The Mirror of ERISED

I once saw a stand-up comedian on Comedy Central (I happened to be taking a break from reading Teen Vogue, listening to Britney, and playing Age of Empires II) who talked about arguing with his girlfriend. He relayed how, after an argument had been going on for a while, she would start just throwing any random insult and indignity at him to try to win, completely ignoring the topic being discussed. While arguing about why he never hadn't done the dishes in a week, for example, she would suddenly start attacking his sexual potency. Bauerlein kind of strikes me as a similar sort of cat. What, you don't agree with me that college freshman are less academically equipped now than they ever have been? Fine! I'll just start arguing about Harry Potter! Oh, you don't know who the King of Sweden was in 1658? Well, graphic novels aren't really books, anyway.

After reading the second chapter of The Dumbest Generation, I went in search of how much high school students read for class in a given year. I know that personally, I would LOVE to read for pleasure, but I am too busy reading text for class and trying to give my eyes a break once in a while to be able to devour a delicious piece of fiction. But one would think that any reading in general would add reading skill and knowledge, so are high school and college students even reading out of necessity? I came across a blog by high school literature teachers. One entry was particularly interesting:

"I had a colleague who used to teach a novel a week in her AP Literature class - I asked her how the kids could possibly keep up with that pace. She told me that they were highly motivated. Then I asked her if she quizzed her students to see if they were really doing the reading. She then told me that the discussions and essays were enough to show that they were doing the reading. I finally convinced her to give a pop quiz. When she did - she discovered that not one student in her entire class had actually done the reading."
-Joseph Scotese

This struck a chord with me because I took an AP literature course my senior year of high school and was told by most of my peers that I was an over-achiever because I actually read the books we were assigned...spark notes was the "cool" and normal thing to do. Because I did not have time to read books of my choice, I instead squeezed every ounce of enjoyment I could out of Crime and Punishment and Paradise Lost (which I really did enjoy) that were assigned by the teacher. I am actually hearing the snickers even from my fellow Junior Seminar classmates to whom I am admitting this. I can also see how my teacher could have thought that we were all actually reading, because a select few of my classmates and I did most of the responding to his discussion questions.

I really want to disagree with Bauerlein that we are the dumbest generation. But I am wondering how much I and my fellow college classmates are really reading the books and articles we are assigned for class, much less for pleasure. Camille and I were discussing this chapter before I started this blog and would like to propose an activity for the class.

This is our challenge to you, classmates: Record how many pages you were assigned to read in the past week, due last Monday through tomorrow (Monday). Then also record how many of the pages of each assignment you read in entirety. Separately, how many pages you "skimmed" and also separately, how many pages you took notes on while reading. In class we would like to discuss how much you feel you learn from reading assignments versus having lectures or discussions in class about the topics. Do you feel you could do well on a pop quiz on the readings for our Junior Seminar class?

Mark Bauerlein’s chapter, “The New Bibliophobes” of The Dumbest Generation has really gotten me thinking about my own reading habits and how they’ve changed from my high school years to my current college years. When I was in high school I was one of those 77% of students who spent three hours or less per week on “personal reading”. I also was most weeks probably not included in the 2% of students who exceeded 10 hours when it came to “Reading/studying for a class”. Looking back on high school, I took difficult classes; however, I figured out what I needed to do to get good grades and that’s all I did. I rarely read for pleasure, studied extra for the sake of learning, or pushed myself because at my high school I simply did not need to. The only pleasure reading I can recall was during those beautiful Easter vacations that I spent on the beach in Florida. Yes, I was a beach reader and since I grew up in a similar climate to Meadville, I guess it caused my pleasure reading to struggle.

It seems as though every chapter I read in Mark Bauerlein's book, The Dumbest Generation, follows the same pattern, as far as my reactions to it and my feelings about it. He usually makes some pretty interesting points with some at least moderately convincing arguments. He also, though, always makes arguments that just rub me the wrong way, and backs them up with further arguments that are flawed or seem ludicrous to me. But I guess that's the nature of reading highly biased literature of any sort, whether you agree with the author's main premise or not. Chapter five was no exception.

I must tangent on this chapter. The idea of coddling children/people for the sake of self-esteem is a personal peeve of mine. My tangent is going to agree with Baurlein.

I'm not going to suggest that we never tell children/college students that they do a good job...when they actually do. But Stupnisky et al. (2007) suggests that self-esteem is one of the most researched topics in psychology. This vast storehouse of knowledge about it has yielded little in the academic impact of self-esteem on academic achievement.

"'We need to stop endlessly repeating, "You're special," and having children repeat that back. Kids are self-centered enough already." (pg. 192) According to Piaget, children are supposed to grow out of egocentrism at the end of preschool (Gjerde, Block, & Block, 1986). We don't need to bring it back superficially later in life.

There are times when I really struggle with just going along with what Mark Bauerlein claims in the “The Betrayal of the Mentors” in his book, The Dumbest Generation. Bauerlein throws so many quotes, other people’s opinions, and even just a ton of summaries all throughout his book. This has been a huge complication for me because I feel like it makes it difficult for me to understand exactly what he thinks when his claims are all through everyone else’s opinions that he just simply agrees with. Since this is the last chapter we’ll be discussing in class, I guess it’s fair to say that there have been many times that I get lost in all of the statistics, quotes, and summaries. It is hard for me many times to pick his claim out of everything he is trying to say.

Having, at least for the time being, seemingly depleted the PsycInfo database of all articles that relate to my senior research topic, I decided to go in a slightly different direction for finding an article to write about for this, my final Exploring the Field blog entry of the semester. The senior comprehensive project is most probably the largest and most involved project that I'll do at Allegheny, and for every major project that I do, I try to relate it to my aspirations to become an elementary teacher. I managed to find the article, Verbal Learning as a Function of Grammatical Structure by Sheela Singh, from way back in our bicentennial year of 1976. This study provided me with some strong connections between my research topic and my hopeful career field.

With the many ways that my senior comp research has been going I’ve been given the opportunity to look at many different research articles pertaining to literature on blogs, podcasts, and the many different subcategories that go into using them in the classroom. I have solidified the fact that I’d like to study CMC in the forms of blogs and podcasts to determine the effects that it has on student recall of information. The details of this have not yet been solidified but as I was looking further into the research and exploring the different methods I could use, I decided it might be pretty cool to make the design
2 x 2 mixed and include gender as a second variable. This is all still up in the air; however, with the background provided by Caspi, Chaujut, and Saporta it seems like it could be something interesting to look at.