If English majors can't read Dickens ...

Students are reading fewer books -- or no books at all -- in English class, reports AP's Sharon Lurye. "In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare students for the modern, digital world."

When kids do read, they're more likely to be assigned a recently written, easy-to-read, young-adult novel than a classic. Think The Hunger Games rather than The Great Gatsby.

Even college students who choose to major in English, an increasingly rare choice, have trouble understanding classic texts, writes Kitten.

Researchers gave state university students in Kansas the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and asked them to translate it into modern English, with the help of a dictionary and their phones. Only 5 percent completely understood what they'd read, according the study. Another 38 percent understood about half, and 58 percent had no clue. Yet they were confident they'd be able to read the book.

Here's the first paragraph:

LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

A reader in the middle category decides that Michaelmas and the Lord Chancellor are both people who've met an animal in the streets. Another thinks bones have been found in the mud and are now walking about.

Another paragraph described the Lord High Chancellor sitting "with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog."

The student said: Describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?"

About half of the students were English Education majors, which means "they will be teaching books like Bleak House to high school students after graduating," writes Kitten. Or, more likely, they'll teach the latest graphic novel.

When I was in high school in the '60s, we read Hard Times and Great Expectations, and didn't find the writing difficult. I went on to read everything Dickens wrote (I speed-read Barnaby Rudge). Dickens is very funny. He was a wildly popular writer in his day for all sorts of people.

AP English students are angry about a passage on the exam that asked them to analyze an excerpt of a scholar's essay, reports Kim Bellware in the Washington Post. "Students complained that the passage featured on the exam was confusing and contradictory, and that the multiple-choice questions about it were vague and overly subjective." 

Namwali Serpell, an author and Harvard English professor was accused on social media of “RUINING HIGH SCHOOLERS’ LIVES.” A critic of standardized tests, Serpell said her book, Stranger Faces, on the pleasure that people take in unusual faces in works of art, is written for academics, not high school students.

"She insists that the complexity of her writing can only be understood in fuller context. The exam excerpt, she said, omitted critical writing that would have made her arguments and rhetorical effects clearer," writes Bellware.