Reading stamina really is a thing. I used to read entire chapter books within a few days but after year long break of reading, I can barely read for an hour and now finish books in a week or more.
You can train your "reading stamina" by reading books (I recommend books you wouldn't normally read) in uncomfortable situations. Walking and reading, in a loud environment, etc. When you finally read in a quiet focused space, it feels like you're reading and absorbing as fast as heat on butter
It's 100% the distractability. I used to be an avid reader, who studied comparative literature at university. A part of the curriculum was reading a novel a week. The moment I got a phone with social media access my concentration started dying. I have actively blocked shorts and reels (these are the most destructive) and have better concentration the less I look at my phone. It irritates me so much when scientists say there isn't adequate proof that social media is messing with kids' brains. It's literally made for being addictive, and adults can't control it either.
I haven't read a book in ten years, but they made entertainment so utterly dull and full of propaganda I'm starting to read more to stop being so bored. So good news, I guess. I loved it too. "Do androids dream of electronic sheep" was the most entertaining thing I ever did with my life. I mean most concepts bore me though. I don't want to read Tom Clancy or Stephen King. Probably going to read neuromancer soon. Im not very good with punctuation or writing nor do I read fast.
@GEORGEJETSON-s4w I like to read about factual things. Might as well learn something while I'm at it. Books about history or biographies are my favorite. I've never been able to get into science fiction. I need to read about realistic things to keep my attention and knowing that what I'm reading about actually happened makes it more exciting.
I have had the same issue. I notice a huge difference in how my mind feels after looking at social media if I have been on a detox for a week. It's a type of brain fog and craving for more that gets worse the more you give in to it. Saying social media doesn't affect the brain is like saying cigarettes don't affect the lungs. It even affects my ability to watch TV because I can't get through entire episodes if I'm on my phone for too long. I didn't grow up with social media, so I can remember a time when I didn't feel the brain fog, but kids who only have ever known social media are going to have a much harder time because they don't even know what their actual baseline attention span is. I wonder how many kids who think they have ADHD or other learning difficulties now are actually experiencing this brain fog from their phone use.
Another massive problem, which has been prominent in my phil degree, is the opposite. To demand that a student read a book a week does not encourage deep reading. For example, when I read Spinoza’s Ethics the first time, it took me 3 weeks and I wrote down every proposition and corollary just to see how they fit together and what implications arise. The problem is time, while phones take up so so much, and reading stamina is necessary, many reading deadlines are unreasonable, especially when the material demands careful attention
in the 80s we had a read a book program if you completed it you got a free pizza from Pizza Hut 5/6/years old I was reading the Herdy Boys mysteries Dick Tracy books and any adventure book
Totally, I am not an avid reader of philosophy, but when I picked up and read the first book to the Nicomachean Ethics. It took a very deliberate analysis of almost every sentence to follow what Aristotle was even remotely trying to say. I took a month to finish 30 pages...
You may be right in part, but I think the issue is the change in student performance. Previously, students could and did keep up with reading schedule such as one book a week. Now, they can't or won't.
You have to admit, there are students who won’t be motivated to do their homework unless it’s two days before the deadline. For those types, a deadline of one week would be effective in motivating them to read. But really, most books (other than technical books and OP’s example) can be read leisurely in a week -provided, one also have a leisurely schedule. A university student with so many extra curricula don’t have that leisure.
Depends on the specific book and depends on how many other homework you have. A quick google search suggested that people can read 30 - 60 pages per hour. If we're talking about a 200 page book, then that's like 4-7 hours of pure reading. So if you also need to carefully think about it or write stuff out, that's let's say 10 hours. Well, that doesn't seem too high a commitment -- working adults have a 40 hour work week. Although if it's a really complicated book or you have tons of other homework, then yeah maybe it's too much.
“The world wants you to read, it just doesn’t really want to give you the time to read a good book.” You have given voice to a deeply felt frustration that I haven’t been able to put my finger on for so, so many years of school and work. Thank you ❤
You didn't mention the large hand-off to the educational arena of childhood book culture passed on by parents. My parents read to me. My parents had books around the house. I have mental snapshots of my Father and Mother reading their books. I copied this with my child. It was very telling when she came home from a sleepover and one of the first thing she mentioned was: "Momma, there were no books! My friend didn't even have a bookshelf in her room!" (They weren't Kindle fans, either, as it turns out) I'm not saying this would "fix everything"; just that I felt it should be mentioned. Thank you for the video. I was a "whole language" kid, but fortunately turned into a bookworm - I blame my parents. :P
Same here. My parents were big readers. House filled with books. Saturday trips to the library every week for most of my childhood (dropping off/picking up, not to mention used books sold for a dime). My brother and I were naturally big readers, thanks to our home environment and upbringing. I recently mentioned to a coworker that I would get in trouble as a child for reading under the covers with a flashlight after my bedtime, and she had absolutely no idea what I was referring to. The goalposts for "normal" have shifted so drastically in the last few years. I'm grateful that my parents instilled in my brother and me a love for reading and a respect for books.
Yes, parents reading to children is a huge contributor. I started reading to my kids, one after another, when they were as young as one. Since they learnt how to walk and take objects from shelves, there were always cardboard books for kids within their reach just to touch it, feel it, turn the pages. Kids are now 9 and almost 7 and I read to them every single night, in two languages, my native and English, devices are non-existent except for occasional cartoons or family movie time. Books are the main source of a truly exciting stories and variety of info that they do not see anywhere else. Our library is huge and we keep adding as children grow.
Yes. In my household, we have 3 maybe four bookshelves. One has nothing but manga, the other is a bunch of books my oldest sister bought over the years, and the third are books I bought for myself (after realizing, I don't have my own collection if and when I move out). People that come over are always impressed by the amount of books we have. It's weird to me that it isn't normal for most people of today. Thinking about it now, I can't remember seeing books in any houses of friends I've been to 😮.
Not only did books feature in the house but even more to your point, I also remember _learning_ to read with my mum (i'd bring home flashcards with words to learn, read assigned books with/for her etc.) - that wasn't her being "super-mum" BTW, that was just pretty much what the school expected. So I certainly sympathise with parents who maybe work multiple jobs etc. just to make ends meet and for sure, schools aren't blameless but the most baffling thing for me about the "Covid uproar" over reading was, how on Earth did your kid get to age 8 or 10 before you realised they were struggling with reading ? Like, _surely_ no matter how busy you are you can at least _check-in_ every now and then, just so you know yourself everything's going as expected ?
Education can not replace reading hundreds of books. Curiosity and availability did it for me. We imagine that schools could replace what parents should do.
I'm a high school teacher. I doubt you'll see this but your video really resonated with me because my colleagues and I have been screaming about this problem for well over a decade. *Every single day* I am shocked by the lack of literacy skills in so many of my students. It is *shocking.* Our grade 9s and 10s have an average reading level of grade 6 - and 30% of our students - *THIRTY PERCENT!* - are reading at a grade 2 (TWO!) level. It is insane. You hit the nail on the head with the switch from phonics. It was an absolute catastrophe and it was one many teachers recognized as such *decades* ago. My Mom taught for 37 years and I remember her talking constantly about this change. In fact, she refused to be part of it and continued to teach phonics when it was replaced in the curriculum. The education system has a real problem with hopping onto unproven trends. There's always some new administrator who is trying to make a name for themselves or heard about some fancy new method of teaching math, reading, writing, etc. Almost always it's complete crap - but the board will pay *millions* to the people peddling it and adopting initiatives to implement it all, only to find out years later it doesn't work - which leads them to hop onto the next bit of nonsense where the cycle repeats. There's another thing I'd mention to that I think you could do an entire video about, and that is the rise in "passive hobbies" where kids will just sit there and watch other people do things on social media. It blows my mind how many hours kids will spend thumbing through TikTok *every day.* I have students who, when asked to do an accounting of their weekly phone use, have 40+ hours a week on TikTok. I have students with over 80 (and in one case *100* !) hours a week on their cell phones. If you ask them how many videos they remember watching out of all those hours, it's *maybe* 5 to 10. What a complete waste of time. Nobody is reading because they're just watching life pass them by. It is *exceptionally* disturbing. Interesting video. Thanks for making more people aware of the problem.
I went to college for secondary education and wanted to be an English teacher because of this. I really thought I could help. But then, as I was going through college and learning how my state wanted me to teach and what they wanted me to teach, I was feeling discouraged. When I had to create lesson plans and teach them in student-teaching exercises, my professors would tell me I had great ideas, but let’s simplify them and cut some things out. I felt like I would never be able to teach in the way I wanted to. I was in year 3 when Covid hit and we all got sent home. In 2020, I started working at my public library, and I decided to stay there. I am able to help people every day without having to deal with the frustration from the state. But now, my state is trying to limit access to certain books for teens, and that’s frustrating too. There are some amazing teachers out there who want to do things differently, but they can’t without their state’s support, and that is so sad.
It's even worse in special education. I have students who are 17, their work is modified to a 2nd grade reading level and they still can't do it. They can't spell they can't comprehend a compound sentence. They are functionally illiterate. And the second you look away they have UA-cam shorts playing.
Your post and the following response is point on. I had the enormous blessing on my life of never having to learn how to read...I always just knew how, ever since I could remember as a tot. I remember reading the words voraciously of everything in front of me....cereal boxes, instructions on cleaning product, the comics in the newspapers. My parents didn't make a big deal of it, but I can't help but think today that they knew there was something extraordinary going on with me in an academic sense. This phenomenon was only contained in the realm of words and literature, though. I had big trouble with mathematics, and really didn't know anything about formulaic writing until I learned it in JC in my late 50s. During that time, after I'd graduated, I was given the opportunity to be employed by my alma mater as a reading/writing tutor. It was at first daunting because I had this innate fear of having to teach in an academic setting. I prevailed despite my weakness in a few particular things in the area of formal grammar, but my saving grace was that with anyone who couldn't read but knew their alphabet, I could start them with the very basic elements of sounding out the letter of any alphabet, then building from there....the basic, fundamental genesis of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and essay construction building...with meaning and context included along the process. It was the most satisfying job I ever held.... But today's approach to reading and writing education is a depressing endeavor. But, as long as speech and languages are our primary methods of understanding and communicating, and what the Greeks established so many centuries ago, there will always be hope in my heart and mind about the resurgence of literacy as we once knew it.
We are creating the circumstances for authoritarian government by dumbing down the population. Not only is this a disaster for business but it leads to getting information from shallow sources - You Tube, FB, headlines, friends, etc Poorly informed will support things that sound good regardless of cost, ethics, feasibility or possibility of success.
Two hours ago, I told myself that I need to put the phone away and finish that book I've been reading for the past two weeks. Yet, here I am watching you.
Same here 😅😭 - but why, though? I think I need *conversation,* and I don't get much of that in my life. My need for interesting voices and interesting new ideas makes me spend time on YT, but the deep need for human connection is never met, so I scroll forever. Shutting it off and doing something real is always a good thing, but for myself I don't think I'm gonna break my YT habit until I get what I really need - real-life sharing of ideas.
I've got ADHD. I am you, but on a professional level. My entire life has been one endless procrastination, distraction, inattention, missed deadline. And yet I've read thousands of books, my house is full of art I've made and from friends. I've got stacks of journals, a few novels I haven't quite finished. I've traveled all over the world, and yet I'm here.... Just get back on it and keep at it, fall down, get back on it, again and again and again....
Most public libraries allow you to check out ebooks, which you can read on your phone. No need to leave your phone at home, and it conserves your battery.
Same here, I was an avid reader in high school before cell phones / social media was a thing. Now, I have to read paragraphs back again just to paint a picture of what I've read.
Lack of phonics + smartphones + bad parenting. But the bad teaching in schools is largely an EFFECT. If kids arrive unsocialized, never having been read to, the school systems try to compensate. They can't fully. But they've done a crap job trying, as well.
I’m a teacher and I genuinely feel like I *cannot* teach. Kids talk over me CONSTANTLY. They have no interest in spending the literal *seconds* it would take to locate a single fact in a text. Fucking EVERYTHING is boring to them if it isn’t on a phone. I *CANNOT* do my job. As in, it is literally impossible.
I'm 58 and a bookworm. I completely quit social media in 2016 because the pace and constant notifications were negativity affecting my ability to read for hours. I can't imagine having grown up with social media and then trying to read Middlemarch.
I grew up in Japan and public school teachers forced students to read very boring books. I was an avid reader in elementary school, but after being forced, I gradually quit reading books. Plus, preparing for high school and university entrance exams made me to have no energy and time for reading. Thankfully, I got free time in my 20s and started reading again. Now I’m reading English books😭🤝👍 I like ur content so much! Keep going!!
There IS a middle ground between no long-form reading and forcing kids to read boring stuff (or, god forbid, The Iliad in a week!). You have to get out there and SEARCH for books that you like. There's every imaginable kind of fiction. Get up and go look for it in the library. And yes, the U.S. ed curriculum creators (usually not the teachers) "prescribes" a lot of "good for you" boring crap with little sense of what will interest students at various grade levels and how to teach challenging works so as to engage students in them. Lots of the teahers are no longer readers, either.
I did a degree in literature, which I enjoyed, but with reading 6 books simultaneously for my degree I ended up being completely burned out from reading. I "took a break" from reading books once I graduated at age 22. Yeah, that break is still ongoing and I'm 40.
6:44 I grew up in Russia, immersed in the often depressive classical Russian literature that glorifies "the little man" as a virtue. It frustrates me that free-thinking Western readers, when praising the so-called "great Russian literature," fail to recognize that the promotion of the state's supremacy over the individual is the very ideology fueling Putin's war machine against the free world today. As for Dostoevsky, after his release from prison, Dostoevsky became a state propagandist and an ideologist of Russian Orthodox fascism. His disdain for Western progress and technological advancements like railroads was part of a broader critique of Western liberalism and individualism - an outlook he believed Russia, as a chosen nation with a special path and holy mission, must oppose. I am utterly disillusioned with the inability of Ivy League intellectuals to read between the lines.
I’m a 17 year old applying to top universities right now and I think another vital reason teenagers like me don’t read enough is because of the increasing pressures to “achieve” and get instant recognition for our efforts. There’s an enormous pressure to eventually land high paying jobs in tech, finance, law, med, etc-and reading often feels like a leisurely distraction compared to ways we should be “getting ahead” of the competition. I often try to start reading and then stop and think I should be doing something more “productive” like homework, my extracurriculars, or college essays. My friend at Columbia tells me their friends don’t read the books in Lit Hum (class you mentioned) because they’re so fixated on securing internships, joining pre-professional clubs, and so on. To fully allow society to get back into reading, we need to focus on what we value and admire: in-depth thought and knowledge or just prestigious resume boxes.
I agree. I decided very early that achieving status is the world was a scam and a waste of my life energy, so instead of pursuing college and a career, I spent all of my 20s and most of my 30s just working part-time just enough to get by, so that I had time for what I loved: traveling and "doing nothing." I read so many good books in that time, I grew by leaps and bounds intellectually and philosophically, I came to savor being alone and exploring the nooks and crannies of areas while looking for ideal spots to read. If I had to do it all over again, I would not trade all that time for a six-figure salary, fancy car, and mountains of stress. Not a chance. All that stuff is on loan, the only thing we truly own is our life.
young people need to think for themselves for once ask around to find out how many other people want that same job you do don't know why kids think their first job is going to be an executive job or the CEO or COO job
There's no way you can write a half decent college essay if you don't read books. That's as stupid as telling a 2 year old "don't listen to people, just talk."
I go to Columbia. Definitely agree with all the points about reading in general, but also Columbia in particular isn't a great example. You're right, it's usually a book a week. And then we have a 2 hour discussion section twice a week to discuss the book/chapters read. The main motivator for reading the book is the discussion section (and, for some, the participation grade for saying something during the seminar). But these books can be pretty long/dense. The Iliad, The Aeneid, and later Crime and Punishment, To the Lighthouse, etc. I always felt that reading the whole book was a waste of time since at that point you are only absorbing plot points and action. There is not enough time in a week (particularly with other classes) to do a deep reading cover to cover and participate in a worthwhile discussion afterwards. I found reading the summary on sparknotes and then honing in on particular sections was how I could get the most out of the books within the short time period. After all, the purpose of reading these books was not the words themselves, but the discussions and arguments and critical thinking that came out of them in class---at least ideally. That said, I definitely feel like I lack reading stamina. Some books I didn't read at all, just pretended to. I wish I read more. What I did read, I really enjoyed. I loved that class and my instructor and learned a lot. Definitely issues with attention span and technology (made worse bc most books I would download online and read on my laptop). That said, Columbia and many "elite schools" are not super conducive to actual learning. Read Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz.
This sort of curriculum sound like "I had to jump this high and you have to as well." Reading is a necessary skill, but if its just an endurance race where one is retaining from the reading of the book what one could get from a short precis, it seems that reading the entire book is kind of a useless exercise. Unless they are specifically testing the ability to rapidly summarize material, or somehow all of the words of the book are needed to make an argument (which means the book can't be usefully summarized), or they are literally testing the ability to recall any part of the book, what is the purpose of reading the entire book? I enjoy reading, but I don't do it just to prove that I can, especially to academics that can not justify why this should be necessary, except to say that it was the way they learned.
Read the review of Excellent Sheep by LA Book Review. The book is apparently pretty sensational/popular vs academically sound - but then again so are Ivy Leagues lol 😝
If you don't properly read the material, then the discussion will be lackluster to say the least. Often times there are unique or special details in sections of novels that seem unimportant, until they are important. There is nothing that can replace properly reading a book all the way through and discussing with others who read the same text. It's like magic when done right.
My experience with Lit Hum and especially CC was pretty similar. I love reading and ended up majoring in English and comparative literature, but the way the core classes are structured is not conducive to deep thought or true understanding. At best, you’ll note which books seemed interesting and return to them later on your own.
Speaking for myself, the phone has really interfered with my time spent reading. Thanks for the excellent video, but watching UA-cam is probably one of my biggest distractions. I used to read a book every week on average, and now it's down to about 1 per month. I get a lot more from reading than I do from watching videos (present company excepted) and tracking the news of the day. I need to make a conscious effort to get back to reading. Thanks for the insight!
My phone even distracts me from watching television. I will pause a show to just check my phone. More often than not whatever content I am looking at isn't more interesting than what I am watching. I live alone so I don't have someone being irritated by my behavior.
This hits hard. With no gaps between events in our life, how does any one of them have meaning? Without negative space, objects have no edges or identity.
This is really well put. I do feel that there’s something deeper than attention spans at play here. Books are only boring in the specific sense mentioned by the presenter. (He presented the point well, and narrowed in immediately on what he meant.) Exploring things at leisure is this incredible gift of time and uninterrupted focus. I guess that’s why I always associated time spent reading with affluence, somewhat as a child but even more so as a young adult.
6:42 funny thing about the SAT, one of the best strategies of the test is just to not read the excerpt at all. Turns out you can read the questions and find the context or answer within a sentence or two. It’s a huge time saver for the test, but definitely points to the fact we aren’t reading as much.
My friend's son is a Navy Seal who just graduated from Stanford with a master's in civil engineering. He complained of the lack of seriousness among many students - they don't do the work, they don't focus or contribute in class, they do poorly on tests - scate through at the bare minimum. Some get their degree, some don't - especially if there's family wealth to fall back on. This at Stanford now.
I'm a retired HS History teacher-I was told once by an instructor in one of my master's degree classes that I was "disrespectful" for questioning Whole Language. These programs aren't discussed among teachers enough-most of us knew that whole language reading programs would be too confusing for a large number of our students but it had become Orthodoxy and we weren't "allowed" to discuss it. Teachers should be choosing strategies and materials. Not administrators. Not politicians. Teachers...most of us actually know what we're doing! Thanks for this great summary.
One thing you need to understand is that whole language learning was an experiment that was first attempted in the late 19th century. It was later introduced nationwide _because_ it had failed miserably. Those in power want an uneducated, easy to manipulate public. That's the whole point of public schools. See John Taylor Gatto's "An Underground History of American Education". It explains a great deal.
Of course it's not. That's why they're pushing it. Just remember that teachers' union chick who was floating in the ocean sipping a drink, recommending people "shelter their kids at home" during COVID. WLL is that applied to reading.
As someone who learned to read in the late 90s and early 2000s, I feel very lucky that my elementary school was still using the "old method" of phonics.
I mean you and me must be the same age, I remember my first day of primary school and I couldn't read. My dad sat down with me after school and told me to remember the sounds and we started to look at the words togheter. And it was a click, I could read.
I feel grateful I learned English as a second language. I used to complain about it, because my accent will never be as good as native's, but now I appreciate it. I can read very well in my own language and in English. Interestingly, and quite terrifying actually, I've realized I can probably read better in English than many of the native English-speaking kids today.
@@elroma7712I m frankly somewhat puzzled by the assertion in this video that the WAY you learn how to read matters all that much. Once you know how to read to some extent, by whichever way you have acquired the skill, doesn't one then just naturally become better and better at it, over time, while reading children's books for pleasure? I m pretty sure that, in a way, even though i was of course taught how to read in primary school, I am still mostly self taught somehow, since I was reading a few books a day a few weeks or months into the first grade. Also in the different scripts I taught myself how to read as an adult, I feel it's always a mix, half phonic/letter by letter, half contextual anticipation, the latter more so as my vocabulary in the new language increases. I m pretty sure that the real culprit here is smartphones. In my younger years, as a teenager and student, back in the 90s and early noughties, I was probably averaging a book a day, and it was extremely rare that I wouldn't finish reading them in one single sitting. Now, in my mid forties and heavily addicted to my smartphone, I m happy if I manage to read 20 or 30 pages in one single go. How pathetic of me!
@@Wandering.HomebodyI agree with your perspective. However I found the structure of this essay to be enjoyable and engaging. Since I already knew about smart phones, and I didn’t know really about whole language learning. (And I know a middle amount about testing. 😉 Nothing he said surprised me, but I also wouldn’t have made such a bold connection from “reading to extract information” and “critical thinking skills” to “failure to read books.”)
Honestly this video made a lot of sense for me because I always sound out words I don’t know or never seen wrong. And all my friends make fun of me in jest. But honestly maybe this is why. I just wasn’t taught the phonic method and now unfamiliar words make me sound like a 1st grader or worse I suppose
Great video Jared!! I teach High School English and ELD (ESL in some states) at a title 1 California Central Valley high school. The tag word (there is always a tag word for EVERY education trend/reform/new idea/recycling of an old idea) which we push is RIGOR. Due to Pearson contantly reinforcing terrible reading habits (excerpts over whole texts or novels, reading ONLY to fill in the boxes on a graphic organizer, performance tasks or products without reading an example essay, etc) many of our students completely lack reading stamina, as you said. Those that do either came from a different district, were in our IB program, or their parents (and I am assuming their early education as well) encouraged reading and supported it in multiple ways. To adress this, our English department turned ALL of our 9th and 10th grader curriculum into an International Baccelaureate Middle Years Program model. Essentiall we threw out the textbok and now each unit is based around 1 or 2 novels with outside reading slowly being pushed as well for homework. Since we've adopted this model we have found that we can move through a 250 page novel as quickly as we used to move through a 150 page book, with the same level of detail, insight and discussion. Students have also just plain read more than they would have with our old Pearson MyPerspectives textbooks. We figured that students are reading around 500-700 pages more, depending on the grade level. You are correct that so many things throughout a young person's education and upbringing contribute to the reading fatigue and weakness that you discuss. What I have found in my 7 years of teachig is that the public education industry has not only contributed to, but is constantly reinforcing bad reading habits and reading for work over good reading habits and reading to discover.
It is so refreshing to watch well-produced, informative, and concise video without overstimulating edits, calls to action, sponsor reads, or other engagement-boosting trickery. Just genuine coverage and novel insights Loved this video, immediately subbed, and I hope I see more content like this in the future 💫
sponsor reads are just things to put food on the table for the youtuber, not usually used to grab or trick us, tho i will say i do prefer when people put them at the end of their videos after finishing everything else so you can choose to stay or leave after the end if the product is/isnt for you
I began teaching in 1994 during the whole language years. Even as a new teacher, I knew could this did not work. My 2nd year I began teaching phonics and saw a vast improvement in my kinders reading skills. You are also correct that students are no longer reading books but are reading passages due to increased standardized testing. That has decreased their reading stamina greatly. Lastly, the increase in tablets and phone usage has shortened attention spans and makes reading appear dull to students. Excellent video!!
I guess I don't recall having to hone my reading comprehension skills when I was 4. We all learn to read through phonics. WWL is perfectly fine for teaching students how to then pluck understanding from what we read. As for stamina, God forbid students read something they are not assigned at school. I'm not sure he really backed up any of what he was trying to put out there, to be honest. It seemed more like making excuses after the fact that people simply don't prioritize reading, or providing an emphasis on education in the home. That's not whole language learning's fault. Take care.
It's hard to imagine learning to read. My mother taught me by 18 months old, and I read The Hobbit at age 7. Learning, like any language skill, has a social element. Children who don't see adults reading to them and around them won't read. They certainly won't find it interesting if it's nothing more than a test skill. I wish schools would deemphasize testing and expensive technology. Someone with a developed reading ability only needs time, a library card and curiosity. However, I have books everywhere and tried to encourage my son to read yet he isn't interested. Perhaps because reading takes mental energy that electronic media does not? Maybe it comes down to attention spans. The brain adapts and the world around us has become frenetic and digitized into bite-sized, effortless pieces. It is difficult for me to read after spending too much time online. It's like my imagination takes too long to activate and I find myself staring at the page instead of lost in the dream crafted by the author. I'm thinking modern media made our brains lazy.
@@andromedaspark2241 You’re missing something important: Reading was easy, which directly feeds into how much you enjoy it. And that in turn means you get a lot of practice, so you end up getting even better at it. There is a a ton more to it than “what you see your parents doing”, although obviously there is value in leading by example, and a lack of opportunity will eliminate the possibility completely. I was the same way, incidentally, I loved reading, was usually reading a novel in class because I’d finished whatever else there was to read. Think of something you don’t enjoy doing, in a school setting this might be physical education, math, one of the sciences, programming, sewing, but it could be outside of school too. Go force yourself to do it a bunch, you may get better at it, but if you continue to struggle do you think you’ll start to like it? My bet is not. Some people just find certain tasks easier, and more enjoyable. You can’t force it, and trying to force things you find easy on someone that finds them to be a unpleasant challenge will only make them double-down on hating it (and possibly, by association, you).
I remember when I was in college, telling an education major that I had learned reading through phonics. She made this face and noise of disgust. I think about that occasionally and hope she learned the error of her ways.
Not to mention boring authors. I bought some vintage books for the covers. When I tried to read them a bit, I found many were grueling, and one was absolutely gripping. I will be looking up that author's other works.
I was placed in special education in 2nd grade and learned to read at that level in 4th grade. All the way through education as kid I felt so stupid because reading was so hard for me. It was when I met my wife, who shared audiobooks with me and gave me a hard copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to read. Slowly but surely, I've gone from reading no books 4 years ago to reading 1 to 2 a month and listening to at least 3 to 4, not to include what I have to read for college on top of full-time 40 hours a week. The bottom line is that if you apply yourself and find books that grab your attention or genres that make you want more, reading will become secondhand.
I have several friends who are voracious readers who were told in school that they were poor readers/needed to lower their expectations. Once they cracked the code and could read a bit better, they never stopped.
@@_jared One of the things I have seen, especially with boys, is to find them books about what interests them. This worked for both my very dyslexic cousin and for the brother of a friend of mine.
That was me in school too. I was functionally illiterate until i was almost 14, teachers had given up on me. Idk what got me into it, I was just hanging in the library, and I was always embarrassed and mad that I couldnt read like everyone else. So I just picked a book with a cool cover and started reading the words, even though I couldn't understand. And I did this for months and months. Used a dictionary sometimes. I read the thesaurus because all the different words for the same things were tripping me up. And one day I realized I understood most of the writing. Idk, I feel like a lot of the really passionate readers i meet are the people who had to fight for the skill in the first place. It took more self-motivation just to get to a basic level, it's only natural to want to keep pushing forward and learning more of it in that case.
@@Tessa_RuThis is really inspiring to me!! I did well in reading growing up, and I am currently working SO HARD to attain a basic level of literacy and listening comprehension in my third language.
I was in a similar position. I was in special ed for reading in 2nd grade, but by the next year I had apparently caught up enough to not require the help. I had some undiagnosed learning problems that contributed, but these days, I can read books without much trouble. I do have to be very careful when reading if I need to be certain that I'm reading the right words, but I can do it.
I (22M) have always been a passionate reader, I grew up reading the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and others besides. It is both my and my parents' firm belief that I managed to teach myself how to read as a kid because I spent so long playing with magnetized letters on the fridge while my mom was cooking, and then had a little help from my parents constantly asking me what things like street signs said. Then I got to school, and my passion dimmed (thankfully it never fully died, but I don't read nearly as much as I used to), due to the way the English teachers handled reading. Two types of situation stick out to me as common occurrences: 1. the teacher would either say in surprise or complain to my parents how I voraciously read through the entire mini-library they had in the classroom, or 2. I would get in trouble during class reading sessions (we would each take turns reading a paragraph or so in a book or text and go around the room like that) for *reading ahead of the class and needing to be pulled back to where everyone else was*. At a time in my and my peers lives where the other kids were slowly working their way through a paragraph and stumbling the whole time, I was pages ahead and immersed in what we were reading, whether it was fantasy, history, or something else, and I got in trouble for it. I could share other stories, like how an English teacher during my junior high years played favorites in the classroom and it took multiple interventions from my mother to save my grade, but I think (I hope) anyone reading this has already grasped the severity of the situation.
I've asked hundreds of teens why they stop reading. Lots of reasons but the most common is they can't find anything good to read. Staffed libraries in schools are disappearing. This is how we keep readers, having someone to match them to books and encourage the sharing of what they've read with their friends.
My brother has that complaint. That he would read, but can’t find books that interest him. And unfortunately I can’t be much help, since the genres I like are very different from the ones he likes (though I do think he’d like my favorite series, as it has a lot in common with books he’s liked in the past, but it’s too high of a reading level for him to be able to just jump in and start reading it after barely reading _any_ books in the past several years)
It's a complex issue and multi-faceted, but I'd agree this is part of it. I used to so enjoy dropping into my school library after hours, and the History teacher, who was the Librarian, welcoming me, taking me to see various new books that had arrived, making suggestions for books she was sure I would like. She was a great influence in my life, which is with me to this day.
The"y can't find anything good to read" is bullsh*t. It's an excuse to not sound lazy and ignorant. They have instant access to almost EVERYTHING ever written...on their tablets. So, ask yourself, "If you have access to almost every book, short story, poem, and article ever written...AND have search engines to sort through them...why can't you find anything to read?"
Sounds like an excuse for lazyness. Sorry. There are SO MANY books available today. A swipe of your finger gives you access to probably 80% of books ever written.
Big thank you from a former Columbia-trained classicist, turned Middle School English teacher. You put this in such a lucid, easy to follow manner that I can show it to my students next time they ask why I make them do Sustained Silent Reading at the beginning of each class.
This is great! I remember doing this while in middle school. We were given quite a bit of time to just sit and read. I think this is one of the reasons I’ve sustained reading for leisure later in life.
super-reader here that’s gone through long bouts of not reading and i can confirm, my mental health is SO much better when i’m reading. although being in my early 30s, it’s getting harder and harder to sit in one spot for long periods of time and the eyes can get a little strained similar to phone usage /:
SAME!! When I read, I notice i can cool off faster when triggered my frustrating things. I fall asleep faster, I wake up more energized. I used to spend a lot of time on tiktok watching short content videos. I would literally feel myself bubble over with frustration/nerves multiple times through the day. If someone pissed me off (something usually small) It would take hours to calm down. I was just so angry like a firecracker all the time.
I was an honor student in high school and the school needs to be blamed partly for this. The timelines which English teachers expected us to finish dense novels was insane. Asking a student to read a whole novel in two weeks while balancing 5 other AP classes and extracurriculars is absurd. Of course students are just going to read a summary online. It's called time management. These unrealistic expectations killed my ability to enjoy reading until years after I got out of college. Not to mention, I was always more of a math and science person. I'm a quick study, but a slow reader. If I read a novel fast, I won't retain any of the details.
In high school I would feel guilty reading an unassigned book but didn't want to read the assigned one so I’d read neither. Might be better to have students analyze the book of their choice rather than a classic.
@@barbara5807I had an English teacher who did this and at times I will do this in my 1 on 1 class. The problem is scaling. You don't have to "know" your book when you're the only one reading it. And to you, high school honors student: that sounds like a skill issue. No one forced you to take 5APs
Or maybe the kid is just dyslexic... My parents pay around $84 000+ at the Forman school. Not being able to read is very expensive, it could be neglect or systemic difficultly
@@Katzeblow That's a great school, and you're very lucky that you're getting the help you need! A bit of advice though: you probably shouldn't tell random people on the internet where you go to high school.
I'm not a parent yet and I'm absolutely dumbfounded how the universities and the education system just push ideas without any testing at all, just because they sound good or make their hearths feel warmth. We are supposed to be a secular scientific civilization, yet we act like the darkest of the middle age cults. Man, I blame liberalism.
@@Katzeblow Dyslexia isn't a real thing. It's simply not knowing how to read very well at the expected level and resulting shame/avoidance. What is diagnosed depends on a lot of factors but is mainly social and cultural in nature. That's why dyslexia practically doesn't exist outside of the Englishspeaking world where it was briefly popularised (now waning as other 'disorders' have more currency for parents and institutions who need their kids pathologised when they fail to meet expectations or have not been educated properly). It's convenient for someone to say they're ill, it's not their fault, particularly as an adult, rather than admit the deficiency is in laziness or poor education or character/habits. Which are things that they could get help for if they met it with the necessary humility and willingness to improve.
My mother was furious when my elementary school stopped using phonics and started essentially teaching us to read by memorizing words. All the work my parents put in at home was being undone in class. So she doubled down at home and made us read everything, and she used phonics. I am a prolific reader as a result. I am grateful. That being said when it comes to a love of reading sometimes a person just has to find that one special book that sparks their love of reading. For me it was when my grandmother bought me Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I devoured it at 11 years old. Our local grocery store (Superstore for all you fellow Canadians) would dedicate an entire row to the new books when they were released, money was tight but my parents would always buy me the newest Harry Potter book. After Harry Potter it was our junior high librarian that introduced my to Heir Apparent and the Golden Compass series and from there I have continued on to a plethora of other favourites. It’s amazing how a seemingly tiny moment can really change things.
Similarly, my dad got us all reading before we got to school, as he had done teacher training before phonics was being phased out. For that reason I'm a natural reader, and if I'm struggling I tend to think it reflects some deficiency on the clarity of the writing (unless the subject is new to me obviously). Books were the treat we got bought for us as children, we'd hoover them up. Clearly we do learn meaning through context when reading, but the foundation of my reading is still phonetic.
I agree, it has a lot to do with finding the right book. I was a prolific reader in primary and high school, then became addicted to TV. I've been trying to go back to reading for months now but keep failing because except for one novel and a book series, I just did not find anything that I loved. Maybe because I'm a literature major, maybe because I write myself, I always get stuck on plot flaws or writing style and drop them really quick. It's a bit frustrating and makes me fall back onto TV. It's a lot easier to find a show you like on Netflix, Prime or Viki.
I am an old ( :) so learned reading with phonics at school (and at home). The idea of having to learn _solely_ by context, essentially memorising the "shape of words" etc. is crazy to me (unlike e.g. Chinese, Japanese etc. English as a written language is alphabet based, it's _explicitly_ - if not always rationally :) - _composed_ of smaller pieces so learning how that works seems a totally natural way to teach the _skill_ of reading). And I totally agree about some book or series setting the spark alight (for me, early on, it was probably Roald Dahl - great kids books IMO, even though he was apparently not such a great guy) which is why it's always a puzzle to read in comments sections when someone's teacher was really irritated because the kid only read e.g. Stephen King in high school - the kid is reading, leave them be. Once the fire's lit they'll find other authors, their tastes will broaden etc.
For me it was the (original) Hardy Boys series. I used to get in trouble for staying up super late and reading under the covers with a flashlight. A few years after I’d read all 58 of them (they’re shorter books and a preteen can read one book in maybe 3-4 days if you really spend the time) I made up my mind to read through the entire series in one summer off school. That would mean I’d have to finish a new book every 2 days. It ended up taking until the middle of September to get through them all but I think just that event of reading such an insane amount and doing nothing but reading all day for so many days was super influential in making me not just love reading but also become an incredibly fast reader, which helped me to no end in grad school when I’d have like 6 or 7 days to read an entire Dickens novel plus 3-4 critical essays on the book. But that eventually burned me out and ruined my love of reading, for a while. I didn’t read a single book again for over 4 years after graduation but then I read a Stephen King novel I’d bought like a decade ago but had never touched (11/22/63). Well that was so good that it got me back into reading in a big way, but the difference is now I really take my time and enjoy the reading itself slowly, instead of trying to “have read” a bunch of books
I could barely speak English at 18 and only took up reading at 21 - pretty much convinced that I had wrecked my brain for good and desperate for a way to reverse the damage, after spending my entire childhood and adolescence hooked on screens. I never was the brightest light in the chandelier, nor the most reliable - I suffer from ADHD and would probably scrub the dirt off the sidewalks before sitting down to read a textbook. It only took one book: The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb - and braindead me was never to be seen again... Now, I’m plowing through ~150 books a year, from all disciplines, old and new, most of which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed and all of which have either inspired, edified, and/or instructed me. Reading has become its own reward and the single most fulfilling activity I like to dedicate myself towards. The brain is a weird machine…
Sounds epic! I would just say that eventually you might want to slow down and instead of fitting 150 books in a year, perhaps try and focus on a much smaller number, and reread in a rotation if you're already done with them. Take time to really ingest the material, and perhaps even write little essays to yourself about them.
Love it! If you don't already, start keeping track of them with a simple reading log -- trust me, after several thousand, you'll be glad you did! And grillin chillin has a good point too, it's good to mix things up with some challenging, slower, and more considered reading as well. It's like weight training, changing your approach from time to time (or book to book) improves your overall growth.
@@grillinnchillin4009 Re-reading is a strategy I ignored for the longest time. But it really does help you digest more of the material; I'll often find some highly interesting detail that I don't recall at all from the first reading. I also find that particularly with fiction and poetry, the resonance with my own life can be very different when I'm reading them years apart. Maybe the first time I read something it didn't seem all that remarkable, but the second time, I was experiencing something in life that had similiarity with the story/poem, and that made the connection so much deeper. You'll also relate to characters differently depending your own age.
I never read at all growing up. I didn’t have the attention span. But when i went to college, I had trouble making friends and decided that instead of doom scrolling all night, i wanted to try and read. Now, when I read regularly, I notice i can cool off faster when triggered my frustrating things. I fall asleep faster, I wake up more energized. I used to spend a lot of time on tiktok watching short content videos. I would literally feel myself bubble over with frustration/nerves multiple times through the day. If someone pissed me off (something usually small) It would take hours to calm down. I was just so angry like a firecracker all the time. I still have reactions to things that piss me off, but within minutes, i calm down and move on!
For me it's social media. It Fd up my attention span and patience. But I found a Hungarian author by the name of István Örkény. He wrote so called one-minute short stories. They are quite good for getting back into reading since they don't require much mental stamina or discipline to read. Even the author admits he wrote them specifically this way so readers can "save time".
Same. I have stopped using Facebook a while a go but other social media just filled that void. Moreover, it is sad that books have to be adapted for our short attention span and busy lives. I will always remember Moby Dick. While I don't really like the story but I love how it is written, the language and how it flows. And sadly, those kind of books are not short and they are written in a more advanced language.
@@100MilesEast I mean the reason why these short stories are good because they were not adapted. The guy wrote them as literary experiments. I think the collection was released in the 60s. I'd recommend them if you like the dark satire of WWII and early cold war era
I believe his goal was to eliminate the excuse of not having enough time, but I don't know, I like spending a lot of time on good things, so a minute long story sort of automatically can't be the best thing ever.
This is really interesting to me. I'm a 20-year-old junior in college. I was homeschooled from K-12th grade. The curriculum my parents used to teach me had an extensive focus on phonics, and even beyond that, I was required to read entire books throughout high school and middle school. I had no idea that in public schools, phonics are a thing of the past. I've been so taken aback during my time in college by how illiterate most students are. Now it makes a lot more sense.
They're illiterate not because of the methodology of how they were taught to read but because they simply didn't read books. My sister taught me to read in the backseat of our car on the thirty minute drive to our grandmother's house. I was a teacher for ten years. Since college I've known that university schools of education had a lot of pure BS. What happened a few decades ago is that people who were really interested in learning gravitated to psychology and behaviorism. If you look up 'Educational research' you'll find all these pointless arguments about phonics and whole language learning. But google, "The science of Expertise," and you'll find the people who are actually making progress. K. Anders Ericsson studied the 10,000 hours theory. You can find his most important 5 (maybe more now) articles online. You can read them in a couple of hours and lean a lot about how to learn. (The statistical analysis of his procedure.... skip that. ) I did this one Saturday morning and was just popping with ideas on lessons for my students and for myself. Then I read one of the education periodicals I was sent as a teacher. Suddenly I felt kind of stupid... How was it that I'd read PhD work, no problem and yet this .....? So I went back through it. Most of these 'education journal' articles hinge on some jargon. String two or three words together. "Phonetical Introspective Activation." Now just start writing about it as if your reader already knows what it means.... Voila! The entire article will be absolutely meaningless and ready to publish. And every truly educated person is an autodidact. Whatever is assigned is never enough.
I homeschool my kids and I have read to them picture books and chapter books daily. They read complete books for history and literature. I cannot imagine not using books in educating a young person.
Same on being homeschooled K-12, (even though I graduated college in 2014) and I remember using phonics and kinetic methods like spelling things out in the air. We've always been huge readers and it was always baffling when I met other kids who had to read everything out loud even as teens
Another with the same story. I learned using a phonics-based curriculum being homeschooled. I'm 43 now, and have been a life-long reader, I could easily read 2 or 3 novels in a week, or 1-2 6-800 page long collections in a week. I often read a book a week just for enjoyment.
As a guy who grew up in the mid 90's into the really early 00's, I was a kid who HATED reading. I had/have a comprehension problem that was ignored by the school for too long when I was really little and that effected me significantly all through elementary school and high school. It hasn't been until the last few years that I've taken to reading and enjoying it. Yes, I'm a VERY slow reader and some times I have trouble really grasping themes and deeper meaning, but, I'm progressing and now have two bookshelves full of books (which little me would have never believed haha)! A lot of this has been because of channels like yours Jared. You and other's like you have inspired me to challenge myself with reading more and more. While also introducing me to texts that I never would have looked at before. Yes, people reading books are in a sharp decline, but there are still a few people who are now picking up books for the first time to read simply for enjoyment! Keep up the great work Jared! Take care
I am the same age, and I went through very similar struggles. I flew under the radar because I could decode words, but I had serious comprehension difficulties. When I was a college student, I was scared to participate in conversations about texts in classes, because I didn't ever seem to grasp what my classmates could grasp. I always felt rushed and confused. It wasn't until I studied education myself that I started to be able to fill in my educational gaps. I also find Jared's channel really motivating!
It’s mostly our shift to short-form video media, like this. It’s re-training our brains to process information differently. When I was in 4th grade I could already read at a college level. Now, I struggle to make it through a full work report. Our brains are flexible. We can gain skills, and lose them if not practiced.
I hated reading books, and my middle school Language Arts teacher knew that I was super competitive with anything. He had the amazing idea of making a competition of reading 50 books in a year, with different themes and genres (to avoid reading only fictional books). That teacher changed me forever, he knew us so well that our competitive nature would force us to fall in love with reading. More than half of our class pull of reading 20 books and 10 (including me) managed to read 50. The beauty of leveraging a specific trait from a child is that once they get that feeling of pleasure by reading books, you must make sure they understand that they have to enjoy the book and if they don’t, they SHOULD NOT keep reading it to the end. Fun fact: this class was in the US, I didn’t speak very good English, and he made me fall in love with reading both in English and in my native language, plus I learned English exponentially faster with those 50 books. 2 for 1 combo for one of my favorite teachers in my academic life.
@@noob78 he didn’t, we had a report paper where you mentioned the books you have read but you could obviously lie. I guess the easiest way to prove if we were telling the truth was by looking at us be quiet reading books during his class. I doubt there is a child that could fake reading books for a year and be still for 2 hours. Hahahahah
This, for me anyway, is pretty much the only legitimate use for "reading challenges" - to get a reluctant kid over that initial hump. (whereas for adults I mostly don't really get it personally. If you're reading for work/study then it has its own built-in "challenge" pressure anyway and if you're reading for recreation then read _what_ you want to read, _when_ you want to read it - if you have to "game-ify" reading to make yourself do it then i'd say it's not the hobby/pastime for you and that's perfectly fine, there are plenty of other worthwhile ways to spend your leisure time)
@@anonymes2884 I totally agree with you, people think that reading is some kind of worldwide competition of who reads more books every week/year. I believe reading has to be like having great conversations with a friend when going out. Sometimes you have 20 of those in one year, and sometimes you have only 5. The number of books is not correlated with the knowledge intake and pleasure of the reader. After getting over that hump you said (as a child or an adult), you should already know the beauty of reading and stop making it a competition, and rather a hobby. It’s like a sport, playing any sport is fun and healthy. Competitions usually make it less fun because of stress and pressure to win a worthless medal (except for professional players). Some people enjoy competitions and that’s fine, but the sport should be enjoyable fundamentally without any competition.
I would probably feel rather defeated by something like that. I actively read every single day, usually for at least an hour, but I'm very slow, and most books take me more than a month to get through. I'd've finished the year having finished maybe 10 books in total and probably would have been written off as one of the lazy ones who didn't care about reading.
Ma’am/Sir, how’s the teaching experience as a whole? I am considering to take an English degree and I’ve been thinking about it for the past weeks. I do hope that this decision will be rewarding in the near future.
PHONICS IS NOT BORING. Wordplay is fun. Repetition leads to quick mastery, which makes kids feel smart and successful, which is fun. Guessing is not reading. Decoding words is reading. Yours Sincerely, A Fifteen Year Veteran Teacher
Yes, and learning latin word roots and components so you can actually figure out at least partially what a word means because you know what a word ending in -itis indicates, or how adding anti- as a prefix affects the word.
@ohkaypretty But we know this "whole language" method was about test preparation. I wholeheartedly agree phonics is better, but that takes more time and NCLB needed a shortcut to get kids to pass those tests! It was all about the money at the expense of our kids' actually learning to read!
@@zakiya1635 The whole language philosophy is not primarily about test prep - it's about the idea that a child being able to derive meaning from a text is more important than decoding each individual word. This is why they teach readers to use "cues" from the book to guess at unfamiliar words - "cues" like looking at the picture, looking at the first letter, or thinking about what type of word would make sense in the sentence. Just guess at the unfamiliar words, and the child will land on the correct meaning of the text, is what they propose. Whole language proponents argue that students become bored of decoding unfamiliar words sound-by-sound and lose sight of the meaning of the text. Of course, it's obvious that students also lose the meaning of the text when they _can't decode the words_
repetition leads to long term memory retention, an annual red cross trainer always said. over 60 now but I still remember thick folders of phonics worksheets from very early grades. reading opened new worlds of possibilities for me; it's strange and sad to hear some phased them out...
As someone who is severely dyslexic, I also wish there was an increase in audio books available for college classes. I definitely can’t read a whole book I a week, but I can listen to one and take notes!
This is a wonderful 'discussion'. I'm in my very late 50's. In the 6th grade I used to check out 10 books on a Friday and read all of them over the course of the weekend and return them on Monday. Perfect for a rainy day weekend. I had no idea this had been going on. Thank you for educating me.
Yes, and it was a discussion authored by Rose Horowitch in her article in The Atlantic. This guy just paraphrases her article and doesn't even mention her or the effort she went through to write this piece. This guy is a thief.
47 here, and same! I used to love the book reading contests the library held. Oh and the Scholastic book fair at school was always something to look forward to! I've certainly never found reading boring. But even so, I could see social media starting to impact my focus and long-term concentration. I've since cut most of it out, but I feel for those kids. They never even got a chance to appreciate reading. They've got to start from scratch almost and retrain their brain at an older age. That's got to be difficult.
@@savetheunstable Oh that made me remember the bookmobile!! During the summers they would come out to our neighborhood and I would check out books. Thank you for stirring that memory!
0:21 Just an aside... Reading a long and dense book in a week every week while juggling organic chemistry, biochemistry, and some other time-intensive science courses as a premed does sound undoable for reasons aside from reading skill, especially for a freshman who's still adjusting to college life, and I bet they aren't just "talking" about those books as much as requiring a degree of understanding to do essays on them. I spent almost a week on hansel and gretel because of all the nuances to write an essay on it (last time I take a class called fairy tales thinking it'd be easy and come out an expert on child psychology, they trick'd me good.), and that is a short story, not a book. For a class like that, I'd be more worried about devoting 2 hours a day just to finish the average length book in a week (not counting the extra time to revisit parts and mark for discussion/essay citations), and fall behind on studying for the rest of my classes, especially with everything being graded on a curve. So yes, read well or not, I'd complain to the professor too.
I agree. He says that college students have a lot of free time, which I disagree with. Many college students have a full course load and likely have jobs or other commitments. Learning to maximize your time is key, and sometimes reading an entire book(especially if it’s not for a class for your major) can seem like a waste of time.
Why do you consider 2 hours a day spent reading to be a worrisomely-large amount of time? If you assume 4 hours in-class weekly for each of 5 classes, that's 4 daily hours of classes. If each class also requires 2 daily hours of study/homework, that leaves 10 hours for sleeping and meals on weekdays, with weekends left completely free.
@@KerrickLong Even by your calculation, if you want to get 8 hours of sleep, that only leaves 2 hours for reading and meals. And maybe meals take 45 mins of your day (15 mins for each meal) if you're just having microwavable meals. Then you'll need 30 mins for miscellaneous stuff (getting ready in the morning/getting ready for bed, etc.). That then leaves 45 mins for reading and that's a very generous estimate considering things can come up or a student might be burnt out from 14 hours of mentally challenging work.
Content like this forces me to keep some amount of faith in the overall good purpose of present day internet, I'm glad there's people responsible enough to criticise a mindless practice through which i came across their critique in the first place. Thanks for helping me remember about the real world, even if only briefly
You can't trust any online person's motives these days. Anything recommended by a Google algorithm is de facto endorsed by them. Google is VERY close to the Xhinese Xommunist Party, as is all Western Media which has very malevolent intentions to the West.
Thank you! I shared this video with my son’s Language Arts teacher & expressed my concerns about kids not reading books anymore, and she forwarded to her higher ups! I really hope maybe this can be used to affect change, at least in my school district!
Reading stamina. That is exactly what I'm seeing in myself and others. I've been saying why can't I stay in a book longer like I used to? Apparently it's this device I'm typing on. Thank you for giving it a name and one of the causes. This will help me do better.
I was one of the kids that would read the required books in English class, I still read consistently today. The issue I have is when reading something heavy, I can’t read quickly and retain anything. I feel that my memory has gotten worse and the only social media I use daily is UA-cam. Can’t imagine if I had all the others too, as the shorts are damaging enough I believe. Thanks for sharing, I appreciate your perspective and topic.
I truly believe Tiktok is poisonous to your brain. It makes me feel the way I felt when my dissociative disorder was at its work. Same goes for FB and YT shorts
@Chasing-the-outdoors reading quickly and retaining information is not easy. It requires a lot of practice, particularly I believe in terms of short term memory. I find it helps if you simplify points in your head, that way you don't have to remember too much jargon.
I was the same but soon developed the strategy of taking notes as a memory aid . Writing them down was the trick for me. No teacher ever worked on learning strategies . it was sink or swim in high school in the 60s. Now that I think of it, it was sink or swim all through elementary school as an esl student starting kindergarten in 1953. I swam all the way through grad school. All my kids were great fans of phonics as sounding out new word spellings confirmed the vocabulary bank they had already acquired by constantly being read to as infants onwards.
I would argue that most authors are bad at conveying ideas clearly. Possibly my favorite book is Frankenstein but Shelly was quite prone to rambling and nesting too many concepts in a sentence, where deciphering what noun/event "that" is referring to or which character "he" is referring to requires a laborious chain of logic backtracking sometimes. Your memory is probably fine. You'll retain information that you think is interesting, useful, logical. If you can't follow the chain of ideas then author may be to blame, they are just humans too.
Yep. As a parent, I've been pretty alarmed at the lack of requirement to read entire books...and that seemed to accompany the high-stakes testing. I was able to fight that with my kids -- one is a voracious reader and the other really enjoys reading and does it for pleasure even though he's dyslexic, but at least part of that was heavy modeling from me and my husband. And when you talk about context...the meaning of a passage can seem entirely different when it's divorced from the rest of the book.
As a parent myself, I find this comment very relatable. My older boy reads long, worthwhile books (literature, history…) cover to cover. My younger son finds extended reading harder, but loves immersing himself in favourite chapters for short periods, and is always quoting and discussing passages and elements of books that he loves. He loves books and can read well even though he isn’t a natural reader. So the foundation is there, and we’ll just keep fostering!
We've taken those tests for generations, and if placing an emphasis on reading comprehension after we all already know how to read by sounding out the words is a problem, I'm not sure he proved it. It was a fine way to learn to read. And, really, how many of us are ever required to read a book in a single week unless we're taking a college lit class - which makes us a self-selecting group - and it's a relatively short book? I'm not sure he really backed up any of what he was trying to put out there, to be honest. It seemed more like making excuses after the fact that people simply don't prioritize reading, or providing an emphasis on education in the home. That's not whole language learning's fault.
@cobbler88 I'm less inclined to put blame on whole-language learning. I've seen very little emphasis on it being the only method used, and my mother was both taking lots of coursework on teaching reading (and talking about it -- I helped her study for tests) when I was a teen in the 80s and teaching reading thereafter as someone who specialized in the primary grades, eventually settling into Kindergarten. The general mantra I saw and heard was that you need both because sounding out words doesn't mean you understand what you're reading and because there are different words that are spelled the same. I'm wary of the claim that the use of solely whole language methods was a widespread thing. It certainly didn't seem to be when I was in primary grades during the 70s, when my mom was studying in the 80s, or when my kids were in the primary grades during the 2000s. The high-stakes testing was not a normal thing in most of the US until NCLB (signed in 2002), and it saw rather dranatic changes in terms of book reading requirements as the testing became a big deal. Just to give a feel, I saw a stark decrease in expectations for book reports and full book-related projects between my third grade and my childrens' third grades, and that sort of thing was consistent throughout the rest of their schooling. When I was going through elementary school, it was the norm for teachers to read entire books out loud to the class a chapter at a time...all the way through elementary school, and the books were slightly above what was considered grade-level reading. In high school for me there were excerpts (for example, a few chapters of Paradise Lost rather than the whole thing) and short stories, but we also read a LOT of full books, had class discussions on them, etc. Usually we had 2-3 weeks, particularly for a longer book, but reading entire books and being asked to write about them was a regular thing and the normal state of things in English class. By the time my kids went to high school, there were surrounding districts where kids (even in honors) graduated high school without ever having to read an entire book cover to cover for class. The shift from being given several weeks to get through a book to having one week to get through a book was small. The shift from never having to read a whole book for class to getting through a book a week is a large one.
@@amw6846 See, we rarely had to read books, period, for a standard English class. We only really had to do it in lit-type classes. If the schools were burning kids' education hours having them read books in standard English classes, I could honestly argue that - counter to the general theme of all of this - having kids reading so many books was detrimental to their education.
I think the largest factor for me is that books quickly became less accessible than other forms of media. Why go to a library to pick up leisure reading (in a car centric mess that requires driving/an adult as a child) when you can find virtually any video media online for free without navigating the hellscape of American urbanism. The second part is the monopoly of Amazon on kindle and Audible.
It wasn't that. No Child Left behind basically removed the LITERAL TIME and Curriculum that existed in the 90s and prior where teachers set their own classroom activities. This meant a natural and wide range of customized education. No Child Left behind introduced very specific state tests that REQUIRE students to pass the test to move on. Grades are not as important. Actual knowledge is irrelevant. It was a cookie cutter program with the same tests dispersed to all schools, and when collected they were graded by a government machine in the Pacific Northwest (yes, no humans) like a automated digital voting machine. So even in 2002, in my senior year of high school (second year of no child left behind) we spent the entire year on computers taking practice tests and memorizing questions and answers to past the tests. THAT was my education those two years. A HUGE culture shock versus the rest of the years I was in High School in the 90s and my time in elementary school in the 80s and early 90s. Ask any Elder Millennial, and they will tell you that as the first wave of kids that graduated in that experiment - we were complaining even back then, that it was gonna doom education. And we uniquely knew better than any generation prior or since, because we spent almost our entire school era in the old system - and then got a taste in our last two years of what No Child Left Behind had for the next generation. I remember the year Bush rolled it out, my school fired half the teachers and filled their slots with substitutes because all they needed was someone to go over work books with us, and baby sit as we spent everyday behind monitors taking practice tests. Basically our education became starting the year off with a mound of practice exam books representing the end of semester state tests. And from the start the goal was to prepare us to pass the tests. That's it. We didn't have time to learn WHY the answers to the questions were as they were. There was only enough time to hammer in that when we see Question A, you are to answer with B. And most the exams where multiple-choice. So it boiled down to a substitute reading a magazine while we took practice tests and if we needed a answer, the sub would dig out the book with all the state tests answers and tell us which letter was the answer (so we could remembered it). Thank God the two years I put up with that system, were arguably the least important two in my education. At the school I attended, the environment became so apathetic that students would just leave half way thru the day and go home since if they already memorized all the questions and answers that day, there was nothing more to do at school. I'm sure things changed in later years as they came to grips with No Child Left Behind (when they rolled it out on my group, it was over night and a head blow) - and probably figured out of to teach within the new system. But I have a younger brother who ended up going to med school, and even he still claims that he learned nothing from public HS school at that time he spent in 2005-2009. Luckily for kids today and unluckily for my younger brother - No Child Left behind was such a catastrophic failure that it was essentially disbanded and no longer a federal requirement by the early 2010s (the law barely made it a decade). Though some states and school districts stubbornly clunge to it (by their choice) much longer. The REAL victims however are those whom your own comment ignorantly is not acknowledging. The fact is that a large chunk of kids DID not pass SOLs (or whatever the test was called in your state), either because they failed to be present all year (often kids with learning disabilities or disadvantaged home lives so they worked). Because of this, if you go back and look at the data: during that time period Drop Out rates and kids choosing to pursue GEDS skyrocketed. I knew plenty of kids who made it to 11th and 12th grade, had passable marks and still failed any ONE of the state tests. Failing JUST ONE was a automatic fail of the grade and a repeat the next year. Most those kids, knowing they were about to turn 18, and not wanting to be 20 in High School choose to leave school after that. My close friend failed TWO years in a row, and had B grades - but was dyslexic and legally blind, and couldn't make heads or tails of the English test. He failed the same test two years in a row. So I'm not sure what your talking about when you say kids knew they were going to pass.
@@mr.selfimprovement3241 They do know. They literally stopped failing them and making them repeat grades. My son ia autistic to the degree you can immediately tell just looking at him and hes not a TV autistic like savant. He wont do his work but hes never been failed.
@@mr.selfimprovement3241Interestingly enough the students that have been raised in the no child left behind era will most likely not even be able to read your long comment.😅 Something tells me that this whole diminishing knowledge curriculum was done on purpose to dumb the people down to control them better.
I'm so grateful that you're bringing attention to this topic. It needs to be part of the public dialogue. We need to be thinking about how this affects our society at large as well as how it affects individuals in their personal lives.
Harry Potter was a huge boost to reading in the nineties because the fandom was so big people wanted to read the books who had a hard time reading. My kids would read them and they were not YA sized even. They were unique in that they grew with the readers as far as the reading level of the books. So what we need is a new set of books that gives back that fire spark of reading. Remember your brain does not have a budget your imagination is not limited to whatever schedule the CGI company has. People should quit writing to choose actors for their character's parts or write for eventual movie deals. Write a book so that it cannot be made into a movie.
You can study symbolism and conduct close reading of short texts. You do not necessarily need to read an entire book to practice these concepts. English classes perform this constantly with poetry for example. Also, students at Columbia University complaining they can’t read a whole book might be the case if each professor is asking them to read a book a week. 1 book a week for each class would be 5-7 books a week, which is in fact worthy of complaint. Some of the points you’re bringing up are being said in such a specific context. I do agree that attention spans are lower now because of technology. However, post-COVID has shown an increase in reading among young people. This can be seen in barns and nobles around the country becoming established.
Great video. I'm one of the few who learned to love reading in university. All thanks to a great literature professor and his ability to push me as a student. My stamina has gotten less(mainly due to my phone) but I'm so happy that my 8 year old's first love is reading.
It's very interesting that my Caribbean high school education prepared me more than the US education system. We read tons of books during my school life for various classes, fun books &, and boring books! We were also taught reading through phonics. And our phones weren't allowed in the classroom. We were focused on test taking but that was only during our last year or 2 of high school. Otherwise we were learning to learn! When I moved to the US, I always found it weird how students from my home country always EXCELLED! Like it'd be students who were at low ranked middle or high schools completely eating up the American high school system and getting full ride scholarships to prestigious universities. I guess this explains some of it.
Hello, fellow west Indian here. I emigrated to the US from Jamaica in the 90s. The school system was so bad I had to transfer to private school. Catholic school Curriculum was still behind Jamaica as well. Whenever a relative visited the island they ALWAYS came back with the school readers! Every grade- every subject- you name it and cousins would share the books. This is the only way to neutralize the wacky teaching in the US schools. I have to counter some of the innercity schools are so bad that you have to be careful being an honor student there. That's why my family tries to keep up with the Jamaica curriculum for each grade. It's gut-wrenching when a student spends 3 years in remedial classes because their high school practiced grade inflation or had a lax curriculum. 🇯🇲 🇯🇲
Pandemic happened, I started watching video essays and some interesting subjects that provides insight. I wasn’t exposed with books until this month(like actually reading it), I decided that I want and need to spend time reading for pleasure and also being aware(without too much pressure). Though I started writing journal before, it did helped get a starter ground. Taking a step at time.
Mid thirties here, I lost my reading stamina from 15-25 and only completed a book every year or two. Now I’m back to reading on a regular basis. The main change was commuting by train which I find to be an extremely nice place to read.
For me it was working at a call center. 😅 Hated the job, but I got *so much* reading done while people wouldn't answer my auto dialer. It's how I read all of the A Song of Ice & Fire and Throne of Glass series, along with what was out at the time for A Court of Thorns and Roses.
For me the biggest change was to download ebooks on my phone, so if I find myself scrolling mindlessly for too long I can switch to the books app and read instead. It helps to break the addictive cycle, at least for the moment. I also try to delete instagram and TikTok from my phone every few months to get a detox
DRM and bad digital tech is part of the problem. The Kindle ecosystem is designed for generating and capturing customer behavior telemetry, not for organizing eBooks like Calibre. My 4K screen cannot scroll text at its 144hz refresh rate because Chromium and other text rasterization tech is built to maximize Internet ad clients, not visual performance.
I’m really curious about why scrolling text at 144hz matters? I usually run my book to 0.033hz when I’m reading, and paginating seems to work on my digital tools. I actually avidly dislike the feeling of paper so I prefer to not read from tree slices, but I’m currently taking a class that has a textbook that isn’t available digitally, so here we are.
@@thedave1771 My brain is in a state of autistic synesthesia (blended senses)- where I hear dozens of words simultaneously each second like a symphony. I often read at around 2,000 words per minute. The refresh rate of Chromium (which Calibre, my eBook reader is based on) is simply inadequate to move text fluidly at the speed my brain snapshots and comprehends it. More frames actually amount to more sensory bandwidth. This is consistent with classic theorists of communication and sensation like Marshall McLuhan.
@tayzonday You are a legend! It is so refreshing that an internet celebrity is speaking up so forcefully about this! All these digital distractions should be classified like narcotics. I’ve been reading Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus which touches on this very concept and short of disconnecting yourself from society it’s about being aware the dangers this tech poses and cherishing your focus and attention above all else.
I was born in the 60s and read all through primary school, high school, and college, and to the present. In 6th grade, I was reading at a 10th grade level. Considering my major in college, I read more than one book per week. Phonics vs. whole language isn't the reason why attention spans are shorter. My reading material came from carefully edited books and teachers instead of twitter. Television was four channels plus PBS, so that provided a lot of incentive to visit the library regularly.
I've been saying that too. After school for 2hours, and Saturday morning until lunchtime were the "kids" shows. It made you have to get up. And ads helped us stop being sucked into a show too much either
Last year my teenage daughter told me that she wanted to work part time to get money for her things, so I made a deal with her: I prepared a list of books and I told her that I will give her $25 for each book she read, with a one page hand written review as proof. She started slowly, but after a couple books she really got engaged, reading faster a more every week, and engaging in conversation over a coffee to discuss her readings. After a year her vocabulary, pronunciation and orthography improved a lot! Later she asked for a break, but she still reads books on her own just for fun. She learned to enjoy reading. Best investment of my life!
Thank you for posting. I homeschool my children. And it was always very important to teach our children to love reading. We always feel that if you can read, you can teach almost anything to yourself. Although they ask for phones, we always say no. We have seen firsthand how it affects children. We are not willing to jeopardize their education. I did learn some things from this report that i will be adding to our reading regiment. Thank you.
Dont forget the changes in society as a whole over the last 100 to 150 years. It used to be that the only way to get news, learn anything, or entertain your self was by word of mouth, or reading. Books, newspapers, magazines, trade publications. Then radio, television and the Internet came along. Audio books and videos that transmit information. Sometimes more effectively, sometimes less, but in both cases differently than by text.
You recommended in a previous video to purchase a Kindle or other book reader and take it everywhere and read in small increments of free time throughout the day (versus being on the phone). This a great suggestion and am planning to improve my reading stamina using this recommendation. Thanks!
I’m the type of person who love analog. I love love love paper books. I was used to always carrying books around. I grew up as that kid with always a book in hand, a book in my bag. But after a period of buying both hard bound books and ebooks, even I was forced to admit that I am more likely to finish reading a book if it was in my device. It’s just so portable. I still bring my paper books with me on vacations though. And I intentionally keep the devices away.
@Villanelle2 I still prefer paper books, but my Kobo Libra is great. Idk anything about Kindle devices, but i assume it would be similar. 😅 It's just really nice how light they are, and that you can make the font bigger or change the kind of font to reduce eye strain. (OK, well I looked it up online. If people CAN afford a kobo, maybe buy that so you're not held hostage by Amazon lol. But I know the price of Kindle is a lot more approachable).
I learned to read at 4,our house had a long bookshelf with poetry Shakespeare,Poe,Tolstoy ,botany books,art,encyclopedias,I also read science,biography,we never had tv ,I am in my 70s and read informational books ,science,psychology,neuroscience,engineering ,math ,history ,biographies,I am a life long learner,I read minimum of 2 to 3 books a week,I also ,do book reports on what I read,I keep journals li make my own cliff notes
Great video essay. I was a bookworm growing up but when I got to college (Fine Arts/Design) I was so busy, with so many other pleasurable things to do, that I was barely reading the required excerpts. It took me years to build my reading stamina back. I try to remember what happened whenever I stay a couple of days away from my books. Now, being an Engineer, I see how many of my students or colegues have a hard time understanding themes or taking key concepts from whole texts. They easily get lost with texts that are not directly instructive. I can't imagine most of them being able to read Tolstoy or Camus, which is such a loss. But I do understand where it comes from, and your video made it other reasons even more clear. Hopefully, this debate will help us make better pedagogical choices moving forward.
That reading stamina point is so real. I grew up loving reading, and would read about a book a week in my free time up throughout high school. When I switched from physical to digital though, I started getting more audiobooks. Now I almost only “read” using audiobooks and I’ve started noticing that reading physical books is a lot more difficult for me. I still consume about the same number of books this way, but I really don’t like this shift in my brain and now that I’ve noticed it I’m actively trying to fix it
There’s a book called “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr on this subject. My English professor made our class read it. It has to do with reading stamina (Neuroplasticity) and how the medium of technology is changing our brains. Good read if anyone’s interested.
I have 5 kids, 16 consecutive years of public high school. My youngest is now a senior. I ask his teacher at back to school night for a reading list. She gleefully replied “oh we won’t be reading any full books. All are readings will come from from excerpts and articles.”
I live in Australia, gen x. I left school without the ability to read and write properly. I completed year 12 education. It took me 15 years to regain reading and writing skills. Struggled at uni and dropped out. When homeless I would look at signs and words quickly and try to respell them, did this for hours. I can now read 1300 page novels and read endocrinology textbook like a paper a back novel. Les miserables is one book every student should read.
@@mustang8206 The few books are better. One can better understand what the author was saying. Cherry picking ideas can misrepresent the author's intent.
Excellent, excellent, Jared! I have a friend that discusses this topic regularly. We are both big readers. If you discipline yourself enough to become a good reader, and if you do not waste time reading junk books, but instead read good literature, it will improve your writing skills, as well. Reading good books also helps to train the mind to grasp concepts and have critical thinking you certainly will not get from going on TikTok. After taking constitutional law in college and reading an enormous textbook with a font the size of that on a pill bottle, I began reading less because it would strain my eyes, even with glasses. I read books on Audible now, and this has enabled me to really dig into quite a few terrific, albeit long, books.
PS: My aunt was the principal of an elementary school and advised me to read daily to my daughter from the time she was an infant, and get my relatives and friends to read. This taught her that everyone reads, and reading is a fun activity. During Covid I got on Facetime every single day and read to my granddaughter, my husband read to her, and we continued to purchase books - some for their house and some for our house. Thanks for writing this, Jared. It is an interesting topic.
I found this so interesting. I was not taught phonics, but I entered school already reading. Being supported in that activity at home made a difference. I was lucky. I am a busy reader, but yes, online is so alluring after a long day. Working at historic sites, I constantly see people not read, and attempt to extract information. I didn't realize they'd been taught this! But it's surreal when someone looks at a floor-to-ceiling Civil War monument and asks if the building was built in 1865 because that date, among others, can be extracted from it. It's as if they can't even use design or visuals to infer what things are. My students, same, such as not knowing that small print on a page under a painting is info about that painting. I'm equally fascinated and miserable after watching you. Now I'm going to read, though...
Wow. I'm blown away by your insight. I love to read for pleasure, and for learning. As a grad student, I feel like that's all I'm doing is reading textbooks and writing essays! Sadly, I think you're onto something when you talk about adults who have stopped reading. When I was younger, and there was no internet, I feel like I could focus more than I can, now. I've taken to setting a timer to make sure I just focus on the reading, or whatever other assignment I'm working on at the time. It helps, but I find myself plunging into the 'net or social media (or UA-cam) more than is healthy during my downtime. Like you said, I end up feeling crappy at the end of the day.
I cant believe you didnt mention sparknotes! I graduated college within the last few years and did in fact struggle with the stuff mentioned here. They assigned whole books in my high school honors classes, but i never read them cover to cover. Why would i when i could read the sparknotes and get an A and i already understood how to do this stuff. But not having to sit through the whole book really shot me in the foot when in terms of reading stamina
"Compared to doing other things, the act of reading is really boring." THANK YOU for saying this. It's true. I think it's probably why audiobooks are so popular - many people want to engage with literature, but have so many other things that they want or need to do throughout the day that it simply isn't feasible to settle down with a physical book much of the time.
THIS. I'm a stay at home mom. Even when the kids are in school, I'm running errands, doing chores or yardwork, maybe fixing something in the house. None of which allows for me to sit and read. Audiobooks have been a GODSEND.
I believe finding reading "boring" may be a symptom of a very severe underlying pathology. Although I have to admit enjoying my phone occasionally especially for outside news sources, the fact that some people find reading boring is almost certainly because lack of practice in this skill. Consequently their imagination is seriously underdeveloped to the point where it may be considered functionally disabled. I don't say this lightly as I feel this will be a very great problem for society in the future as it is only from imagination that new ideas come. When I am reading I don't remember turning pages or moving my eyes and the book just becomes a movie in my head. The whole story is populated by characters, images and places generated by my imagination built on what is described by the author. I feel that reading is very much exercise for the imagination much like physical exercise is for the physical body - and unfortunately if you don't use it you loose it. And like our bodies, our minds are becoming flabby and ineffective. As for saving time with audio books, I tried them but they take much to much time and interfere with my imagination, I can read probably 4-5 times faster than an audio book can be read aloud and the time spent scrolling through pointless cat and dog videos could be better spent in the meditative stillness of a book exercising your imagination instead of putting it to sleep.
@@JoeBlack-co7is I have a perfect imagination. I can create the pictures on my head of anything I want, except maybe anything that's an object with 4 dimensions or above. Reading is still ranked lower than other activities.
Wow that is wild to me. I don’t ever think of reading as boring (at least not reading fiction). I feel like my brain is working hard imagining the scenario, the environment, what the characters are saying, and making a mental image of it all. Definitely never boring for me!
The sad thing is that kids who are taught the old way without any regard to standardized tests coming up will blow the doors off kids who are "taught to the test". One of my students became an elementary school teacher, and he said he just teaches the kids the things they should know, ignoring the standardized test, and when the test comes, they bury the kids who were drilled for testing. Baby boomers who were simply taught to read books and to write well had nothing to fear when the standardized tests came around.
I exponentially prefer reading books to standardized testing but I see where you are coming from. Standardized testing is a lot more gamified and quantified than it was in the 60’s aside from a few IQ tests. Now you need to be spending 4k minimum to get in the top percentile on the MCAT, LSAT, SAT/ACT, etc.
That makes total sense to me actually. I moved to the states when I was 11. The standardized tests were new to me. However, since I was in a country that valued education and I had my own way of teaching myself, I felt the tests were fairly easy. I wasn’t taught to just pass the test. I was taught good study habits. And to think outside of that standard
I don't want to be mean but I think the teachers who don't do this because they don't feel they have the time to do this are not competent enough. And I wouldn't fault them for it, I think the way they were taught at uni probably wasn't the most optimal, and dare I say I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't taught the core of learning at all, like maybe it was just mentioned but they didn't really get it.
I preferred the company of books over people whilst growing up. Being around people made me deeply anxious and uneasy, and I hated talking. I would always prefer to listen. Books felt like they would reliably just be able to talk to me about their contents, and I would just eat it all up. Once I was in undergrad, I got much more comfortable talking and engaging with others around me, but interestingly enough, my reading ability began to languish. Granted, I would always just read from page to page, not really taking notes. Now, as a grad student, I'm trying to do more engagement with the books I read than just turning pages. I absolutely refuse to write in books, so I just use sticky notes, write my own notes in another notebook, and maybe even writing my own transformative text separately, just for my own understanding.
It's interesting to hear about the idea of whole language reading, cuz I was in 1st or 2nd grade in 2006 (USA) and I remember absolutely /loving/ our phonics lessons. At the end of 2nd grade, I started reading constantly and could not put a book down for anything. I learned (and understood) so many new words (take that, whole language!), though found out years later I did not know how to pronounce them right since none of them were conversational lol. So while I can't speak to the general connection between phonics and reading from a sample size of 1, I can confirm that not everywhere in the country was all in on whole language in the mid aughts, and also can confirm that I did successfully learn to read with phonics.
Great talk. I read a lot of books but live in a small apartment. So, I asked other of my apartment neighbors if they wanted some good books. Nobody wanted any because they don't read books. 🤷
I’m autistic and I developed WAY ahead of my peers with reading, by 2nd grade I had 8th grade reading level and I’m a high school sophomore who is reading Wittgenstein and Heidegger. My reading stamina is really high and I can read for hours on end. I can’t imagine growing up having a distaste towards reading.
Pick up ISL, then ESL. Critique of pure reason is a good one, i think i finally can finish my introduction to category theory (unites prop logic, maths, and deductive systems in cat theory) Books ive needed to read more than once: 1) Elements of statistical learning 2) Introduction to Algorithms 3) Critique of pure reason 4) Introduction to modal logic 5) Introduction to category theory (yet to finish) 1st read is to understand material and read through proofs. 2nd read to clear up any misconceptions and work through proofs. 3rd read is to work through the exercises. Those so far have been my most difficult reads, have fun, they are difficult and not showy or flashy difficult they are precise and clear... the most frustrating thing about maths is "it all makes perfect sense, its just seeing it which remains the problem"
On the spectrum and into philosophy/theory. Let me know when you get to (post)modern theorists and Critical Theory. It's... an adventure, to say the least. And keep up with your interests, find a good Continental philosophy programme.
Around 6:15 - yeah!!!! High school was all about "write this 3 page essay on this topic in your book on page 98" and "make sure you can pass the test". So I learned how to cram and remember wording so I could regurgitate the essay and pass the test. Got to college and dropped out because I was so underprepared to deal with the unhinged amount and level of work they were asking me to do. I went back as an adult on my own time and was ready this time. High school wasn't for anything, as I look back. p.s. Someone gave me a book many years ago that ignited my interest in reading again, so I recommend it - it's not going to be worth it in ebook or audiobook - you have to put the actual book in your hands to see why you need to read the actual book: Mark Danielewski, "House of Leaves".
Love the video man. As always the content is rich and existential, yet very calm and comprehensive. I also love the background in the last portion the backyard nature type, its suits your calm aura and personality. Thanks man, appreciate it.
I don't read a book a week, but I have a job and often have 3-4 books going at once. I encourage my peers to read, which is an effective way to get others to read, too!
I'm not from the United States or any English-speaking country, but somehow, more than a decade ago, I had a teacher who told me about this. It's sad to see that what used to be a problem in my country now seems to be a worldwide issue. The only advice I can give is to keep reading and trying, even if your goal isn't to write something great. I can't express how scary it is to imagine a world where the books you read lack the breath of smart people. We can't live solely in the past, relying on the masters, even if we know we may never surpass them. So, keep working, keep studying, even if your social circle is full of people trying to convince you to stop. I don't mean isolating yourself; that's something most people can't do. Find your circle of good friends and readers. They may be few, but they exist.
I still read books, but I'm over 40 so I know how. turn your phones on DO NOT DISTURB (schedule it if you have to for certain hours), and only set the contacts and apps you need to alert you to do so. pretty sure all phones can do this now. great video!
Reading has always been a passion of mine. My parents would take me to bookstores weekly and i always got a book. My parents read around me, we read together. When I felt defeated with a difficult book my Dad taught me to read the full sentence to help me understand the meaning of a new word. Now I do the same with my kids. My 1.5 year old prefers to “read a book” most of the time. My three year old is starting to sound out words. I’m so proud of them, I hope they carry this love of reading through their lives. It’s a gift.
4:02 some of this is def due to time. it's not like students at Columbia are reading pleasure reading. Reading dense text in a week is a lot if you aren't used to it. The students 100% have tons of other homework as well. if you take 3 classes that require you to read 1 book a week- that's 3 books a week. the students likely have tons of other homework for their other classes, too.
Yeah literally, he said that as if the student has their full time week, 40 hours a week to read that one book. They probably have to read another book that same week for another class
This is one reason that I began home schooling my own children. My oldest daughter began in a small-town Wyoming school where they taught whole language reading. She already had some learning difficulties and was being taught some phonics skills in a pull-out program. By the end of first grade, when we moved back to our home state, she could not read and guessed at everything. She also had developed a mental block that she could not learn to read! Being a college educated woman, I began home schooling her and teaching her to read using phonics. It took me one semester to get her past her mental block and then she began reading very easily and naturally with lots of expression when reading aloud! Each of my children learned to read with me and were many years above their peers in reading skills and comprehension.
Cellphone addiction is the CORE of many of our societal problems. Lack of attention span. Lack of motivation..etc..etc.. Funny, I never hear any of our politicians bring up the issue. It’s almost like they’re getting paid by the tech industry. Weird.
It's scary. I was born in '87, so I fully admit that I spent plenty of time glued to my Game Boy or fooling around on web forums of the early 2000s. But before social media, most forms of entertainment had a logical stopping point: The credits would roll on your TV show, you'd beat the level and get to a save point, or you'd read every bit of text on that website. There was always some signal that maybe you've had all the fun you're going to have with this thing for today and it's time to do something else. They have people with Ph.D.s working full-time on "user engagement" and "consumer neuroscience" - e.g. the science of how to make sure you never close the app and put the phone down. Everything about these apps is purposely designed to hook your attention and hold it at all costs. Perhaps the most effective feature of this is the "infinite scroll" - the neverending carousel of new content. What scares me the most is that some kids are growing up with these devices in their hands right from the time they have the motor skills to operate them. What happens if these kids reach adulthood like that? Judging from the effects of excessive smartphone use even by adults, motivation and attention span (like you said) will be abysmal. How will they function? Are they going to be able to study for a career? Remember to pay their bills? Go to bed on time and get up for work? I hope "smartphones for kids" goes the way of radioactive patent medicines of the '20s - just a horrible mistake we made and thankfully corrected when we saw how horrific the results were.
It's not really weird, I just think that if they rail against cellphones then that'll cost them votes: "does he want to take our phones away?" Besides, there's not really a good solution here other than maybe banning cellphones for non-adults (but even that'll be quite unpopular, and a challenge to implement). And while children with cellphones are a problem, I don't think that in general adults become addicted to something if they weren't already in psychological pain in the first place. And there's an obvious laundry list of painful things in our society that might be driving addiction.
I largely agree, however there is another factor that you are not considering, that is specific to the elite universities you mention. There has been heavily increasing competition to get into these in recent years, which has led to students trying to be as efficient as possible to do many things at a high level because that is what is demanded of them, and highly specializing in certain things in order to stand out and gain acceptance to these universities. As a student at Cornell University I have first hand experience and can say that this leads to students spending much more time doing things other than reading and having much more going on in life in general. This often then carries into their time at college where they want to continue being the amazing people they are outside of school, but now they also having lots of work assigned to them. This is another factor that leads to even students at elite universities feeling like they do not have enough time to read all the books assigned to them, many are doing so many things outside of class as well, I know many who even do research with professors as freshman and sophomores, imagine trying to balance that with a sport, all your other classes, a job sometimes, and reading a novel a week. Even without social media is often just not possible.
Reading stamina really is a thing. I used to read entire chapter books within a few days but after year long break of reading, I can barely read for an hour and now finish books in a week or more.
I try to read no less than a chapter per seating. Otherwise it takes me too long to finish
Me too - am a major book nerd and not even on TikTok .... but since Covid have not read much -the decline in reading is real...
@@MyKrabi Why? Has covid changed your brain? Surely to read or not to read is a choice?
You can train your "reading stamina" by reading books (I recommend books you wouldn't normally read) in uncomfortable situations. Walking and reading, in a loud environment, etc. When you finally read in a quiet focused space, it feels like you're reading and absorbing as fast as heat on butter
Yep use to be able to finish mostly books in three days now I can't read for more than an hour
It's 100% the distractability. I used to be an avid reader, who studied comparative literature at university. A part of the curriculum was reading a novel a week. The moment I got a phone with social media access my concentration started dying. I have actively blocked shorts and reels (these are the most destructive) and have better concentration the less I look at my phone. It irritates me so much when scientists say there isn't adequate proof that social media is messing with kids' brains. It's literally made for being addictive, and adults can't control it either.
I haven't read a book in ten years, but they made entertainment so utterly dull and full of propaganda I'm starting to read more to stop being so bored. So good news, I guess. I loved it too. "Do androids dream of electronic sheep" was the most entertaining thing I ever did with my life. I mean most concepts bore me though. I don't want to read Tom Clancy or Stephen King. Probably going to read neuromancer soon. Im not very good with punctuation or writing nor do I read fast.
@GEORGEJETSON-s4w I like to read about factual things. Might as well learn something while I'm at it. Books about history or biographies are my favorite. I've never been able to get into science fiction. I need to read about realistic things to keep my attention and knowing that what I'm reading about actually happened makes it more exciting.
I have had the same issue. I notice a huge difference in how my mind feels after looking at social media if I have been on a detox for a week. It's a type of brain fog and craving for more that gets worse the more you give in to it. Saying social media doesn't affect the brain is like saying cigarettes don't affect the lungs. It even affects my ability to watch TV because I can't get through entire episodes if I'm on my phone for too long. I didn't grow up with social media, so I can remember a time when I didn't feel the brain fog, but kids who only have ever known social media are going to have a much harder time because they don't even know what their actual baseline attention span is. I wonder how many kids who think they have ADHD or other learning difficulties now are actually experiencing this brain fog from their phone use.
You just inspired me to remove Shorts from my feed.
UA-cam shorts are horrible, I have them blocked on my PC, but no such luck with the phone app...
Another massive problem, which has been prominent in my phil degree, is the opposite. To demand that a student read a book a week does not encourage deep reading. For example, when I read Spinoza’s Ethics the first time, it took me 3 weeks and I wrote down every proposition and corollary just to see how they fit together and what implications arise. The problem is time, while phones take up so so much, and reading stamina is necessary, many reading deadlines are unreasonable, especially when the material demands careful attention
in the 80s we had a read a book program if you completed it you got a free pizza from Pizza Hut 5/6/years old I was reading the Herdy Boys mysteries Dick Tracy books and any adventure book
Totally, I am not an avid reader of philosophy, but when I picked up and read the first book to the Nicomachean Ethics. It took a very deliberate analysis of almost every sentence to follow what Aristotle was even remotely trying to say. I took a month to finish 30 pages...
You may be right in part, but I think the issue is the change in student performance. Previously, students could and did keep up with reading schedule such as one book a week. Now, they can't or won't.
You have to admit, there are students who won’t be motivated to do their homework unless it’s two days before the deadline.
For those types, a deadline of one week would be effective in motivating them to read.
But really, most books (other than technical books and OP’s example) can be read leisurely in a week
-provided, one also have a leisurely schedule. A university student with so many extra curricula don’t have that leisure.
Depends on the specific book and depends on how many other homework you have.
A quick google search suggested that people can read 30 - 60 pages per hour. If we're talking about a 200 page book, then that's like 4-7 hours of pure reading. So if you also need to carefully think about it or write stuff out, that's let's say 10 hours. Well, that doesn't seem too high a commitment -- working adults have a 40 hour work week. Although if it's a really complicated book or you have tons of other homework, then yeah maybe it's too much.
“The world wants you to read, it just doesn’t really want to give you the time to read a good book.” You have given voice to a deeply felt frustration that I haven’t been able to put my finger on for so, so many years of school and work. Thank you ❤
You didn't mention the large hand-off to the educational arena of childhood book culture passed on by parents. My parents read to me. My parents had books around the house. I have mental snapshots of my Father and Mother reading their books. I copied this with my child. It was very telling when she came home from a sleepover and one of the first thing she mentioned was: "Momma, there were no books! My friend didn't even have a bookshelf in her room!" (They weren't Kindle fans, either, as it turns out)
I'm not saying this would "fix everything"; just that I felt it should be mentioned. Thank you for the video. I was a "whole language" kid, but fortunately turned into a bookworm - I blame my parents. :P
Same here. My parents were big readers. House filled with books. Saturday trips to the library every week for most of my childhood (dropping off/picking up, not to mention used books sold for a dime). My brother and I were naturally big readers, thanks to our home environment and upbringing.
I recently mentioned to a coworker that I would get in trouble as a child for reading under the covers with a flashlight after my bedtime, and she had absolutely no idea what I was referring to. The goalposts for "normal" have shifted so drastically in the last few years. I'm grateful that my parents instilled in my brother and me a love for reading and a respect for books.
Yes, parents reading to children is a huge contributor. I started reading to my kids, one after another, when they were as young as one. Since they learnt how to walk and take objects from shelves, there were always cardboard books for kids within their reach just to touch it, feel it, turn the pages. Kids are now 9 and almost 7 and I read to them every single night, in two languages, my native and English, devices are non-existent except for occasional cartoons or family movie time. Books are the main source of a truly exciting stories and variety of info that they do not see anywhere else. Our library is huge and we keep adding as children grow.
Yes. In my household, we have 3 maybe four bookshelves. One has nothing but manga, the other is a bunch of books my oldest sister bought over the years, and the third are books I bought for myself (after realizing, I don't have my own collection if and when I move out). People that come over are always impressed by the amount of books we have. It's weird to me that it isn't normal for most people of today. Thinking about it now, I can't remember seeing books in any houses of friends I've been to 😮.
Not only did books feature in the house but even more to your point, I also remember _learning_ to read with my mum (i'd bring home flashcards with words to learn, read assigned books with/for her etc.) - that wasn't her being "super-mum" BTW, that was just pretty much what the school expected.
So I certainly sympathise with parents who maybe work multiple jobs etc. just to make ends meet and for sure, schools aren't blameless but the most baffling thing for me about the "Covid uproar" over reading was, how on Earth did your kid get to age 8 or 10 before you realised they were struggling with reading ? Like, _surely_ no matter how busy you are you can at least _check-in_ every now and then, just so you know yourself everything's going as expected ?
Education can not replace reading hundreds of books. Curiosity and availability did it for me. We imagine that schools could replace what parents should do.
I'm a high school teacher. I doubt you'll see this but your video really resonated with me because my colleagues and I have been screaming about this problem for well over a decade. *Every single day* I am shocked by the lack of literacy skills in so many of my students. It is *shocking.* Our grade 9s and 10s have an average reading level of grade 6 - and 30% of our students - *THIRTY PERCENT!* - are reading at a grade 2 (TWO!) level. It is insane.
You hit the nail on the head with the switch from phonics. It was an absolute catastrophe and it was one many teachers recognized as such *decades* ago. My Mom taught for 37 years and I remember her talking constantly about this change. In fact, she refused to be part of it and continued to teach phonics when it was replaced in the curriculum.
The education system has a real problem with hopping onto unproven trends. There's always some new administrator who is trying to make a name for themselves or heard about some fancy new method of teaching math, reading, writing, etc. Almost always it's complete crap - but the board will pay *millions* to the people peddling it and adopting initiatives to implement it all, only to find out years later it doesn't work - which leads them to hop onto the next bit of nonsense where the cycle repeats.
There's another thing I'd mention to that I think you could do an entire video about, and that is the rise in "passive hobbies" where kids will just sit there and watch other people do things on social media. It blows my mind how many hours kids will spend thumbing through TikTok *every day.* I have students who, when asked to do an accounting of their weekly phone use, have 40+ hours a week on TikTok. I have students with over 80 (and in one case *100* !) hours a week on their cell phones. If you ask them how many videos they remember watching out of all those hours, it's *maybe* 5 to 10. What a complete waste of time. Nobody is reading because they're just watching life pass them by. It is *exceptionally* disturbing.
Interesting video. Thanks for making more people aware of the problem.
I went to college for secondary education and wanted to be an English teacher because of this. I really thought I could help. But then, as I was going through college and learning how my state wanted me to teach and what they wanted me to teach, I was feeling discouraged. When I had to create lesson plans and teach them in student-teaching exercises, my professors would tell me I had great ideas, but let’s simplify them and cut some things out. I felt like I would never be able to teach in the way I wanted to. I was in year 3 when Covid hit and we all got sent home. In 2020, I started working at my public library, and I decided to stay there. I am able to help people every day without having to deal with the frustration from the state. But now, my state is trying to limit access to certain books for teens, and that’s frustrating too. There are some amazing teachers out there who want to do things differently, but they can’t without their state’s support, and that is so sad.
It's even worse in special education. I have students who are 17, their work is modified to a 2nd grade reading level and they still can't do it. They can't spell they can't comprehend a compound sentence. They are functionally illiterate. And the second you look away they have UA-cam shorts playing.
Isn't 6th grade basically an average adult reading level in the US?
Your post and the following response is point on.
I had the enormous blessing on my life of never having to learn how to read...I always just knew how, ever since I could remember as a tot. I remember reading the words voraciously of everything in front of me....cereal boxes, instructions on cleaning product, the comics in the newspapers. My parents didn't make a big deal of it, but I can't help but think today that they knew there was something extraordinary going on with me in an academic sense.
This phenomenon was only contained in the realm of words and literature, though. I had big trouble with mathematics, and really didn't know anything about formulaic writing until I learned it in JC in my late 50s.
During that time, after I'd graduated, I was given the opportunity to be employed by my alma mater as a reading/writing tutor. It was at first daunting because I had this innate fear of having to teach in an academic setting.
I prevailed despite my weakness in a few particular things in the area of formal grammar, but my saving grace was that with anyone who couldn't read but knew their alphabet, I could start them with the very basic elements of sounding out the letter of any alphabet, then building from there....the basic, fundamental genesis of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and essay construction building...with meaning and context included along the process.
It was the most satisfying job I ever held....
But today's approach to reading and writing education is a depressing endeavor.
But, as long as speech and languages are our primary methods of understanding and communicating, and what the Greeks established so many centuries ago, there will always be hope in my heart and mind about the resurgence of literacy as we once knew it.
We are creating the circumstances for authoritarian government by dumbing down the population. Not only is this a disaster for business but it leads to getting information from shallow sources - You Tube, FB, headlines, friends, etc Poorly informed will support things that sound good regardless of cost, ethics, feasibility or possibility of success.
Two hours ago, I told myself that I need to put the phone away and finish that book I've been reading for the past two weeks. Yet, here I am watching you.
Same here 😅😭 - but why, though? I think I need *conversation,* and I don't get much of that in my life. My need for interesting voices and interesting new ideas makes me spend time on YT, but the deep need for human connection is never met, so I scroll forever. Shutting it off and doing something real is always a good thing, but for myself I don't think I'm gonna break my YT habit until I get what I really need - real-life sharing of ideas.
I've got ADHD. I am you, but on a professional level. My entire life has been one endless procrastination, distraction, inattention, missed deadline. And yet I've read thousands of books, my house is full of art I've made and from friends. I've got stacks of journals, a few novels I haven't quite finished. I've traveled all over the world, and yet I'm here.... Just get back on it and keep at it, fall down, get back on it, again and again and again....
Most public libraries allow you to check out ebooks, which you can read on your phone. No need to leave your phone at home, and it conserves your battery.
Same here, I was an avid reader in high school before cell phones / social media was a thing. Now, I have to read paragraphs back again just to paint a picture of what I've read.
That's a sign
Lack of phonics + smartphones + bad parenting. But the bad teaching in schools is largely an EFFECT. If kids arrive unsocialized, never having been read to, the school systems try to compensate. They can't fully. But they've done a crap job trying, as well.
I’m a teacher and I genuinely feel like I *cannot* teach. Kids talk over me CONSTANTLY. They have no interest in spending the literal *seconds* it would take to locate a single fact in a text. Fucking EVERYTHING is boring to them if it isn’t on a phone.
I *CANNOT* do my job. As in, it is literally impossible.
I'm 58 and a bookworm. I completely quit social media in 2016 because the pace and constant notifications were negativity affecting my ability to read for hours. I can't imagine having grown up with social media and then trying to read Middlemarch.
very unrelated but I LOVE MIDDLEMARCH so far
@@stimkykesp or Ulysses.
Dude posts on social media saying he quit social media years ago.
If you completely quit social media, what are you doing commenting on UA-cam?
That's why I don't want to download Instagram or TikTok.
I grew up in Japan and public school teachers forced students to read very boring books. I was an avid reader in elementary school, but after being forced, I gradually quit reading books. Plus, preparing for high school and university entrance exams made me to have no energy and time for reading. Thankfully, I got free time in my 20s and started reading again. Now I’m reading English books😭🤝👍 I like ur content so much! Keep going!!
this is the problems with asian countries
It's not being forced to read that's the problem, it's the very boring books that is. We need to expose our children to good classic literature.
There IS a middle ground between no long-form reading and forcing kids to read boring stuff (or, god forbid, The Iliad in a week!). You have to get out there and SEARCH for books that you like. There's every imaginable kind of fiction. Get up and go look for it in the library. And yes, the U.S. ed curriculum creators (usually not the teachers) "prescribes" a lot of "good for you" boring crap with little sense of what will interest students at various grade levels and how to teach challenging works so as to engage students in them. Lots of the teahers are no longer readers, either.
I did a degree in literature, which I enjoyed, but with reading 6 books simultaneously for my degree I ended up being completely burned out from reading. I "took a break" from reading books once I graduated at age 22. Yeah, that break is still ongoing and I'm 40.
6:44 I grew up in Russia, immersed in the often depressive classical Russian literature that glorifies "the little man" as a virtue. It frustrates me that free-thinking Western readers, when praising the so-called "great Russian literature," fail to recognize that the promotion of the state's supremacy over the individual is the very ideology fueling Putin's war machine against the free world today. As for Dostoevsky, after his release from prison, Dostoevsky became a state propagandist and an ideologist of Russian Orthodox fascism. His disdain for Western progress and technological advancements like railroads was part of a broader critique of Western liberalism and individualism - an outlook he believed Russia, as a chosen nation with a special path and holy mission, must oppose. I am utterly disillusioned with the inability of Ivy League intellectuals to read between the lines.
I’m a 17 year old applying to top universities right now and I think another vital reason teenagers like me don’t read enough is because of the increasing pressures to “achieve” and get instant recognition for our efforts. There’s an enormous pressure to eventually land high paying jobs in tech, finance, law, med, etc-and reading often feels like a leisurely distraction compared to ways we should be “getting ahead” of the competition. I often try to start reading and then stop and think I should be doing something more “productive” like homework, my extracurriculars, or college essays. My friend at Columbia tells me their friends don’t read the books in Lit Hum (class you mentioned) because they’re so fixated on securing internships, joining pre-professional clubs, and so on. To fully allow society to get back into reading, we need to focus on what we value and admire: in-depth thought and knowledge or just prestigious resume boxes.
Good point!
I agree. I decided very early that achieving status is the world was a scam and a waste of my life energy, so instead of pursuing college and a career, I spent all of my 20s and most of my 30s just working part-time just enough to get by, so that I had time for what I loved: traveling and "doing nothing." I read so many good books in that time, I grew by leaps and bounds intellectually and philosophically, I came to savor being alone and exploring the nooks and crannies of areas while looking for ideal spots to read. If I had to do it all over again, I would not trade all that time for a six-figure salary, fancy car, and mountains of stress. Not a chance. All that stuff is on loan, the only thing we truly own is our life.
young people need to think for themselves for once ask around to find out how many other people want that same job you do don't know why kids think their first job is going to be an executive job or the CEO or COO job
yeah, the video is full of innacuracies and unjustified extrapolations.
There's no way you can write a half decent college essay if you don't read books. That's as stupid as telling a 2 year old "don't listen to people, just talk."
I go to Columbia. Definitely agree with all the points about reading in general, but also Columbia in particular isn't a great example. You're right, it's usually a book a week. And then we have a 2 hour discussion section twice a week to discuss the book/chapters read. The main motivator for reading the book is the discussion section (and, for some, the participation grade for saying something during the seminar). But these books can be pretty long/dense. The Iliad, The Aeneid, and later Crime and Punishment, To the Lighthouse, etc. I always felt that reading the whole book was a waste of time since at that point you are only absorbing plot points and action. There is not enough time in a week (particularly with other classes) to do a deep reading cover to cover and participate in a worthwhile discussion afterwards. I found reading the summary on sparknotes and then honing in on particular sections was how I could get the most out of the books within the short time period. After all, the purpose of reading these books was not the words themselves, but the discussions and arguments and critical thinking that came out of them in class---at least ideally.
That said, I definitely feel like I lack reading stamina. Some books I didn't read at all, just pretended to. I wish I read more. What I did read, I really enjoyed. I loved that class and my instructor and learned a lot. Definitely issues with attention span and technology (made worse bc most books I would download online and read on my laptop). That said, Columbia and many "elite schools" are not super conducive to actual learning. Read Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz.
This sort of curriculum sound like "I had to jump this high and you have to as well." Reading is a necessary skill, but if its just an endurance race where one is retaining from the reading of the book what one could get from a short precis, it seems that reading the entire book is kind of a useless exercise. Unless they are specifically testing the ability to rapidly summarize material, or somehow all of the words of the book are needed to make an argument (which means the book can't be usefully summarized), or they are literally testing the ability to recall any part of the book, what is the purpose of reading the entire book? I enjoy reading, but I don't do it just to prove that I can, especially to academics that can not justify why this should be necessary, except to say that it was the way they learned.
Read the review of Excellent Sheep by LA Book Review. The book is apparently pretty sensational/popular vs academically sound - but then again so are Ivy Leagues lol 😝
If you don't properly read the material, then the discussion will be lackluster to say the least. Often times there are unique or special details in sections of novels that seem unimportant, until they are important. There is nothing that can replace properly reading a book all the way through and discussing with others who read the same text. It's like magic when done right.
My experience with Lit Hum and especially CC was pretty similar. I love reading and ended up majoring in English and comparative literature, but the way the core classes are structured is not conducive to deep thought or true understanding. At best, you’ll note which books seemed interesting and return to them later on your own.
Speaking for myself, the phone has really interfered with my time spent reading. Thanks for the excellent video, but watching UA-cam is probably one of my biggest distractions. I used to read a book every week on average, and now it's down to about 1 per month. I get a lot more from reading than I do from watching videos (present company excepted) and tracking the news of the day. I need to make a conscious effort to get back to reading. Thanks for the insight!
I make UA-cam videos for a living, but I don't have UA-cam on my phone.
I encourage you to turn off youtube history(recommendation) so that you use UA-cam only when you search about something @@_jared
@@BambiOateswhile you can’t DELETE it from android phones, you can disable it in the settings, which hides it from view.
My phone even distracts me from watching television. I will pause a show to just check my phone. More often than not whatever content I am looking at isn't more interesting than what I am watching. I live alone so I don't have someone being irritated by my behavior.
@@Bootus123 Easier to just disable notifications from it.
This hits hard. With no gaps between events in our life, how does any one of them have meaning? Without negative space, objects have no edges or identity.
I wanna drop in and say, that was very beautifully put. Thank you.
"Music is the silence between the notes" - Debussy
This is really well put.
I do feel that there’s something deeper than attention spans at play here.
Books are only boring in the specific sense mentioned by the presenter. (He presented the point well, and narrowed in immediately on what he meant.)
Exploring things at leisure is this incredible gift of time and uninterrupted focus. I guess that’s why I always associated time spent reading with affluence, somewhat as a child but even more so as a young adult.
This is nonsense. You experienced them so they have meaning, wtf.
What if your life is nothing but gaps?
6:42 funny thing about the SAT, one of the best strategies of the test is just to not read the excerpt at all. Turns out you can read the questions and find the context or answer within a sentence or two. It’s a huge time saver for the test, but definitely points to the fact we aren’t reading as much.
It makes you question why the reading portion of the exam even exists to begin with.
@@baconninja4481 It's hardly comprehension and more so the ability to rapidly recognize key phrases and terms in a heuristic-style assessment
What I do from the last 15 years of my school…
That’s exactly what he is saying, we learn to pull information from text to get high scores on test.
BINGO. We’ve turned from critical thinking into quick thinking. Look for the answer and forget the rest lol
My friend's son is a Navy Seal who just graduated from Stanford with a master's in civil engineering. He complained of the lack of seriousness among many students - they don't do the work, they don't focus or contribute in class, they do poorly on tests - scate through at the bare minimum. Some get their degree, some don't - especially if there's family wealth to fall back on. This at Stanford now.
I'm a retired HS History teacher-I was told once by an instructor in one of my master's degree classes that I was "disrespectful" for questioning Whole Language. These programs aren't discussed among teachers enough-most of us knew that whole language reading programs would be too confusing for a large number of our students but it had become Orthodoxy and we weren't "allowed" to discuss it. Teachers should be choosing strategies and materials. Not administrators. Not politicians. Teachers...most of us actually know what we're doing! Thanks for this great summary.
EXACTLY it’s so genuinely so sad
The key is to not talk to stupid people or let them know what you think or are doing.
One thing you need to understand is that whole language learning was an experiment that was first attempted in the late 19th century.
It was later introduced nationwide _because_ it had failed miserably.
Those in power want an uneducated, easy to manipulate public. That's the whole point of public schools.
See John Taylor Gatto's "An Underground History of American Education". It explains a great deal.
*banging pots and pans*
WHOLE LANGUAGE IS NOT TEACHING READING
Thank you so much for highlighting this problem
For anyone who wants to delve deeper into this issue, highly recommend the podcast Sold a Story
That method was so aweful. I hated school.
Of course it's not. That's why they're pushing it. Just remember that teachers' union chick who was floating in the ocean sipping a drink, recommending people "shelter their kids at home" during COVID. WLL is that applied to reading.
Sure. Neither is phonics.
@@tenny37 Sold a story is nasty propaganda and anti-education.
As someone who learned to read in the late 90s and early 2000s, I feel very lucky that my elementary school was still using the "old method" of phonics.
I mean you and me must be the same age, I remember my first day of primary school and I couldn't read. My dad sat down with me after school and told me to remember the sounds and we started to look at the words togheter. And it was a click, I could read.
I feel grateful I learned English as a second language. I used to complain about it, because my accent will never be as good as native's, but now I appreciate it. I can read very well in my own language and in English. Interestingly, and quite terrifying actually, I've realized I can probably read better in English than many of the native English-speaking kids today.
@@elroma7712I m frankly somewhat puzzled by the assertion in this video that the WAY you learn how to read matters all that much. Once you know how to read to some extent, by whichever way you have acquired the skill, doesn't one then just naturally become better and better at it, over time, while reading children's books for pleasure? I m pretty sure that, in a way, even though i was of course taught how to read in primary school, I am still mostly self taught somehow, since I was reading a few books a day a few weeks or months into the first grade. Also in the different scripts I taught myself how to read as an adult, I feel it's always a mix, half phonic/letter by letter, half contextual anticipation, the latter more so as my vocabulary in the new language increases. I m pretty sure that the real culprit here is smartphones. In my younger years, as a teenager and student, back in the 90s and early noughties, I was probably averaging a book a day, and it was extremely rare that I wouldn't finish reading them in one single sitting. Now, in my mid forties and heavily addicted to my smartphone, I m happy if I manage to read 20 or 30 pages in one single go. How pathetic of me!
@@Wandering.HomebodyI agree with your perspective. However I found the structure of this essay to be enjoyable and engaging. Since I already knew about smart phones, and I didn’t know really about whole language learning. (And I know a middle amount about testing. 😉 Nothing he said surprised me, but I also wouldn’t have made such a bold connection from “reading to extract information” and “critical thinking skills” to “failure to read books.”)
Honestly this video made a lot of sense for me because I always sound out words I don’t know or never seen wrong. And all my friends make fun of me in jest. But honestly maybe this is why. I just wasn’t taught the phonic method and now unfamiliar words make me sound like a 1st grader or worse I suppose
Great video Jared!! I teach High School English and ELD (ESL in some states) at a title 1 California Central Valley high school. The tag word (there is always a tag word for EVERY education trend/reform/new idea/recycling of an old idea) which we push is RIGOR. Due to Pearson contantly reinforcing terrible reading habits (excerpts over whole texts or novels, reading ONLY to fill in the boxes on a graphic organizer, performance tasks or products without reading an example essay, etc) many of our students completely lack reading stamina, as you said. Those that do either came from a different district, were in our IB program, or their parents (and I am assuming their early education as well) encouraged reading and supported it in multiple ways.
To adress this, our English department turned ALL of our 9th and 10th grader curriculum into an International Baccelaureate Middle Years Program model. Essentiall we threw out the textbok and now each unit is based around 1 or 2 novels with outside reading slowly being pushed as well for homework. Since we've adopted this model we have found that we can move through a 250 page novel as quickly as we used to move through a 150 page book, with the same level of detail, insight and discussion. Students have also just plain read more than they would have with our old Pearson MyPerspectives textbooks. We figured that students are reading around 500-700 pages more, depending on the grade level. You are correct that so many things throughout a young person's education and upbringing contribute to the reading fatigue and weakness that you discuss.
What I have found in my 7 years of teachig is that the public education industry has not only contributed to, but is constantly reinforcing bad reading habits and reading for work over good reading habits and reading to discover.
It is so refreshing to watch well-produced, informative, and concise video without overstimulating edits, calls to action, sponsor reads, or other engagement-boosting trickery. Just genuine coverage and novel insights Loved this video, immediately subbed, and I hope I see more content like this in the future 💫
Ikr!! Or jump cuts
"novel insights" I see what you did there...
jk I know it was probably an unintended pun, but I found it funny anyway.
What do you mean? I **love** being told "like & subscribe" & hearing obnoxious bell-sounds every five minutes..
sponsor reads are just things to put food on the table for the youtuber, not usually used to grab or trick us, tho i will say i do prefer when people put them at the end of their videos after finishing everything else so you can choose to stay or leave after the end if the product is/isnt for you
For the most part. I could have done 0:00 without the spooky music.
I began teaching in 1994 during the whole language years. Even as a new teacher, I knew could this did not work. My 2nd year I began teaching phonics and saw a vast improvement in my kinders reading skills.
You are also correct that students are no longer reading books but are reading passages due to increased standardized testing. That has decreased their reading stamina greatly. Lastly, the increase in tablets and phone usage has shortened attention spans and makes reading appear dull to students. Excellent video!!
I guess I don't recall having to hone my reading comprehension skills when I was 4. We all learn to read through phonics. WWL is perfectly fine for teaching students how to then pluck understanding from what we read. As for stamina, God forbid students read something they are not assigned at school.
I'm not sure he really backed up any of what he was trying to put out there, to be honest. It seemed more like making excuses after the fact that people simply don't prioritize reading, or providing an emphasis on education in the home. That's not whole language learning's fault.
Take care.
It's hard to imagine learning to read. My mother taught me by 18 months old, and I read The Hobbit at age 7. Learning, like any language skill, has a social element. Children who don't see adults reading to them and around them won't read. They certainly won't find it interesting if it's nothing more than a test skill. I wish schools would deemphasize testing and expensive technology. Someone with a developed reading ability only needs time, a library card and curiosity.
However, I have books everywhere and tried to encourage my son to read yet he isn't interested. Perhaps because reading takes mental energy that electronic media does not? Maybe it comes down to attention spans. The brain adapts and the world around us has become frenetic and digitized into bite-sized, effortless pieces. It is difficult for me to read after spending too much time online. It's like my imagination takes too long to activate and I find myself staring at the page instead of lost in the dream crafted by the author.
I'm thinking modern media made our brains lazy.
@@andromedaspark2241 You’re missing something important: Reading was easy, which directly feeds into how much you enjoy it. And that in turn means you get a lot of practice, so you end up getting even better at it. There is a a ton more to it than “what you see your parents doing”, although obviously there is value in leading by example, and a lack of opportunity will eliminate the possibility completely.
I was the same way, incidentally, I loved reading, was usually reading a novel in class because I’d finished whatever else there was to read.
Think of something you don’t enjoy doing, in a school setting this might be physical education, math, one of the sciences, programming, sewing, but it could be outside of school too. Go force yourself to do it a bunch, you may get better at it, but if you continue to struggle do you think you’ll start to like it? My bet is not. Some people just find certain tasks easier, and more enjoyable. You can’t force it, and trying to force things you find easy on someone that finds them to be a unpleasant challenge will only make them double-down on hating it (and possibly, by association, you).
I remember when I was in college, telling an education major that I had learned reading through phonics. She made this face and noise of disgust. I think about that occasionally and hope she learned the error of her ways.
Not to mention boring authors. I bought some vintage books for the covers. When I tried to read them a bit, I found many were grueling, and one was absolutely gripping. I will be looking up that author's other works.
I was placed in special education in 2nd grade and learned to read at that level in 4th grade. All the way through education as kid I felt so stupid because reading was so hard for me. It was when I met my wife, who shared audiobooks with me and gave me a hard copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to read. Slowly but surely, I've gone from reading no books 4 years ago to reading 1 to 2 a month and listening to at least 3 to 4, not to include what I have to read for college on top of full-time 40 hours a week.
The bottom line is that if you apply yourself and find books that grab your attention or genres that make you want more, reading will become secondhand.
I have several friends who are voracious readers who were told in school that they were poor readers/needed to lower their expectations. Once they cracked the code and could read a bit better, they never stopped.
@@_jared One of the things I have seen, especially with boys, is to find them books about what interests them. This worked for both my very dyslexic cousin and for the brother of a friend of mine.
That was me in school too. I was functionally illiterate until i was almost 14, teachers had given up on me. Idk what got me into it, I was just hanging in the library, and I was always embarrassed and mad that I couldnt read like everyone else. So I just picked a book with a cool cover and started reading the words, even though I couldn't understand. And I did this for months and months. Used a dictionary sometimes. I read the thesaurus because all the different words for the same things were tripping me up. And one day I realized I understood most of the writing.
Idk, I feel like a lot of the really passionate readers i meet are the people who had to fight for the skill in the first place. It took more self-motivation just to get to a basic level, it's only natural to want to keep pushing forward and learning more of it in that case.
@@Tessa_RuThis is really inspiring to me!!
I did well in reading growing up, and I am currently working SO HARD to attain a basic level of literacy and listening comprehension in my third language.
I was in a similar position. I was in special ed for reading in 2nd grade, but by the next year I had apparently caught up enough to not require the help. I had some undiagnosed learning problems that contributed, but these days, I can read books without much trouble.
I do have to be very careful when reading if I need to be certain that I'm reading the right words, but I can do it.
I (22M) have always been a passionate reader, I grew up reading the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and others besides. It is both my and my parents' firm belief that I managed to teach myself how to read as a kid because I spent so long playing with magnetized letters on the fridge while my mom was cooking, and then had a little help from my parents constantly asking me what things like street signs said. Then I got to school, and my passion dimmed (thankfully it never fully died, but I don't read nearly as much as I used to), due to the way the English teachers handled reading. Two types of situation stick out to me as common occurrences: 1. the teacher would either say in surprise or complain to my parents how I voraciously read through the entire mini-library they had in the classroom, or 2. I would get in trouble during class reading sessions (we would each take turns reading a paragraph or so in a book or text and go around the room like that) for *reading ahead of the class and needing to be pulled back to where everyone else was*. At a time in my and my peers lives where the other kids were slowly working their way through a paragraph and stumbling the whole time, I was pages ahead and immersed in what we were reading, whether it was fantasy, history, or something else, and I got in trouble for it. I could share other stories, like how an English teacher during my junior high years played favorites in the classroom and it took multiple interventions from my mother to save my grade, but I think (I hope) anyone reading this has already grasped the severity of the situation.
I've asked hundreds of teens why they stop reading. Lots of reasons but the most common is they can't find anything good to read. Staffed libraries in schools are disappearing. This is how we keep readers, having someone to match them to books and encourage the sharing of what they've read with their friends.
My brother has that complaint. That he would read, but can’t find books that interest him. And unfortunately I can’t be much help, since the genres I like are very different from the ones he likes (though I do think he’d like my favorite series, as it has a lot in common with books he’s liked in the past, but it’s too high of a reading level for him to be able to just jump in and start reading it after barely reading _any_ books in the past several years)
It's a complex issue and multi-faceted, but I'd agree this is part of it. I used to so enjoy dropping into my school library after hours, and the History teacher, who was the Librarian, welcoming me, taking me to see various new books that had arrived, making suggestions for books she was sure I would like. She was a great influence in my life, which is with me to this day.
Libraries are awful now, full of Pride and antiwhitism
The"y can't find anything good to read" is bullsh*t. It's an excuse to not sound lazy and ignorant. They have instant access to almost EVERYTHING ever written...on their tablets. So, ask yourself, "If you have access to almost every book, short story, poem, and article ever written...AND have search engines to sort through them...why can't you find anything to read?"
Sounds like an excuse for lazyness. Sorry. There are SO MANY books available today. A swipe of your finger gives you access to probably 80% of books ever written.
Big thank you from a former Columbia-trained classicist, turned Middle School English teacher. You put this in such a lucid, easy to follow manner that I can show it to my students next time they ask why I make them do Sustained Silent Reading at the beginning of each class.
G00d for you! Though I wonder how long a class would have to be, to allow truly sustained anything at its beginning....
Genius, dont gota teach when they just sit there and pretend to read while you scroll👍
This is great! I remember doing this while in middle school. We were given quite a bit of time to just sit and read. I think this is one of the reasons I’ve sustained reading for leisure later in life.
I remember doing ssr in elementary and middle school!
super-reader here that’s gone through long bouts of not reading and i can confirm, my mental health is SO much better when i’m reading. although being in my early 30s, it’s getting harder and harder to sit in one spot for long periods of time and the eyes can get a little strained similar to phone usage /:
Reading glasses & a book light. Give in to Granny mode, it’s lovely over here.
Yeah same, I notice a big difference in mental health when reading (including audiobooks).
Same 👍
SAME!! When I read, I notice i can cool off faster when triggered my frustrating things. I fall asleep faster, I wake up more energized. I used to spend a lot of time on tiktok watching short content videos. I would literally feel myself bubble over with frustration/nerves multiple times through the day. If someone pissed me off (something usually small) It would take hours to calm down. I was just so angry like a firecracker all the time.
I was an honor student in high school and the school needs to be blamed partly for this. The timelines which English teachers expected us to finish dense novels was insane. Asking a student to read a whole novel in two weeks while balancing 5 other AP classes and extracurriculars is absurd. Of course students are just going to read a summary online. It's called time management. These unrealistic expectations killed my ability to enjoy reading until years after I got out of college.
Not to mention, I was always more of a math and science person. I'm a quick study, but a slow reader. If I read a novel fast, I won't retain any of the details.
In high school I would feel guilty reading an unassigned book but didn't want to read the assigned one so I’d read neither. Might be better to have students analyze the book of their choice rather than a classic.
@@barbara5807I had an English teacher who did this and at times I will do this in my 1 on 1 class. The problem is scaling. You don't have to "know" your book when you're the only one reading it.
And to you, high school honors student: that sounds like a skill issue. No one forced you to take 5APs
It’s amazing what parents learn about their kids when they actually pay attention
Or maybe the kid is just dyslexic... My parents pay around $84 000+ at the Forman school. Not being able to read is very expensive, it could be neglect or systemic difficultly
@@Katzeblow That's a great school, and you're very lucky that you're getting the help you need! A bit of advice though: you probably shouldn't tell random people on the internet where you go to high school.
Yeah dont tell where you study specially if its a high end school, cuz i feel jealous, if it would be an inexpensive school go for it @@lqtm237
I'm not a parent yet and I'm absolutely dumbfounded how the universities and the education system just push ideas without any testing at all, just because they sound good or make their hearths feel warmth. We are supposed to be a secular scientific civilization, yet we act like the darkest of the middle age cults.
Man, I blame liberalism.
@@Katzeblow Dyslexia isn't a real thing. It's simply not knowing how to read very well at the expected level and resulting shame/avoidance. What is diagnosed depends on a lot of factors but is mainly social and cultural in nature. That's why dyslexia practically doesn't exist outside of the Englishspeaking world where it was briefly popularised (now waning as other 'disorders' have more currency for parents and institutions who need their kids pathologised when they fail to meet expectations or have not been educated properly). It's convenient for someone to say they're ill, it's not their fault, particularly as an adult, rather than admit the deficiency is in laziness or poor education or character/habits. Which are things that they could get help for if they met it with the necessary humility and willingness to improve.
My mother was furious when my elementary school stopped using phonics and started essentially teaching us to read by memorizing words. All the work my parents put in at home was being undone in class. So she doubled down at home and made us read everything, and she used phonics. I am a prolific reader as a result. I am grateful. That being said when it comes to a love of reading sometimes a person just has to find that one special book that sparks their love of reading. For me it was when my grandmother bought me Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I devoured it at 11 years old. Our local grocery store (Superstore for all you fellow Canadians) would dedicate an entire row to the new books when they were released, money was tight but my parents would always buy me the newest Harry Potter book. After Harry Potter it was our junior high librarian that introduced my to Heir Apparent and the Golden Compass series and from there I have continued on to a plethora of other favourites. It’s amazing how a seemingly tiny moment can really change things.
Similarly, my dad got us all reading before we got to school, as he had done teacher training before phonics was being phased out. For that reason I'm a natural reader, and if I'm struggling I tend to think it reflects some deficiency on the clarity of the writing (unless the subject is new to me obviously). Books were the treat we got bought for us as children, we'd hoover them up.
Clearly we do learn meaning through context when reading, but the foundation of my reading is still phonetic.
I agree, it has a lot to do with finding the right book. I was a prolific reader in primary and high school, then became addicted to TV. I've been trying to go back to reading for months now but keep failing because except for one novel and a book series, I just did not find anything that I loved. Maybe because I'm a literature major, maybe because I write myself, I always get stuck on plot flaws or writing style and drop them really quick. It's a bit frustrating and makes me fall back onto TV. It's a lot easier to find a show you like on Netflix, Prime or Viki.
I am an old ( :) so learned reading with phonics at school (and at home). The idea of having to learn _solely_ by context, essentially memorising the "shape of words" etc. is crazy to me (unlike e.g. Chinese, Japanese etc. English as a written language is alphabet based, it's _explicitly_ - if not always rationally :) - _composed_ of smaller pieces so learning how that works seems a totally natural way to teach the _skill_ of reading).
And I totally agree about some book or series setting the spark alight (for me, early on, it was probably Roald Dahl - great kids books IMO, even though he was apparently not such a great guy) which is why it's always a puzzle to read in comments sections when someone's teacher was really irritated because the kid only read e.g. Stephen King in high school - the kid is reading, leave them be. Once the fire's lit they'll find other authors, their tastes will broaden etc.
For me it was the (original) Hardy Boys series. I used to get in trouble for staying up super late and reading under the covers with a flashlight. A few years after I’d read all 58 of them (they’re shorter books and a preteen can read one book in maybe 3-4 days if you really spend the time) I made up my mind to read through the entire series in one summer off school. That would mean I’d have to finish a new book every 2 days. It ended up taking until the middle of September to get through them all but I think just that event of reading such an insane amount and doing nothing but reading all day for so many days was super influential in making me not just love reading but also become an incredibly fast reader, which helped me to no end in grad school when I’d have like 6 or 7 days to read an entire Dickens novel plus 3-4 critical essays on the book. But that eventually burned me out and ruined my love of reading, for a while. I didn’t read a single book again for over 4 years after graduation but then I read a Stephen King novel I’d bought like a decade ago but had never touched (11/22/63). Well that was so good that it got me back into reading in a big way, but the difference is now I really take my time and enjoy the reading itself slowly, instead of trying to “have read” a bunch of books
Good for your mom!
I could barely speak English at 18 and only took up reading at 21 - pretty much convinced that I had wrecked my brain for good and desperate for a way to reverse the damage, after spending my entire childhood and adolescence hooked on screens.
I never was the brightest light in the chandelier, nor the most reliable - I suffer from ADHD and would probably scrub the dirt off the sidewalks before sitting down to read a textbook.
It only took one book: The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb - and braindead me was never to be seen again... Now, I’m plowing through ~150 books a year, from all disciplines, old and new, most of which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed and all of which have either inspired, edified, and/or instructed me. Reading has become its own reward and the single most fulfilling activity I like to dedicate myself towards.
The brain is a weird machine…
Sounds epic!
I would just say that eventually you might want to slow down and instead of fitting 150 books in a year, perhaps try and focus on a much smaller number, and reread in a rotation if you're already done with them. Take time to really ingest the material, and perhaps even write little essays to yourself about them.
Love it! If you don't already, start keeping track of them with a simple reading log -- trust me, after several thousand, you'll be glad you did!
And grillin chillin has a good point too, it's good to mix things up with some challenging, slower, and more considered reading as well. It's like weight training, changing your approach from time to time (or book to book) improves your overall growth.
@@grillinnchillin4009 Re-reading is a strategy I ignored for the longest time. But it really does help you digest more of the material; I'll often find some highly interesting detail that I don't recall at all from the first reading. I also find that particularly with fiction and poetry, the resonance with my own life can be very different when I'm reading them years apart. Maybe the first time I read something it didn't seem all that remarkable, but the second time, I was experiencing something in life that had similiarity with the story/poem, and that made the connection so much deeper. You'll also relate to characters differently depending your own age.
What is your original language?
Now write a 750 word book review for each book you read!
I never read at all growing up. I didn’t have the attention span. But when i went to college, I had trouble making friends and decided that instead of doom scrolling all night, i wanted to try and read. Now, when I read regularly, I notice i can cool off faster when triggered my frustrating things. I fall asleep faster, I wake up more energized. I used to spend a lot of time on tiktok watching short content videos. I would literally feel myself bubble over with frustration/nerves multiple times through the day. If someone pissed me off (something usually small) It would take hours to calm down. I was just so angry like a firecracker all the time. I still have reactions to things that piss me off, but within minutes, i calm down and move on!
For me it's social media. It Fd up my attention span and patience. But I found a Hungarian author by the name of István Örkény. He wrote so called one-minute short stories. They are quite good for getting back into reading since they don't require much mental stamina or discipline to read. Even the author admits he wrote them specifically this way so readers can "save time".
that's not really solving the issue
Same. I have stopped using Facebook a while a go but other social media just filled that void. Moreover, it is sad that books have to be adapted for our short attention span and busy lives. I will always remember Moby Dick. While I don't really like the story but I love how it is written, the language and how it flows. And sadly, those kind of books are not short and they are written in a more advanced language.
@@qwertyiuwg4uwtwthn its not meant to solve anything. its meant to be a start so you can slowly grow your reading stamina
@@100MilesEast I mean the reason why these short stories are good because they were not adapted. The guy wrote them as literary experiments. I think the collection was released in the 60s. I'd recommend them if you like the dark satire of WWII and early cold war era
I believe his goal was to eliminate the excuse of not having enough time, but I don't know, I like spending a lot of time on good things, so a minute long story sort of automatically can't be the best thing ever.
This is really interesting to me. I'm a 20-year-old junior in college. I was homeschooled from K-12th grade. The curriculum my parents used to teach me had an extensive focus on phonics, and even beyond that, I was required to read entire books throughout high school and middle school. I had no idea that in public schools, phonics are a thing of the past. I've been so taken aback during my time in college by how illiterate most students are. Now it makes a lot more sense.
What curriculum did you learn to read with.
They're illiterate not because of the methodology of how they were taught to read but because they simply didn't read books. My sister taught me to read in the backseat of our car on the thirty minute drive to our grandmother's house. I was a teacher for ten years. Since college I've known that university schools of education had a lot of pure BS. What happened a few decades ago is that people who were really interested in learning gravitated to psychology and behaviorism. If you look up 'Educational research' you'll find all these pointless arguments about phonics and whole language learning. But google, "The science of Expertise," and you'll find the people who are actually making progress. K. Anders Ericsson studied the 10,000 hours theory. You can find his most important 5 (maybe more now) articles online. You can read them in a couple of hours and lean a lot about how to learn. (The statistical analysis of his procedure.... skip that. ) I did this one Saturday morning and was just popping with ideas on lessons for my students and for myself. Then I read one of the education periodicals I was sent as a teacher. Suddenly I felt kind of stupid... How was it that I'd read PhD work, no problem and yet this .....? So I went back through it. Most of these 'education journal' articles hinge on some jargon. String two or three words together. "Phonetical Introspective Activation." Now just start writing about it as if your reader already knows what it means.... Voila! The entire article will be absolutely meaningless and ready to publish.
And every truly educated person is an autodidact. Whatever is assigned is never enough.
I homeschool my kids and I have read to them picture books and chapter books daily. They read complete books for history and literature. I cannot imagine not using books in educating a young person.
Same on being homeschooled K-12, (even though I graduated college in 2014) and I remember using phonics and kinetic methods like spelling things out in the air. We've always been huge readers and it was always baffling when I met other kids who had to read everything out loud even as teens
Another with the same story. I learned using a phonics-based curriculum being homeschooled. I'm 43 now, and have been a life-long reader, I could easily read 2 or 3 novels in a week, or 1-2 6-800 page long collections in a week. I often read a book a week just for enjoyment.
As a guy who grew up in the mid 90's into the really early 00's, I was a kid who HATED reading. I had/have a comprehension problem that was ignored by the school for too long when I was really little and that effected me significantly all through elementary school and high school. It hasn't been until the last few years that I've taken to reading and enjoying it. Yes, I'm a VERY slow reader and some times I have trouble really grasping themes and deeper meaning, but, I'm progressing and now have two bookshelves full of books (which little me would have never believed haha)! A lot of this has been because of channels like yours Jared. You and other's like you have inspired me to challenge myself with reading more and more. While also introducing me to texts that I never would have looked at before. Yes, people reading books are in a sharp decline, but there are still a few people who are now picking up books for the first time to read simply for enjoyment!
Keep up the great work Jared!
Take care
Could you suggest some channels?
I am the same age, and I went through very similar struggles. I flew under the radar because I could decode words, but I had serious comprehension difficulties. When I was a college student, I was scared to participate in conversations about texts in classes, because I didn't ever seem to grasp what my classmates could grasp. I always felt rushed and confused. It wasn't until I studied education myself that I started to be able to fill in my educational gaps. I also find Jared's channel really motivating!
It’s mostly our shift to short-form video media, like this.
It’s re-training our brains to process information differently.
When I was in 4th grade I could already read at a college level.
Now, I struggle to make it through a full work report.
Our brains are flexible. We can gain skills, and lose them if not practiced.
I hated reading books, and my middle school Language Arts teacher knew that I was super competitive with anything. He had the amazing idea of making a competition of reading 50 books in a year, with different themes and genres (to avoid reading only fictional books).
That teacher changed me forever, he knew us so well that our competitive nature would force us to fall in love with reading.
More than half of our class pull of reading 20 books and 10 (including me) managed to read 50. The beauty of leveraging a specific trait from a child is that once they get that feeling of pleasure by reading books, you must make sure they understand that they have to enjoy the book and if they don’t, they SHOULD NOT keep reading it to the end.
Fun fact: this class was in the US, I didn’t speak very good English, and he made me fall in love with reading both in English and in my native language, plus I learned English exponentially faster with those 50 books.
2 for 1 combo for one of my favorite teachers in my academic life.
How did he know that you acually read it?
@@noob78 he didn’t, we had a report paper where you mentioned the books you have read but you could obviously lie. I guess the easiest way to prove if we were telling the truth was by looking at us be quiet reading books during his class. I doubt there is a child that could fake reading books for a year and be still for 2 hours. Hahahahah
This, for me anyway, is pretty much the only legitimate use for "reading challenges" - to get a reluctant kid over that initial hump.
(whereas for adults I mostly don't really get it personally. If you're reading for work/study then it has its own built-in "challenge" pressure anyway and if you're reading for recreation then read _what_ you want to read, _when_ you want to read it - if you have to "game-ify" reading to make yourself do it then i'd say it's not the hobby/pastime for you and that's perfectly fine, there are plenty of other worthwhile ways to spend your leisure time)
@@anonymes2884 I totally agree with you, people think that reading is some kind of worldwide competition of who reads more books every week/year.
I believe reading has to be like having great conversations with a friend when going out. Sometimes you have 20 of those in one year, and sometimes you have only 5.
The number of books is not correlated with the knowledge intake and pleasure of the reader. After getting over that hump you said (as a child or an adult), you should already know the beauty of reading and stop making it a competition, and rather a hobby.
It’s like a sport, playing any sport is fun and healthy. Competitions usually make it less fun because of stress and pressure to win a worthless medal (except for professional players). Some people enjoy competitions and that’s fine, but the sport should be enjoyable fundamentally without any competition.
I would probably feel rather defeated by something like that. I actively read every single day, usually for at least an hour, but I'm very slow, and most books take me more than a month to get through. I'd've finished the year having finished maybe 10 books in total and probably would have been written off as one of the lazy ones who didn't care about reading.
High school English teacher here. You are 100% correct on everything in this video.
Elementary school classroom teacher here to second that motion.
college prof. here -- yes, this is all correct.
It probably doesn't help that there are websites like sparknotes that summarize books and help students get by...
Ma’am/Sir, how’s the teaching experience as a whole?
I am considering to take an English degree and I’ve been thinking about it for the past weeks. I do hope that this decision will be rewarding in the near future.
He is wrong about blaming whole language. Weak argument.
PHONICS IS NOT BORING. Wordplay is fun. Repetition leads to quick mastery, which makes kids feel smart and successful, which is fun. Guessing is not reading. Decoding words is reading. Yours Sincerely, A Fifteen Year Veteran Teacher
Yes, and learning latin word roots and components so you can actually figure out at least partially what a word means because you know what a word ending in -itis indicates, or how adding anti- as a prefix affects the word.
Best comment so far
@ohkaypretty But we know this "whole language" method was about test preparation.
I wholeheartedly agree phonics is better, but that takes more time and NCLB needed a shortcut to get kids to pass those tests! It was all about the money at the expense of our kids' actually learning to read!
@@zakiya1635 The whole language philosophy is not primarily about test prep - it's about the idea that a child being able to derive meaning from a text is more important than decoding each individual word. This is why they teach readers to use "cues" from the book to guess at unfamiliar words - "cues" like looking at the picture, looking at the first letter, or thinking about what type of word would make sense in the sentence. Just guess at the unfamiliar words, and the child will land on the correct meaning of the text, is what they propose. Whole language proponents argue that students become bored of decoding unfamiliar words sound-by-sound and lose sight of the meaning of the text. Of course, it's obvious that students also lose the meaning of the text when they _can't decode the words_
repetition leads to long term memory retention, an annual red cross trainer always said. over 60 now but I still remember thick folders of phonics worksheets from very early grades. reading opened new worlds of possibilities for me; it's strange and sad to hear some phased them out...
As someone who is severely dyslexic, I also wish there was an increase in audio books available for college classes. I definitely can’t read a whole book I a week, but I can listen to one and take notes!
This is a wonderful 'discussion'. I'm in my very late 50's. In the 6th grade I used to check out 10 books on a Friday and read all of them over the course of the weekend and return them on Monday. Perfect for a rainy day weekend. I had no idea this had been going on. Thank you for educating me.
Yes, and it was a discussion authored by Rose Horowitch in her article in The Atlantic. This guy just paraphrases her article and doesn't even mention her or the effort she went through to write this piece. This guy is a thief.
@@rugbybeefHer work along with many others is cited in the description of the video. There are links to all of them.
You must always be in the Top Borrower list in your library! I used to be one too. 😊
47 here, and same! I used to love the book reading contests the library held. Oh and the Scholastic book fair at school was always something to look forward to! I've certainly never found reading boring. But even so, I could see social media starting to impact my focus and long-term concentration. I've since cut most of it out, but I feel for those kids. They never even got a chance to appreciate reading. They've got to start from scratch almost and retrain their brain at an older age. That's got to be difficult.
@@savetheunstable Oh that made me remember the bookmobile!! During the summers they would come out to our neighborhood and I would check out books. Thank you for stirring that memory!
0:21 Just an aside... Reading a long and dense book in a week every week while juggling organic chemistry, biochemistry, and some other time-intensive science courses as a premed does sound undoable for reasons aside from reading skill, especially for a freshman who's still adjusting to college life, and I bet they aren't just "talking" about those books as much as requiring a degree of understanding to do essays on them. I spent almost a week on hansel and gretel because of all the nuances to write an essay on it (last time I take a class called fairy tales thinking it'd be easy and come out an expert on child psychology, they trick'd me good.), and that is a short story, not a book. For a class like that, I'd be more worried about devoting 2 hours a day just to finish the average length book in a week (not counting the extra time to revisit parts and mark for discussion/essay citations), and fall behind on studying for the rest of my classes, especially with everything being graded on a curve. So yes, read well or not, I'd complain to the professor too.
I agree. He says that college students have a lot of free time, which I disagree with. Many college students have a full course load and likely have jobs or other commitments. Learning to maximize your time is key, and sometimes reading an entire book(especially if it’s not for a class for your major) can seem like a waste of time.
Why do you consider 2 hours a day spent reading to be a worrisomely-large amount of time? If you assume 4 hours in-class weekly for each of 5 classes, that's 4 daily hours of classes. If each class also requires 2 daily hours of study/homework, that leaves 10 hours for sleeping and meals on weekdays, with weekends left completely free.
@@KerrickLong throw in a job, clubs, and other classes asking for 2 hours of your day outside of classes, and suddenly *poof* its all gone
@@KerrickLong2daily hours of study/homework is a pretty big underestimate for a lot of science/engineering courses.
@@KerrickLong Even by your calculation, if you want to get 8 hours of sleep, that only leaves 2 hours for reading and meals. And maybe meals take 45 mins of your day (15 mins for each meal) if you're just having microwavable meals. Then you'll need 30 mins for miscellaneous stuff (getting ready in the morning/getting ready for bed, etc.). That then leaves 45 mins for reading and that's a very generous estimate considering things can come up or a student might be burnt out from 14 hours of mentally challenging work.
Content like this forces me to keep some amount of faith in the overall good purpose of present day internet,
I'm glad there's people responsible enough to criticise a mindless practice through which i came across their critique in the first place.
Thanks for helping me remember about the real world, even if only briefly
Family and community are the bastions that stand against global Obamunism
You can't trust any online person's motives these days.
Anything recommended by a Google algorithm is de facto endorsed by them.
Google is VERY close to the Xhinese Xommunist Party, as is all Western Media which has very malevolent intentions to the West.
Thank you! I shared this video with my son’s Language Arts teacher & expressed my concerns about kids not reading books anymore, and she forwarded to her higher ups! I really hope maybe this can be used to affect change, at least in my school district!
I don't unserstand. My parents taught me phonics and how to read when I was 3-4. What could possibly be more important?
Reading stamina. That is exactly what I'm seeing in myself and others. I've been saying why can't I stay in a book longer like I used to? Apparently it's this device I'm typing on. Thank you for giving it a name and one of the causes. This will help me do better.
I was one of the kids that would read the required books in English class, I still read consistently today. The issue I have is when reading something heavy, I can’t read quickly and retain anything. I feel that my memory has gotten worse and the only social media I use daily is UA-cam. Can’t imagine if I had all the others too, as the shorts are damaging enough I believe.
Thanks for sharing, I appreciate your perspective and topic.
Same. The neural pathways for concentrated reading are gone.
I truly believe Tiktok is poisonous to your brain. It makes me feel the way I felt when my dissociative disorder was at its work. Same goes for FB and YT shorts
@Chasing-the-outdoors reading quickly and retaining information is not easy. It requires a lot of practice, particularly I believe in terms of short term memory. I find it helps if you simplify points in your head, that way you don't have to remember too much jargon.
I was the same but soon developed the strategy of taking notes as a memory aid . Writing them down was the trick for me. No teacher ever worked on learning strategies . it was sink or swim in high school in the 60s. Now that I think of it, it was sink or swim all through elementary school as an esl student starting kindergarten in 1953. I swam all the way through grad school. All my kids were great fans of phonics as sounding out new word spellings confirmed the vocabulary bank they had already acquired by constantly being read to as infants onwards.
I would argue that most authors are bad at conveying ideas clearly. Possibly my favorite book is Frankenstein but Shelly was quite prone to rambling and nesting too many concepts in a sentence, where deciphering what noun/event "that" is referring to or which character "he" is referring to requires a laborious chain of logic backtracking sometimes.
Your memory is probably fine. You'll retain information that you think is interesting, useful, logical. If you can't follow the chain of ideas then author may be to blame, they are just humans too.
Yep. As a parent, I've been pretty alarmed at the lack of requirement to read entire books...and that seemed to accompany the high-stakes testing. I was able to fight that with my kids -- one is a voracious reader and the other really enjoys reading and does it for pleasure even though he's dyslexic, but at least part of that was heavy modeling from me and my husband. And when you talk about context...the meaning of a passage can seem entirely different when it's divorced from the rest of the book.
As a parent myself, I find this comment very relatable. My older boy reads long, worthwhile books (literature, history…) cover to cover.
My younger son finds extended reading harder, but loves immersing himself in favourite chapters for short periods, and is always quoting and discussing passages and elements of books that he loves. He loves books and can read well even though he isn’t a natural reader. So the foundation is there, and we’ll just keep fostering!
We've taken those tests for generations, and if placing an emphasis on reading comprehension after we all already know how to read by sounding out the words is a problem, I'm not sure he proved it. It was a fine way to learn to read. And, really, how many of us are ever required to read a book in a single week unless we're taking a college lit class - which makes us a self-selecting group - and it's a relatively short book?
I'm not sure he really backed up any of what he was trying to put out there, to be honest. It seemed more like making excuses after the fact that people simply don't prioritize reading, or providing an emphasis on education in the home. That's not whole language learning's fault.
@cobbler88 I'm less inclined to put blame on whole-language learning. I've seen very little emphasis on it being the only method used, and my mother was both taking lots of coursework on teaching reading (and talking about it -- I helped her study for tests) when I was a teen in the 80s and teaching reading thereafter as someone who specialized in the primary grades, eventually settling into Kindergarten. The general mantra I saw and heard was that you need both because sounding out words doesn't mean you understand what you're reading and because there are different words that are spelled the same. I'm wary of the claim that the use of solely whole language methods was a widespread thing. It certainly didn't seem to be when I was in primary grades during the 70s, when my mom was studying in the 80s, or when my kids were in the primary grades during the 2000s.
The high-stakes testing was not a normal thing in most of the US until NCLB (signed in 2002), and it saw rather dranatic changes in terms of book reading requirements as the testing became a big deal. Just to give a feel, I saw a stark decrease in expectations for book reports and full book-related projects between my third grade and my childrens' third grades, and that sort of thing was consistent throughout the rest of their schooling. When I was going through elementary school, it was the norm for teachers to read entire books out loud to the class a chapter at a time...all the way through elementary school, and the books were slightly above what was considered grade-level reading. In high school for me there were excerpts (for example, a few chapters of Paradise Lost rather than the whole thing) and short stories, but we also read a LOT of full books, had class discussions on them, etc. Usually we had 2-3 weeks, particularly for a longer book, but reading entire books and being asked to write about them was a regular thing and the normal state of things in English class. By the time my kids went to high school, there were surrounding districts where kids (even in honors) graduated high school without ever having to read an entire book cover to cover for class. The shift from being given several weeks to get through a book to having one week to get through a book was small. The shift from never having to read a whole book for class to getting through a book a week is a large one.
@@amw6846 See, we rarely had to read books, period, for a standard English class. We only really had to do it in lit-type classes. If the schools were burning kids' education hours having them read books in standard English classes, I could honestly argue that - counter to the general theme of all of this - having kids reading so many books was detrimental to their education.
Its your responsibility to help your children lovebooks ans reading.
I think the largest factor for me is that books quickly became less accessible than other forms of media. Why go to a library to pick up leisure reading (in a car centric mess that requires driving/an adult as a child) when you can find virtually any video media online for free without navigating the hellscape of American urbanism. The second part is the monopoly of Amazon on kindle and Audible.
No Child Left Behind has done so much damage to the educational system in the US. Like they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Right. The kids stopped caring when they knew they would pass anyway
It wasn't that. No Child Left behind basically removed the LITERAL TIME and Curriculum that existed in the 90s and prior where teachers set their own classroom activities. This meant a natural and wide range of customized education.
No Child Left behind introduced very specific state tests that REQUIRE students to pass the test to move on. Grades are not as important. Actual knowledge is irrelevant.
It was a cookie cutter program with the same tests dispersed to all schools, and when collected they were graded by a government machine in the Pacific Northwest (yes, no humans) like a automated digital voting machine.
So even in 2002, in my senior year of high school (second year of no child left behind) we spent the entire year on computers taking practice tests and memorizing questions and answers to past the tests. THAT was my education those two years.
A HUGE culture shock versus the rest of the years I was in High School in the 90s and my time in elementary school in the 80s and early 90s.
Ask any Elder Millennial, and they will tell you that as the first wave of kids that graduated in that experiment - we were complaining even back then, that it was gonna doom education.
And we uniquely knew better than any generation prior or since, because we spent almost our entire school era in the old system - and then got a taste in our last two years of what No Child Left Behind had for the next generation.
I remember the year Bush rolled it out, my school fired half the teachers and filled their slots with substitutes because all they needed was someone to go over work books with us, and baby sit as we spent everyday behind monitors taking practice tests.
Basically our education became starting the year off with a mound of practice exam books representing the end of semester state tests. And from the start the goal was to prepare us to pass the tests. That's it.
We didn't have time to learn WHY the answers to the questions were as they were. There was only enough time to hammer in that when we see Question A, you are to answer with B. And most the exams where multiple-choice.
So it boiled down to a substitute reading a magazine while we took practice tests and if we needed a answer, the sub would dig out the book with all the state tests answers and tell us which letter was the answer (so we could remembered it).
Thank God the two years I put up with that system, were arguably the least important two in my education. At the school I attended, the environment became so apathetic that students would just leave half way thru the day and go home since if they already memorized all the questions and answers that day, there was nothing more to do at school.
I'm sure things changed in later years as they came to grips with No Child Left Behind (when they rolled it out on my group, it was over night and a head blow) - and probably figured out of to teach within the new system.
But I have a younger brother who ended up going to med school, and even he still claims that he learned nothing from public HS school at that time he spent in 2005-2009.
Luckily for kids today and unluckily for my younger brother - No Child Left behind was such a catastrophic failure that it was essentially disbanded and no longer a federal requirement by the early 2010s (the law barely made it a decade). Though some states and school districts stubbornly clunge to it (by their choice) much longer.
The REAL victims however are those whom your own comment ignorantly is not acknowledging. The fact is that a large chunk of kids DID not pass SOLs (or whatever the test was called in your state), either because they failed to be present all year (often kids with learning disabilities or disadvantaged home lives so they worked).
Because of this, if you go back and look at the data: during that time period Drop Out rates and kids choosing to pursue GEDS skyrocketed.
I knew plenty of kids who made it to 11th and 12th grade, had passable marks and still failed any ONE of the state tests. Failing JUST ONE was a automatic fail of the grade and a repeat the next year.
Most those kids, knowing they were about to turn 18, and not wanting to be 20 in High School choose to leave school after that. My close friend failed TWO years in a row, and had B grades - but was dyslexic and legally blind, and couldn't make heads or tails of the English test. He failed the same test two years in a row.
So I'm not sure what your talking about when you say kids knew they were going to pass.
@@mr.selfimprovement3241 They do know. They literally stopped failing them and making them repeat grades. My son ia autistic to the degree you can immediately tell just looking at him and hes not a TV autistic like savant. He wont do his work but hes never been failed.
@@mr.selfimprovement3241Interestingly enough the students that have been raised in the no child left behind era will most likely not even be able to read your long comment.😅
Something tells me that this whole diminishing knowledge curriculum was done on purpose to dumb the people down to control them better.
When no child is left behind, everyone is. The group can only move as fast as the slowest person
I'm so grateful that you're bringing attention to this topic. It needs to be part of the public dialogue. We need to be thinking about how this affects our society at large as well as how it affects individuals in their personal lives.
Harry Potter was a huge boost to reading in the nineties because the fandom was so big people wanted to read the books who had a hard time reading. My kids would read them and they were not YA sized even. They were unique in that they grew with the readers as far as the reading level of the books. So what we need is a new set of books that gives back that fire spark of reading. Remember your brain does not have a budget your imagination is not limited to whatever schedule the CGI company has. People should quit writing to choose actors for their character's parts or write for eventual movie deals. Write a book so that it cannot be made into a movie.
Read the full series 7 times
You can study symbolism and conduct close reading of short texts. You do not necessarily need to read an entire book to practice these concepts. English classes perform this constantly with poetry for example.
Also, students at Columbia University complaining they can’t read a whole book might be the case if each professor is asking them to read a book a week. 1 book a week for each class would be 5-7 books a week, which is in fact worthy of complaint.
Some of the points you’re bringing up are being said in such a specific context.
I do agree that attention spans are lower now because of technology. However, post-COVID has shown an increase in reading among young people. This can be seen in barns and nobles around the country becoming established.
Great video. I'm one of the few who learned to love reading in university. All thanks to a great literature professor and his ability to push me as a student. My stamina has gotten less(mainly due to my phone) but I'm so happy that my 8 year old's first love is reading.
Find a list of quality book titles at Ambleside Online.
It's very interesting that my Caribbean high school education prepared me more than the US education system. We read tons of books during my school life for various classes, fun books &, and boring books! We were also taught reading through phonics. And our phones weren't allowed in the classroom. We were focused on test taking but that was only during our last year or 2 of high school. Otherwise we were learning to learn! When I moved to the US, I always found it weird how students from my home country always EXCELLED! Like it'd be students who were at low ranked middle or high schools completely eating up the American high school system and getting full ride scholarships to prestigious universities. I guess this explains some of it.
Hello, fellow west Indian here. I emigrated to the US from Jamaica in the 90s. The school system was so bad I had to transfer to private school. Catholic school Curriculum was still behind Jamaica as well. Whenever a relative visited the island they ALWAYS came back with the school readers! Every grade- every subject- you name it and cousins would share the books. This is the only way to neutralize the wacky teaching in the US schools.
I have to counter some of the innercity schools are so bad that you have to be careful being an honor student there. That's why my family tries to keep up with the Jamaica curriculum for each grade. It's gut-wrenching when a student spends 3 years in remedial classes because their high school practiced grade inflation or had a lax curriculum. 🇯🇲 🇯🇲
Pandemic happened, I started watching video essays and some interesting subjects that provides insight. I wasn’t exposed with books until this month(like actually reading it), I decided that I want and need to spend time reading for pleasure and also being aware(without too much pressure).
Though I started writing journal before, it did helped get a starter ground.
Taking a step at time.
Thank you for your honesty. People are not reading anymore.
Mid thirties here, I lost my reading stamina from 15-25 and only completed a book every year or two. Now I’m back to reading on a regular basis.
The main change was commuting by train which I find to be an extremely nice place to read.
For me it was working at a call center. 😅 Hated the job, but I got *so much* reading done while people wouldn't answer my auto dialer. It's how I read all of the A Song of Ice & Fire and Throne of Glass series, along with what was out at the time for A Court of Thorns and Roses.
For me the biggest change was to download ebooks on my phone, so if I find myself scrolling mindlessly for too long I can switch to the books app and read instead. It helps to break the addictive cycle, at least for the moment. I also try to delete instagram and TikTok from my phone every few months to get a detox
DRM and bad digital tech is part of the problem. The Kindle ecosystem is designed for generating and capturing customer behavior telemetry, not for organizing eBooks like Calibre. My 4K screen cannot scroll text at its 144hz refresh rate because Chromium and other text rasterization tech is built to maximize Internet ad clients, not visual performance.
I’m really curious about why scrolling text at 144hz matters? I usually run my book to 0.033hz when I’m reading, and paginating seems to work on my digital tools. I actually avidly dislike the feeling of paper so I prefer to not read from tree slices, but I’m currently taking a class that has a textbook that isn’t available digitally, so here we are.
Well, there are less shitty e-readers
@@thedave1771 My brain is in a state of autistic synesthesia (blended senses)- where I hear dozens of words simultaneously each second like a symphony. I often read at around 2,000 words per minute. The refresh rate of Chromium (which Calibre, my eBook reader is based on) is simply inadequate to move text fluidly at the speed my brain snapshots and comprehends it. More frames actually amount to more sensory bandwidth. This is consistent with classic theorists of communication and sensation like Marshall McLuhan.
@tayzonday You are a legend! It is so refreshing that an internet celebrity is speaking up so forcefully about this! All these digital distractions should be classified like narcotics. I’ve been reading Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus which touches on this very concept and short of disconnecting yourself from society it’s about being aware the dangers this tech poses and cherishing your focus and attention above all else.
@@tayzonday have you tried building your own reader?
I was born in the 60s and read all through primary school, high school, and college, and to the present. In 6th grade, I was reading at a 10th grade level. Considering my major in college, I read more than one book per week. Phonics vs. whole language isn't the reason why attention spans are shorter. My reading material came from carefully edited books and teachers instead of twitter. Television was four channels plus PBS, so that provided a lot of incentive to visit the library regularly.
I've been saying that too. After school for 2hours, and Saturday morning until lunchtime were the "kids" shows. It made you have to get up. And ads helped us stop being sucked into a show too much either
Last year my teenage daughter told me that she wanted to work part time to get money for her things, so I made a deal with her: I prepared a list of books and I told her that I will give her $25 for each book she read, with a one page hand written review as proof.
She started slowly, but after a couple books she really got engaged, reading faster a more every week, and engaging in conversation over a coffee to discuss her readings. After a year her vocabulary, pronunciation and orthography improved a lot! Later she asked for a break, but she still reads books on her own just for fun. She learned to enjoy reading.
Best investment of my life!
Thank you for posting. I homeschool my children. And it was always very important to teach our children to love reading. We always feel that if you can read, you can teach almost anything to yourself. Although they ask for phones, we always say no. We have seen firsthand how it affects children. We are not willing to jeopardize their education. I did learn some things from this report that i will be adding to our reading regiment. Thank you.
Dont forget the changes in society as a whole over the last 100 to 150 years. It used to be that the only way to get news, learn anything, or entertain your self was by word of mouth, or reading. Books, newspapers, magazines, trade publications.
Then radio, television and the Internet came along. Audio books and videos that transmit information. Sometimes more effectively, sometimes less, but in both cases differently than by text.
Great piece. I am so grateful to be Canadian, where French immersion is free. Learning French grammar is the only reason I can read in English.
Absolutely fascinating. Unfortunate trend, but thank you for distilling and disseminating all this info
You recommended in a previous video to purchase a Kindle or other book reader and take it everywhere and read in small increments of free time throughout the day (versus being on the phone). This a great suggestion and am planning to improve my reading stamina using this recommendation. Thanks!
is very useful suggestion, a portable ereader able to increase the convenience for us to grab n read. And comfortable to eyes because is e ink device
I bought my first Kindle three or four months ago, and it has really brought me back to books.
I’m the type of person who love analog. I love love love paper books. I was used to always carrying books around. I grew up as that kid with always a book in hand, a book in my bag.
But after a period of buying both hard bound books and ebooks, even I was forced to admit that I am more likely to finish reading a book if it was in my device. It’s just so portable.
I still bring my paper books with me on vacations though. And I intentionally keep the devices away.
@Villanelle2 I still prefer paper books, but my Kobo Libra is great. Idk anything about Kindle devices, but i assume it would be similar. 😅 It's just really nice how light they are, and that you can make the font bigger or change the kind of font to reduce eye strain.
(OK, well I looked it up online. If people CAN afford a kobo, maybe buy that so you're not held hostage by Amazon lol. But I know the price of Kindle is a lot more approachable).
@@Tessa_Ru Yes, the ability to change font sizes and stuff like that really helps these boomer eyes keep reading.
I learned to read at 4,our house had a long bookshelf with poetry Shakespeare,Poe,Tolstoy ,botany books,art,encyclopedias,I also read science,biography,we never had tv ,I am in my 70s and read informational books ,science,psychology,neuroscience,engineering ,math ,history ,biographies,I am a life long learner,I read minimum of 2 to 3 books a week,I also ,do book reports on what I read,I keep journals li make my own cliff notes
Great video essay. I was a bookworm growing up but when I got to college (Fine Arts/Design) I was so busy, with so many other pleasurable things to do, that I was barely reading the required excerpts. It took me years to build my reading stamina back. I try to remember what happened whenever I stay a couple of days away from my books. Now, being an Engineer, I see how many of my students or colegues have a hard time understanding themes or taking key concepts from whole texts. They easily get lost with texts that are not directly instructive. I can't imagine most of them being able to read Tolstoy or Camus, which is such a loss. But I do understand where it comes from, and your video made it other reasons even more clear. Hopefully, this debate will help us make better pedagogical choices moving forward.
That reading stamina point is so real. I grew up loving reading, and would read about a book a week in my free time up throughout high school. When I switched from physical to digital though, I started getting more audiobooks. Now I almost only “read” using audiobooks and I’ve started noticing that reading physical books is a lot more difficult for me. I still consume about the same number of books this way, but I really don’t like this shift in my brain and now that I’ve noticed it I’m actively trying to fix it
There’s a book called “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr on this subject. My English professor made our class read it. It has to do with reading stamina (Neuroplasticity) and how the medium of technology is changing our brains. Good read if anyone’s interested.
Oh yeah - the guy who wrote "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" for The Atlantic.
Thanks for the book recommendation!
Is there a short 10-or-so-minute-long video summary of it, by any chance?
@@pooroldnostradamus😂😂😂 sorry this is so funny for some reasons
@@pooroldnostradamus * chef's kiss * :)
I have 5 kids, 16 consecutive years of public high school. My youngest is now a senior. I ask his teacher at back to school night for a reading list. She gleefully replied “oh we won’t be reading any full books. All are readings will come from from excerpts and articles.”
I live in Australia, gen x. I left school without the ability to read and write properly. I completed year 12 education. It took me 15 years to regain reading and writing skills. Struggled at uni and dropped out. When homeless I would look at signs and words quickly and try to respell them, did this for hours. I can now read 1300 page novels and read endocrinology textbook like a paper a back novel. Les miserables is one book every student should read.
Our
@@flyguy437
🙄… I’ll just leave it “their” since you’ve replied.
Nothing wrong with that. You can cover a lot more material by reading many different excerpts than a few books
@@mustang8206 The few books are better. One can better understand what the author was saying. Cherry picking ideas can misrepresent the author's intent.
Thanks very much bro! this video will change my life, I will start reading everyday FROM NOW.
Excellent, excellent, Jared! I have a friend that discusses this topic regularly. We are both big readers. If you discipline yourself enough to become a good reader, and if you do not waste time reading junk books, but instead read good literature, it will improve your writing skills, as well. Reading good books also helps to train the mind to grasp concepts and have critical thinking you certainly will not get from going on TikTok.
After taking constitutional law in college and reading an enormous textbook with a font the size of that on a pill bottle, I began reading less because it would strain my eyes, even with glasses. I read books on Audible now, and this has enabled me to really dig into quite a few terrific, albeit long, books.
PS: My aunt was the principal of an elementary school and advised me to read daily to my daughter from the time she was an infant, and get my relatives and friends to read. This taught her that everyone reads, and reading is a fun activity. During Covid I got on Facetime every single day and read to my granddaughter, my husband read to her, and we continued to purchase books - some for their house and some for our house. Thanks for writing this, Jared. It is an interesting topic.
4:17 This was my thought, they stopped requiring novels, they only required excerpts. I noticed that when my son was in school.
I found this so interesting. I was not taught phonics, but I entered school already reading. Being supported in that activity at home made a difference. I was lucky. I am a busy reader, but yes, online is so alluring after a long day. Working at historic sites, I constantly see people not read, and attempt to extract information. I didn't realize they'd been taught this! But it's surreal when someone looks at a floor-to-ceiling Civil War monument and asks if the building was built in 1865 because that date, among others, can be extracted from it. It's as if they can't even use design or visuals to infer what things are. My students, same, such as not knowing that small print on a page under a painting is info about that painting. I'm equally fascinated and miserable after watching you. Now I'm going to read, though...
Thank you, this was very interesting and thought provoking. 📚
Thanks for addressing the problem without being judgmental.
This breaks my heart. Books are the closest thing we have to magic in this world, and so many humans are missing out on the experience.
I disagree. I think that magic tricks are the closest thing we have to magic in this world.
Literalman strikes again@@spacegene-guild
Mushrooms are pretty good. 🍄
I love that!
all the arts are like magic
Wow. I'm blown away by your insight. I love to read for pleasure, and for learning. As a grad student, I feel like that's all I'm doing is reading textbooks and writing essays! Sadly, I think you're onto something when you talk about adults who have stopped reading. When I was younger, and there was no internet, I feel like I could focus more than I can, now. I've taken to setting a timer to make sure I just focus on the reading, or whatever other assignment I'm working on at the time. It helps, but I find myself plunging into the 'net or social media (or UA-cam) more than is healthy during my downtime. Like you said, I end up feeling crappy at the end of the day.
So happy to seeing more and more awareness of the problems with whole word reading.
I cant believe you didnt mention sparknotes! I graduated college within the last few years and did in fact struggle with the stuff mentioned here. They assigned whole books in my high school honors classes, but i never read them cover to cover. Why would i when i could read the sparknotes and get an A and i already understood how to do this stuff. But not having to sit through the whole book really shot me in the foot when in terms of reading stamina
"Compared to doing other things, the act of reading is really boring." THANK YOU for saying this. It's true. I think it's probably why audiobooks are so popular - many people want to engage with literature, but have so many other things that they want or need to do throughout the day that it simply isn't feasible to settle down with a physical book much of the time.
THIS. I'm a stay at home mom. Even when the kids are in school, I'm running errands, doing chores or yardwork, maybe fixing something in the house. None of which allows for me to sit and read. Audiobooks have been a GODSEND.
I believe finding reading "boring" may be a symptom of a very severe underlying pathology. Although I have to admit enjoying my phone occasionally especially for outside news sources, the fact that some people find reading boring is almost certainly because lack of practice in this skill. Consequently their imagination is seriously underdeveloped to the point where it may be considered functionally disabled. I don't say this lightly as I feel this will be a very great problem for society in the future as it is only from imagination that new ideas come. When I am reading I don't remember turning pages or moving my eyes and the book just becomes a movie in my head. The whole story is populated by characters, images and places generated by my imagination built on what is described by the author. I feel that reading is very much exercise for the imagination much like physical exercise is for the physical body - and unfortunately if you don't use it you loose it. And like our bodies, our minds are becoming flabby and ineffective. As for saving time with audio books, I tried them but they take much to much time and interfere with my imagination, I can read probably 4-5 times faster than an audio book can be read aloud and the time spent scrolling through pointless cat and dog videos could be better spent in the meditative stillness of a book exercising your imagination instead of putting it to sleep.
@@JoeBlack-co7is👏🏻👏🏻 100% this
@@JoeBlack-co7is I have a perfect imagination. I can create the pictures on my head of anything I want, except maybe anything that's an object with 4 dimensions or above. Reading is still ranked lower than other activities.
Wow that is wild to me. I don’t ever think of reading as boring (at least not reading fiction). I feel like my brain is working hard imagining the scenario, the environment, what the characters are saying, and making a mental image of it all. Definitely never boring for me!
The sad thing is that kids who are taught the old way without any regard to standardized tests coming up will blow the doors off kids who are "taught to the test". One of my students became an elementary school teacher, and he said he just teaches the kids the things they should know, ignoring the standardized test, and when the test comes, they bury the kids who were drilled for testing. Baby boomers who were simply taught to read books and to write well had nothing to fear when the standardized tests came around.
why are they burying children?
someone call the police. what the hell.
@@ian.swift.31614 i needed this laugh today, thanks
I exponentially prefer reading books to standardized testing but I see where you are coming from. Standardized testing is a lot more gamified and quantified than it was in the 60’s aside from a few IQ tests. Now you need to be spending 4k minimum to get in the top percentile on the MCAT, LSAT, SAT/ACT, etc.
That makes total sense to me actually. I moved to the states when I was 11. The standardized tests were new to me. However, since I was in a country that valued education and I had my own way of teaching myself, I felt the tests were fairly easy. I wasn’t taught to just pass the test. I was taught good study habits. And to think outside of that standard
I don't want to be mean but I think the teachers who don't do this because they don't feel they have the time to do this are not competent enough. And I wouldn't fault them for it, I think the way they were taught at uni probably wasn't the most optimal, and dare I say I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't taught the core of learning at all, like maybe it was just mentioned but they didn't really get it.
I preferred the company of books over people whilst growing up. Being around people made me deeply anxious and uneasy, and I hated talking. I would always prefer to listen. Books felt like they would reliably just be able to talk to me about their contents, and I would just eat it all up.
Once I was in undergrad, I got much more comfortable talking and engaging with others around me, but interestingly enough, my reading ability began to languish. Granted, I would always just read from page to page, not really taking notes. Now, as a grad student, I'm trying to do more engagement with the books I read than just turning pages. I absolutely refuse to write in books, so I just use sticky notes, write my own notes in another notebook, and maybe even writing my own transformative text separately, just for my own understanding.
It's interesting to hear about the idea of whole language reading, cuz I was in 1st or 2nd grade in 2006 (USA) and I remember absolutely /loving/ our phonics lessons. At the end of 2nd grade, I started reading constantly and could not put a book down for anything. I learned (and understood) so many new words (take that, whole language!), though found out years later I did not know how to pronounce them right since none of them were conversational lol. So while I can't speak to the general connection between phonics and reading from a sample size of 1, I can confirm that not everywhere in the country was all in on whole language in the mid aughts, and also can confirm that I did successfully learn to read with phonics.
Great talk. I read a lot of books but live in a small apartment. So, I asked other of my apartment neighbors if they wanted some good books. Nobody wanted any because they don't read books. 🤷
I made some very short videos talking about books I was reading- hoping to chat to other book lovers. But no interest. 😆
Read Niel Postman!!!
I’m autistic and I developed WAY ahead of my peers with reading, by 2nd grade I had 8th grade reading level and I’m a high school sophomore who is reading Wittgenstein and Heidegger. My reading stamina is really high and I can read for hours on end. I can’t imagine growing up having a distaste towards reading.
Pick up ISL, then ESL. Critique of pure reason is a good one, i think i finally can finish my introduction to category theory (unites prop logic, maths, and deductive systems in cat theory)
Books ive needed to read more than once:
1) Elements of statistical learning
2) Introduction to Algorithms
3) Critique of pure reason
4) Introduction to modal logic
5) Introduction to category theory (yet to finish)
1st read is to understand material and read through proofs. 2nd read to clear up any misconceptions and work through proofs. 3rd read is to work through the exercises.
Those so far have been my most difficult reads, have fun, they are difficult and not showy or flashy difficult they are precise and clear... the most frustrating thing about maths is "it all makes perfect sense, its just seeing it which remains the problem"
Never had the environment that pays attention to it but I’m starting to read now at 18. It’s better late than never:)
On the spectrum and into philosophy/theory. Let me know when you get to (post)modern theorists and Critical Theory. It's... an adventure, to say the least. And keep up with your interests, find a good Continental philosophy programme.
@@Samantha-vlly You''re only allowed to say "better late than never" when you're at least a century old.
I'm autistic and my reading level was way above my peers, but my stamina is -1.
I CAN read anything, but it will take me 10+ years to finish it.
Around 6:15 - yeah!!!! High school was all about "write this 3 page essay on this topic in your book on page 98" and "make sure you can pass the test". So I learned how to cram and remember wording so I could regurgitate the essay and pass the test. Got to college and dropped out because I was so underprepared to deal with the unhinged amount and level of work they were asking me to do. I went back as an adult on my own time and was ready this time. High school wasn't for anything, as I look back. p.s. Someone gave me a book many years ago that ignited my interest in reading again, so I recommend it - it's not going to be worth it in ebook or audiobook - you have to put the actual book in your hands to see why you need to read the actual book: Mark Danielewski, "House of Leaves".
Love the video man. As always the content is rich and existential, yet very calm and comprehensive. I also love the background in the last portion the backyard nature type, its suits your calm aura and personality. Thanks man, appreciate it.
I don't read a book a week, but I have a job and often have 3-4 books going at once. I encourage my peers to read, which is an effective way to get others to read, too!
I'm not from the United States or any English-speaking country, but somehow, more than a decade ago, I had a teacher who told me about this. It's sad to see that what used to be a problem in my country now seems to be a worldwide issue. The only advice I can give is to keep reading and trying, even if your goal isn't to write something great. I can't express how scary it is to imagine a world where the books you read lack the breath of smart people. We can't live solely in the past, relying on the masters, even if we know we may never surpass them. So, keep working, keep studying, even if your social circle is full of people trying to convince you to stop. I don't mean isolating yourself; that's something most people can't do. Find your circle of good friends and readers. They may be few, but they exist.
I still read books, but I'm over 40 so I know how. turn your phones on DO NOT DISTURB (schedule it if you have to for certain hours), and only set the contacts and apps you need to alert you to do so. pretty sure all phones can do this now. great video!
This video is so well-made, a really great job, and a great topic too!
Reading has always been a passion of mine. My parents would take me to bookstores weekly and i always got a book. My parents read around me, we read together. When I felt defeated with a difficult book my Dad taught me to read the full sentence to help me understand the meaning of a new word. Now I do the same with my kids. My 1.5 year old prefers to “read a book” most of the time. My three year old is starting to sound out words. I’m so proud of them, I hope they carry this love of reading through their lives. It’s a gift.
They all love reading until middle school. I used to be proud that my young kids loved books too.
4:02 some of this is def due to time. it's not like students at Columbia are reading pleasure reading. Reading dense text in a week is a lot if you aren't used to it. The students 100% have tons of other homework as well. if you take 3 classes that require you to read 1 book a week- that's 3 books a week. the students likely have tons of other homework for their other classes, too.
Yeah literally, he said that as if the student has their full time week, 40 hours a week to read that one book. They probably have to read another book that same week for another class
Yeah saw this too, don’t know what he was on about
I think this is your best video yet, Jared. I'd never heard the term "reading stamina" before.
What a complete analysis. Thank you!
3:02 the girl with her CHILTON AUTO REPAIR MANUAL!!!!
She must have been reading Dune
That's a boy with a shaggy 70's hair cut
This is one reason that I began home schooling my own children. My oldest daughter began in a small-town Wyoming school where they taught whole language reading. She already had some learning difficulties and was being taught some phonics skills in a pull-out program. By the end of first grade, when we moved back to our home state, she could not read and guessed at everything. She also had developed a mental block that she could not learn to read! Being a college educated woman, I began home schooling her and teaching her to read using phonics. It took me one semester to get her past her mental block and then she began reading very easily and naturally with lots of expression when reading aloud! Each of my children learned to read with me and were many years above their peers in reading skills and comprehension.
Cellphone addiction is the CORE of many of our societal problems. Lack of attention span. Lack of motivation..etc..etc..
Funny, I never hear any of our politicians bring up the issue. It’s almost like they’re getting paid by the tech industry. Weird.
They do most of their campaigning online so they want the attention from social media
It's scary. I was born in '87, so I fully admit that I spent plenty of time glued to my Game Boy or fooling around on web forums of the early 2000s. But before social media, most forms of entertainment had a logical stopping point: The credits would roll on your TV show, you'd beat the level and get to a save point, or you'd read every bit of text on that website. There was always some signal that maybe you've had all the fun you're going to have with this thing for today and it's time to do something else.
They have people with Ph.D.s working full-time on "user engagement" and "consumer neuroscience" - e.g. the science of how to make sure you never close the app and put the phone down. Everything about these apps is purposely designed to hook your attention and hold it at all costs. Perhaps the most effective feature of this is the "infinite scroll" - the neverending carousel of new content.
What scares me the most is that some kids are growing up with these devices in their hands right from the time they have the motor skills to operate them. What happens if these kids reach adulthood like that? Judging from the effects of excessive smartphone use even by adults, motivation and attention span (like you said) will be abysmal. How will they function? Are they going to be able to study for a career? Remember to pay their bills? Go to bed on time and get up for work?
I hope "smartphones for kids" goes the way of radioactive patent medicines of the '20s - just a horrible mistake we made and thankfully corrected when we saw how horrific the results were.
It's not really weird, I just think that if they rail against cellphones then that'll cost them votes: "does he want to take our phones away?" Besides, there's not really a good solution here other than maybe banning cellphones for non-adults (but even that'll be quite unpopular, and a challenge to implement).
And while children with cellphones are a problem, I don't think that in general adults become addicted to something if they weren't already in psychological pain in the first place. And there's an obvious laundry list of painful things in our society that might be driving addiction.
An apathetic population is the dream of any politician lol.
Lol. No. That would be the absolute knowledge growing up that you will never own anything and always be in debt and poor.
I largely agree, however there is another factor that you are not considering, that is specific to the elite universities you mention.
There has been heavily increasing competition to get into these in recent years, which has led to students trying to be as efficient as possible to do many things at a high level because that is what is demanded of them, and highly specializing in certain things in order to stand out and gain acceptance to these universities.
As a student at Cornell University I have first hand experience and can say that this leads to students spending much more time doing things other than reading and having much more going on in life in general. This often then carries into their time at college where they want to continue being the amazing people they are outside of school, but now they also having lots of work assigned to them.
This is another factor that leads to even students at elite universities feeling like they do not have enough time to read all the books assigned to them, many are doing so many things outside of class as well, I know many who even do research with professors as freshman and sophomores, imagine trying to balance that with a sport, all your other classes, a job sometimes, and reading a novel a week. Even without social media is often just not possible.