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https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html

Recent years have seen successive waves of book bans in Republican-controlled states, aimed at pulling any text with woke themes from classrooms and library shelves. Though the results sometimes seem farcical, as with the banning of Art Spiegelmans Maus due to its inclusion of cuss words and explicit rodent nudity, the book-banning agenda is no laughing matter. Motivated by bigotry, it has already done demonstrable harm and promises to do more. But at the same time, the appropriate response is, in principle, simple. Named individuals have advanced explicit policies with clear goals and outcomes, and we can replace those individuals with people who want to reverse those policies. That is already beginning to happen in many places, and I hope those successes will continue until every banned book is restored.

If and when that happens, however, we will not be able to declare victory quite yet. Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place. As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, its as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectationsometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argumentskills I used to be able to take for granted.

Professors are also discussing the issue in academic trade publications, from a variety of perspectives. What we almost all seem to agree on is that we are facing newobstacles in structuring and delivering our courses, requiring us to ratchet down expectations in the face of a ratcheting down of preparation. Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the gradeexcept for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.

If we ask what has caused this change, there are some obvious culprits. The first is the same thing that has taken away almost everyones ability to focusthe ubiquitous smartphone. Even as a career academic who studies the Quran in Arabic for fun, I have noticed my reading endurance flagging. I once found myself boasting at a faculty meeting that I had read through my entire hourlong train ride without looking at my phone. My colleagues agreed this was a major feat, one they had not achieved recently. Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to turn it on when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. Thats because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age, meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.

The second go-to explanation is the massive disruption of school closures during COVID-19. There is still some debate about the necessity of those measures, but what is not up for debate any longer is the very real learning loss that students suffered at every level. The impact will inevitably continue to be felt for the next decade or more, until the last cohort affected by the mass pivot to online finally graduates. I doubt that the pandemic closures were the decisive factor in themselves, however. Not only did the marked decline in reading resilience start before the pandemic, but the students I am seeing would have already been in high school during the school closures. Hence they would be better equipped to get something out of the online format and, more importantly, their basic reading competence would have already been established.

We cant go back in time and do the pandemic differently at this point, nor is there any realistic path to putting the smartphone genie back in the bottle. (Though I will note that we as a society do at least attempt to keep other addictive products out of the hands of children.) But I have to think that we can, at the very least, stop actively preventing young people from developing the ability to follow extended narratives and arguments in the classroom. Regardless of their profession or ultimate educational level, they will need those skills. The world is a complicated place. Peopletheir histories and identities, their institutions and work processes, their fears and desiresare simply too complex to be captured in a worksheet with a paragraph and some reading comprehension questions. Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.

This is a matter not of snobbery, but of basic justice. I recognize that not everyone centers their lives on books as much as a humanities professor does. I think theyre missing out, but theyre adults and they can choose how to spend their time. Whats happening with the current generation is not that they are simply choosing TikTok over Jane Austen. They are being deprived of the ability to choosefor no real reason or benefit. We can and must stop perpetrating this crime on our young people.

As much as he respects the fighters competing in the UFC, Rollins feels like the arduous schedule required to perform in WWE would just be too much to handle.

As an example, Rollins invoked former UFC champion Ronda Rousey, who transitioned to WWE after her fighting career was over, however didnt work a full-time schedule filled with televised events, premium cards like WrestleMania, and weekly house shows where the promotion holds untelevised matches for local live crowds.

I dont want to knock Ronda Rousey because I love Ronda, Rollins told ESPN. She did a lot for our industry, for women in our industry and the fight industry in general, but it was tough for Ronda. She tried her damnedest and it was hard for her.

But I dont know, Id love for somebody to come over and take a crack if you think you can hang. But its hard.

Unlike many professional sports, there is no offseason for UFC fighters, so most train year-round but typically only set foot in the octagon two to three times per year.

Rollins understands MMA isnt easy, but he still argues its a different animal to put the kind of physical toll on your body that WWE requires for performers working a full-time schedule.

They dont have the stamina for it, Rollins said. They dont fight every single weekend.

This championship goes everywhere. It goes everywhere. It goes to like Biloxi, [Miss.]. And especially the top stars over there, theyre catered to a certain way, and thats great. Thats their style. Thats what works for them. You fight maybe once, twice a year. Youre crazy, youre fighting three times a year.

But to fight over 100 times a year, make all those towns, still be able to train, still be able to do all the media, its an exhausting industry.

The 45-year-old music producer responded after fans poured out their thoughts about the 45-year-old halftime show performer embracing the 43-year-old singer from behind during their fantastic performance together in Allegiant Stadium on Sunday (February 11) in Las Vegas.

Some people felt the entertainers were a little too up close and familiar during their My Boo performance. Now, hes setting the record straight.

Yall talking about the wrong damn thing !!! yall dont see that amazing dress covering the entire stadium Tonights performance was nothing but amazing with 2 amazing Giants ! Swizzwrote on Instagram.

Congrats @usher and my love @aliciakeys that song is a classic We dont do negative vibes on this side we make history Go see GIANTS at @brooklynmuseum its open until July blessings , he continued.

This week 22-year-old model Kaia Gerber launched her own book club, Library Science.

Gerber, who this month appears on the cover of British Vogue alongside her supermodel mum, Cindy Crawford, describes it as a platform for sharing books, featuring new writers, hosting conversations with artists we admire and continuing to build a community of people who are as excited about literature as I am.

Books have always been the great love of my life, she added. Reading is so sexy.

Gerber isnt alone. Last year physical books sold were the highest level ever recorded. Research from Nielsen BookData highlights that it is print books that gen Z favor, accounting for 80% of purchases from November 2021 to 2022. Libraries are also reporting an uptick in gen Z users who favor their quiet over noisy coffee shops.

While the BookTok charts a subsection of TikTok where avid readers post recommendations are regularly topped by fantasy and romance titles from authors such as Colleen Hoover, gen Z are reading a diverse range of genres.

The gen Z book sphere is incredibly broad, says Hali Brown, the 28-year-old co-founder of Books on the Bedside, a popular TikTok account dedicated to gen Z reading habits. There is a lot of appreciation for literary fiction, memoirs, translated fiction and classics in particular, says Brown.