pictured myself because most days I wish I were in my home office writing rather than at the high school teaching writing – even though I love that in some ways – I wish I had more time for my own art.  And last, I sometimes wish I had been intrepid enough in my youth to just go do something crazy like move to Paris to write – but I also wish writers and publishers were looked at the same way they were in Hemingway’s time  -- so that image just comes from romantic notions of what it meant to be a writer in a bygone age.  Are there writers or other types of writing not reflected by these images?  Yep!  Too numerous to name – but here are a few:  technical writers, people who write in handwritten diaries, poets.  And the process can be as individual and numerous and there are humans who write for any reason.

6.                  Webster’s Dictionary defines “Technology” in its second definition as “a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods or knowledge.” The reason I begin with this is that opening line is the most frustrating and boring thing I encounter kids using to find a way to start an essay.   That being said, I think that the word “Technology” has come to mean using “devices” to accomplish tasks that once did not need training, knowledge, or even electricity to accomplish.  But, if we look at Webster’s definition, the act of writing itself is a technology (even if one does not use technological devices to write) because depending on the kind of writing one is doing, it requires knowledge of methods, process, and a decoding of language and sentence structure.  It is therefore, technical.

7.                  Yes, the term “writing process” is quite familiar to me.  The writing process can be anything from preparing your materials in advance, to outlining ideas, to drafting and revising, to lining up your sharpened pencils next to your clean yellow legal pad, to invoking the muses for inspiration.  It can mean many things to different people and different kinds of writers.

8.                  Writing is both a private and a social thing.  As a teacher and a writer, the idea of “audience” always comes up which makes writing a social thing.  We teach students to write to or target specific audiences.  As a writer, I write first for myself and then for my intended audience.  But, even when I wrote in my diary as a little girl, I pictured “future historians” someday finding it and reading it.  The act of putting thoughts on paper or on a computer screen takes the private out of your thoughts as they are there for anyone to find.  Whether you are conscious of that or not when you write, it does make writing a social thing.  It is private also because it is a solitary act – not usually a collaborative act.  Writing has also become way more social – becoming more popular than oral conversation – because of the advent of e-mail, text messaging, and social networks like Facebook.

9.                  I mainly think of illiteracy as simply people who cannot read in ANY language.  It is incorrect to call someone who can read in another language illiterate if they cannot read in English.  I also think illiteracy means people who cannot read well or cannot decipher text and decode it for meaning.  Those who are illiterate in this country include a population of non-readers to which reading has never become a priority.  You cannot completely blame the educational system for non-readers because if one has the desire to read, one will be able to eventually read.  Look at what the uneducated of the past were capable of doing.  Look at Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln.  Formal education was not the reason these two become extremely literate.  If a person is curious and interested, reading is possible.  There are, of course, learning deficits that hinder comprehension and those should be addressed and targeted early in children.  Bilingual students may also have a hard time reading in English, but that does not mean they have a reading problem if they read in their own language.  It is a separate issue.  But I do not and will not blame teachers for the fact that there may be an illiteracy problem in this country.  Education and teachers are better now than it and they have ever been in this country.  The ability to read now competes with many more other distractions, television, video games, etc. that are becoming more and more prevalent.  If reading is not a priority or a focus in one’s home or life then it becomes less important to learn to read.  If there is not one book in your home, or if getting a library card is not something you were inspired to do, chance are, you may become illiterate.  I hear all the time even from students sitting next to me in my graduate classes that they got by in high school English classes without reading a single text.  And they wonder why they are struggling to understand complex texts today.  Why Johnny can’t read is sometimes because Johnny is not interested in reading, not because some teacher never taught him.  And if Johnny gets away with that at home when he is young, Johnny may become one of the illiterate.  Of course illiteracy is a problem. Reading is not going away, even if reading is now part of the digital age.  You will still need to know how to decipher text for meaning even if the only reading you do is on your hand-held device – that is, until we all become part of George Orwell’s world and language becomes so overly simplified if loses its meaning, or our computers start talking to us so we don’t have to read the text.  Hopefully text messaging will not lead to that.

10.              As I intimated above, I worry that writing will become so truncated by abbreviations and acronyms that the beauty and power of language will be overly simplified into some kind of utilitarian language that is purely for communication and not for the pleasure of words.  I do think it is cool that more writing is done than ever before because of texting and tweeting. But, are our lives richer for knowing what kind of sweater Paris Hilton buys for her dog or that Kanye West thinks it’s hard to sleep on a fur pillow?  Probably not.  But at least people are using the skills of reading and writing to communicate.  Email has been a wonderful addition to writing in the digital age, however, as I think it has in some ways brought back the art of letter writing.  But, I also think because it is less formal, the quality of writing has diminished.  Although I do look forward in the future to an anthology of The Greatest Love E-mails of the Millennial Generation or Deep Twitter Thoughts of the Last Five Presidents.  It will be interesting to see how history will treat the significance of writing in the digital age.  For now I cannot say if all of this is a bad thing.  Right now it seems more good than bad, but it also has the potential to be scary as more and more text to read does not always mean quality text to read.  Will we be so distracted by so much information that we lose the ability to think critically about the text we are reading?  I think we need more time to tell how it will affect us in a lasting way.  But we should be vigilant about reading and writing in the digital age and to continually question how and why it is used.