The End of Reading
Great piece in the Atlantic. Hope you can read it. It's a longer piece and if you haven't been spending much time reading, you may find it challenging, not the vocabulary, or the syntax, just the length. Dig in!
I can attest to much of what the author claims about how most students hardly read at all, and how their writing skills and vocabulary suffer as a result. College professors are having to do remediation in reading and comprehension at Ivy League schools. Yes, you read that right.
As an example: recently I had a long term substitute position in a local high school. As a former secondary English teacher I was eager to be in English classrooms. One day, I was covering an honors class of 10th graders. They had to read one of Shakespeare's sonnets, "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day." Then they had to answer a few short questions about the poem.
One of the students asked me what the meaning of the word "bitter" was. I was shocked. It was being used in a figurative way. The question asked about the tone of the poem and one of the choices was "bitter," (obviously an outlier choice.)
Honors class, high achievers. Didn't understand the use of the word in this context.
Rose Horowitch