Perhaps college students can't read long or complex texts because they didn't read many books in middle and high school, suggests "Bellringer" Holly Korbey. Her son read no books in his sixth-grade class in a large public school, she writes on X. He did very little writing. In seventh grade at a private school, he read six books in class and wrote a paper. Here are some responses.
In 2019, Korbey wrote for Edutopia that English teachers were moving away from teaching classic novels and letting students read books of their own choice. Teens prefer The Little Mermaid: Against the Tide or Star Wars: Padawan to Lord of the Flies.
Some worry "that too much student choice is putting young adult (YA) and graphic novels — not highly regarded and vetted literature — at the center of the English literature curriculum," she wrote. "Challenging books help boost students’ comprehension and reading proficiency, they argue, and force them to grapple with difficult, timeless questions about love, life and death, and societal dynamics."
If every student is reading a different book, it's impossible to have a class discussion. "Teacher-led explicit instruction in reading a particular text (especially in different genres), combined with lots of reading, can reap four to eight times the payoff compared with students’ choosing books and reading on their own," wrote Korbey, citing Timothy Shanahan, founding director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Common Core standards encouraged teaching short texts such as articles, poems and excerpts of novels, wrote Ariel Sacks, a middle-school English teacher in Education Week in 2019. She advocates teaching Whole Novels for the Whole Class. Reading excerpts is "a Band-Aid for low reading stamina and motivation," she writes.
My sixth-grade teacher told us to fill out an index card for every book we read at home. The minimum was 10 in the school year. I read 152. I read fantasy, adventure, Nancy Drew, history, biographies and . . . everything. Young-adult and graphic novels hadn't been invented.
I slowed down in seventh grade because I was reading longer books: Tale of Two Cities, Kidnapped, Lord of the Rings, etc.