Have Students Really Lost the Ability to Read Deeply

My adult daughter, who teaches 9th grade Humanities at High Tech High, dropped by last night. I am sorting through books I don't want on my shelves anymore, and I always like to offer them to her. Two of my three children have inherited the obsession to purchase and hold on to books we have read, as though having the book on the shelf means that the ideas contained within them are ours forever. She was super excited that I had found some of her textbooks from college. She can use them in her classroom or in future research.

We like to share ideas we have been reading about and so we began talking about some of the concepts from this class.

She mentioned that teaching reading and reading comprehension to students is one of the hardest parts of her job. Her students just don't read deeply. They don't want to spend time understanding the books they are assigned. She suggested that exposure to new medias might be part of the problem.

Maybe.

On the other hand, I know all kinds of people who never read a book in high school. They wrote reports based on cliff notes or reading the back covers of books.

And they did that before the internet was invented.