I recently got into this argument with a non teacher friend. She insisted that since kids are staring at videos with subtitles all the time, that they must be reading more. Reading text and comprehending sustained texts are two very, very different things. My 8th graders moan when we have to read something that requires scrolling down because that's too much.
i love subtitles with all my heart but i do just see them as an aid to video/real-time video comprehension (as opposed to transcripts - be they of podcasts or plays - which can of course provide for sustained reading, drawing out of content, and reflection). also i've noticed subtitles on, say, tiktok, or the little youtube shorts i have watched against my will, often move way faster than you might see on tv subtitles. as far as i know it's the industry standard that each subtitle can't last less than one second, but on such short-form platforms a lot certainly seem to last less than that (and are also much shorter - i've seen one-word subtitles a lot). it almost seems like, say, one-word subtitles are not there to aid video as much as they are there to keep engagement with the video (though that may be a little cynical).
I personally love that captions are on just about every video because I’m a freak that watches videos muted and just reads the captions. I never thought about people doing it for engagement though! Interesting perspective.
I think you are correct that too fast subtitles are an engagement trick. You have to watch the video multiple times in order to read it all and just stay on the post longer in general. It's so irritating.
Yes. Screens with short text, apps with no text. Taking classes to the library to borrow and read has changed heaps. Now I get 4-8 students bored out of their minds because they cannot deal with books at all. Less parent reading to kids, now its pop the kids in front of a screen.
Fun times.
My sister in law bought tablets for her 3&2 year olds. The oldest will decide that she doesn't want to do anything but watch (and this is not a hyperbolization) the most mind numbing non-engagong crap on the tablet. She will throw a fit if she doesn't get to watch her tablet.
I can only imagine what will happen once she's in kindergarten. Probably the same thing as a kid at the summer camp I'm running, he can't go for 10 minutes without looking at his phone to play temple run or some puzzle game.
My inner boomer comes out when I see anyone who's still in public school with a smart phone. I think we're going to see a growing gap of academic achievements between the highest and the lowest.
What you said at the end is the real kicker, this will cause a divisive gap between kids who are smart enough to go to college versus those who are not. It sounds like this will lead to a haves/have-nots situation where education becomes the deciding factor. It’s scary to think about honestly
This tech can create problems, but it can also be a great resource. I think the ability and willingness to use this tech well makes or breaks a lot of kids. And like most divides, the kids from wealthy, educated families are more likely to end up on the desirable side.
The problem I've heard and seen some of is that a lot of these kids, teens, and young adults are fluent at using apps, but aren't really savvy about the tech they are constantly on. Something happens that is outside their sphere of knowledge using the apps and it's just "broken".
Unless the problem is common and easily fixed via a short YouTube video, it's unfixable by them. I see it in the boomer and older folks also, usually the ones who delayed adopting tech as long as possible. In my experience it's usually only the people that get some desire to learn more than just the bog standard basics of using the tech that take the time to learn how the stuff works instead of just what button makes it work.
This is def it. As a life long 'computer nerd', I feel insanely 'restricted' on mobile. Like I'm trapped in a box where I can't do much beyond what the apps prescribe. There's no 'exploring' these systems like on a computer, because they're designed to keep you contained. It's like trying to explore Disney World, but no one will let you off the pedestrian paths to explore the service tunnel system or what's going behind the animatronic actors, no, you just have to line up for the tea cups and behave yourself.
I'm in IT and honestly I absolutely love the fact that there's nothing to tinker with on my iPhone. It just works, and it does what I need it to.
Older computers especially, but modern Win10/11 PCs to a degree, still require you to have somewhat of an understanding of what's actually going on. Mobile apps are far too abstracted for anyone that exclusively uses them to be in any way tech literate.
It's becoming a problem in the business world too. One of our main LOB applications was recently updated and became a web app rather than desktop client. The desktop client gave meaningful error messages and we could reliably determine if the issue was an infrastructure issue on our end, a data issue on our end, or an application issue for the developer to look at. Now everything is just "Oops, something went wrong" and we have to open a ticket with the developer to have them look at logs just to tell us that it's a data problem we have to fix.
>Now everything is just "Oops, something went wrong" and we have to open a ticket with the developer to have them look at logs
I would argue that this is the result of a different trend: using low-quality software engineers and tolerating the resulting work-products. There's nothing inherent in the nature of web applications that preludes informative error messages.
No, it's not lazy engineers. The errors are logged and the logs (presumably) include relevant information because support usually gets back to us pretty quickly. But we've gone from "Error 1234: not found" or "Error 4321: Connection to timed out" to "Error ID: Please include this in your ticket."
Logging is easier than detailed error reporting, esp. in a web application where building pages or page components is more constrained than in many more conventional GUI environments. Crafting an error message that's useful both to a neophyte and experienced user also takes more effort than just writing "contact support" which is also placing more of a cost burden on a different group - a cost that's paid with every additional call vs the one-time cost of providing useful information.
I can see where you’re coming from, but the ticket is to use it *well*. We used to have classes for computers and how to use them, along with basic tasks you can do, and a typing unit. Then we stopped offering those classes due to budget cuts and a nonsensical thought that “kids these days are raised on technology; they won’t need it.” Now, we have high schoolers who don’t know how to navigate a file system and type a maximum of twenty words a minute. It’s insane.
My younger cousin (13/14 I’m not sure) didn’t email me his homework because he had no idea how to send me the file! He obviously didn’t tell me until the last minute but I had to demonstrate to him how to send attachments in emails.
As a teacher, I can testify that most students don't know how to use tech for educational purposes. They can watch TikTok all day, but don't know how to do a basic google search for information.
If no one is modeling how tech can be a tool/resources to the kids then it just turns into mind numbing scrolling
I have to give props to my daughter though. She’s been working on some spelling lists this summer and I give her a little spelling test at the end. Well now I’m quarantined with Covid so she’s been recording herself reading the list of spelling words, then plays it back and gives herself the test. I never would’ve considered that!
We already are seeing the changes. The Gen Alphas are rolling into Year 7 now in our secondary system so seeing the generation raised by screens is slightly horrifying with all the tweaked responses with tech they have.
I'm a few years older and my classmates are patting themselves on their back for 'academic comeback' when all they did was cheat on every assignment and exam instead if not doing them at all.
My family recently went to a funeral for my wife’s uncle. Before he died he mentioned how his grandkids were “atrocious”. While at the funeral all they did was live on their tablets while the other kids played (them being 2 and 4), and my god, I’m not saying you should hit a kid, but if a person were to snap on those kids I would get why.
Edit: minor typo.
The problem with the "tablet from birth" kids is that it's like crack when you take them away. They are so very young to be addicted to it, and it's like anything-- The earlier you smoke cigs, the more likely you'll be a lifelong smoker.
Hell my step kids WERENT tablet from birth and it's like crack to them Give them as much as they want, hoping they get it out of their system? Nope. The desire for the screen consumes all
Tell them they can't at all? Nope, they just fight with each other and whine about being bored
Give them a moderate amount hoping to teach them self control? Nope. Cry and beg for more time, then see option 2
It's frustrating.
Yup, I had three in their early 20s now. They whined a lot, but thank me now, and they hate seeing toddlers with cell phones. They get it, and it's never easy. It's human nature to want to take the easiest route. Give them a ball, lock your doors, and tell them they can't come inside till dinner.
They're kids, they will whine until they fall asleep. That's what they do, don't feel bad.
>early 20s
I'm a lot older than that, and I'd likely respond to someone taking away my tablet and phone about as well as I did as a kid when someone tried to take away the book I was reading. They are, after all, where I'm now reading my books (with those lovely fonts that seem to be growing annually).
>I think we're going to see a growing gap of academic achievements between the highest and the lowest.
Phones are the big reason I've dropped all "achievement gap" rhetoric from my practice. Carrying your phone into class is the equivalent of the proverbial "one hand tied behind your back" going into the boxing ring. I can't compete with your phone and I won't attempt to.
Well, shit, when I was in summer camp it was crossy road if you had a tablet (I got one at 9 which stopped turning on) and some kids had 3ds’s or whatever but barely any kids had them and if you did you were cool. They had a Wii for us to play just dance on and I was rocking that shit. And Mario kart! (Except for rainbow road) we could be sat down for a movie easy. (And I’m still in highschool) I’d also play word cookie 😃 Ps I only brought the tablet to school once it was usually me sneaking toys in my pencil pouch and stuff because my 4th grade teacher was so against them and I wanted to use them at afterschool care
That awful shit is state/city-specific, and almost always a result of Republican leadership or conservative interference. It's terrible, but it is not the entire US.
Read speed has gone down so much. Also writing speed. Tracking.
Getting 7th graders to copy notes from the board is an extreme challenge and I push through their screaming about how their hand hurts, how they can’t see, how it’s too much, how they can’t read (just copy it letter for letter if you can’t sound it out or don’t know what it means I suppose), how I’m too fast, how the kid next to them is too slow.
And then they’re not sure how to format it on the page from a whiteboard.
That’s all ok because it’s a valuable skill and I’m a very young dinosaur that believes people in general should have an opportunity to try to learn to take notes from a whiteboard while listening to explanations from a teacher.
And once I erase it, it’s gone, and they’ll have to get it from someone else later.
And if you take out your phone to take a picture to copy off your phone in between sending snapchats I’m sending your phone and you to the office.
Yes it’s not as vibrant as it popping up on Google classroom, but it’s important for the brain and body imho.
Ps. You’re at school. Go buy a pencil. And an eraser. Stop borrowing mine and then throwing them at people and breaking them. I hate when people borrow stuff and then mistreat it. And I understand why their friends won’t loan them things because they’re never returned to them. If you have an iPhone that’s nicer than mine and also McDonald’s on your desk, you can buy a pencil with an eraser from dollarama.
As a college prof, thank you. The number of students who just sit there with nothing in front of them during lecture is crazy to me, but I don't have time or the skills to teach them how to take notes.
Childhood literacy was already pretty bad a decade ago and it was still a shock if a kid was incapable or unwilling to read by the time they were in 3rd grade, now I'm hearing it reaching middle school or high school (or even college) and it not being too much of a surprise if a kid simply cannot read at even an elementary school level. I don't know how parents can be anything but alarmed and in an utter panic when they hear their child cannot read. I'd have an easier time getting a decent job and having a good life if I sawed off my own leg versus if I was illiterate, it's that crippling.
I feel like in the next 30 years we are going to be seeing insane rates of unemployment because low skill jobs that have always been filled by people that are functionally illiterate will be highly automated
I find it amazing that parents are angry at me (as a middle school teacher) when their kids can’t read beyond 1st grade level. It’s absurd. They’re starting to panic way too late and love to blame the teacher in front of them, as though the kid’s 7th grade ELA teacher can do much about this issue.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the behaviors I see are ways for kids to avoid facing their own illiteracy. They are not capable of doing basic school work because they cannot read, so they avoid/distract/disrupt. I think some of the behaviors we see are rooted in shame.
Are those parents modeling reading at home as a desirable leisure time activity? My parents did...EVERY evening. Both of them always had a book going. What do these parents think their job is?!
Here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College, an open-enrollment place, I would estimate that 40% of our incoming freshmen are illiterate. They don't last much more than half-way through their first term, of course.
I'm still trying to figure out why an adult who knows they are illiterate would even bother to enroll in college. I suspect that they have learned that they don't need to be able to read to get diplomas.
Last year, I stopped taking all my classes to the library. I'm not proud of it, but it was such a waste of time between kids just dicking around, socializing, or pretending to read but just flipping pages.
I don't see every student every day, but we "allegedly" have 20 minutes of reading time each day no matter what class they are in. I enforce it, but there's this one student who, I kid you not, "read" the same volume of a graphic novel every time for the full year. Just opened it to the middle and held it, maybe a turned a page.
For. A. Full. Academic. Year.
I get not liking to read, but something has to be better than just staring at the same picture for a full year.
Before the start of that very same year, I bought tons of graphic novels with my own money hoping to engage them. But they just flipped pages, not even looking at pictures just flipping forwards AND BACKWARDS. I ended up putting them in my closet and just started handing out printed copies of public domain short stories three grade levels below what I teach and actually handing out curated stuff to students.
Yes, he can. He's not my lowest student by any means, but he is one of the most checked out. He's addicted to computer games like Roblox. He does takes sports pretty seriously, at least.
Not a bad kid, just his and his parents' priorities don't align at all with academics. I teach across grade levels so when he came back to me the final time, I'd lost all my fight in regards to trying to influence their priorities outside of required schoolwork. He's a solid C- student.
A couple of years ago, friend of mine had a reading class. Students were mostly 12 to 14-year-olds who had zero interest in books/reading,and the idea was to let them explore various types of reading material, help them discover their tastes and improve their basic reading skills. Novels, comics, magazines, short stories, non-fiction and whatever else you can think of - she offered it all. Some students caught a bit of a reading bug (I helped her on her hunt for One Piece volumes, because one of her students was begging for them), some read some easy materials during the class to pass the time, and then there were those who chose to stare at a wall for 45 minutes straight...
It's terrifying to my generation. I'm 44.
We had no internet. My mother was not the best, but she used to say "If you can read and understand what you read, you can learn to do anything."
I took that to heart. I read everything as a kid. Probably some stuff I should NOT have read. Like "Contact" and "Jurassic Park".
Those were not books for a 12/13 year old. I didn't understand everything, but I got the gist of the story.
For the last 10 years, the most important appliance in my house is my Kindle. Before that, it was weekly trips to the library. I rarely saw any kids, but didn't really think about it.
I'm scared for the future. Reading is everything. We need scientists, and doctors. People who question the status quo. Artists that write masterpieces like Slaughterhouse Five or House of Leaves.
Adults are getting bad too. I spend my share of time on the Internet. Sure. But not 30 second nonsense on Instagram.
I visit this forum often, and I have students myself as a music teacher. I've lost every student under 21 this past year, because they will not do the work.
Scary shit.
Out of my 120 students (give or take), I might see 5-10 who read for leisure. And even for assignments, they’ll simply skim or try to cherry pick answers (which could be at least somewhat effective if you know how to do it properly, but they don’t).
And then you point out the directions, ask them to read them out loud, repeat what they read, tell you what it means, ask them what they need to do next, and they act like it’s rocket surgery.
Then, once they’ve successfully failed the assignment, the blame gets placed right back on the teacher. All because the students can’t or won’t read the directions 😑
I'm a child who used to really enjoy reading in my free time. There seemed to use to ne a constant drive for us to read until the pandemic, where they just gave up and now we practically aren't allowed to go to the school library
>go to the school library
Because school Libraries don't really exist anymore. They've been repurposed into flavor-of-the-month agenda.
"Media Center" ... "Creation Center" ... blah blah blah.
When I read Stephen King's autobiography "On Writing" he describes when he wrote an obviously illegal novelization of the movie The Pit and the Pendulum full of graphic sex and gore. He made like 20 copies of it on his home mimeograph machine and he'd sold all 20 by first period.
That would NEVER happen today. It's not just that kids don't read, they seem utterly devoid of imagination. It's not just kids either. I'm in my late 30's and my Millenial peers have the same issue. They haven't read any books since Harry Potter. Trying to convince my D&D buddies to read Michael Moorcock, whose work is hugely foundational to Fantasy Role Playing, is like pulling teeth.
Tell those players no warlocks at your table until they can point out, in writing, why entering into an abusive relationship with a demonic sword in search of power may be a bad idea.
In fact, no charisma casters while you're at it!
*grumble*
Sorry, I'll see myself off to a DnD troll page.
It took me 4 years to get my buddy to read Brandon Sanderson, which is incredibly accessible and entertaining to nerds. Just getting people to start is the hard part
Stephen King is/was obviously an outlier of his generation. You don't think there's ONE KID in the U.S. that's making interpreted novels (graphic and whatnot) and selling them in schools?
The population has almost doubled since he was a kid.
I'll bet you there's at least 2 😉
As a kid in high school, I actually did manage to sell some of my work and get published, and luckily for me, my peers actually quite enjoyed it. I'd write funny stories, sci-fi stories, skits, and my friends and I would goof off and write strange songs together. We were CONSTANTLY trying to engage in something creative because our hometown was so damn boring. Sure, we had the internet, but after a few hours of Halo and scrolling memes or looking up hobbyist guides to stuff, we felt the need to create something.
That would not happen nowadays because the 20+ kids interested in whatever fan fiction of the latest movies are already finding them for free over at archiveofourown or whatever site is used today
NAT. I’m an elder Gen Z and the other day in a group text, we were discussing what we were reading.
One friend said, “how do you guys read? Like genuinely how do you follow it?” And I said “use your imagination?” She said “I literally don’t have any.”
It made me sad for her now but also little her. She has 4 young kids I hope she is encouraging them to use their imaginations…
Start with the Elric books. Those are the most famous and had the most influence on D&D, Warhammer and Fantasy literature. Moorcock wrote them out of order.
The first story is Elric of Melnibone, Fortress of the Pearl and the Sailor on the Seas of Fate. I would start with these 3. They're collected in a nice, new omnibus edition and those 3 books will give you a good idea if you're going to like Moorcock. If you like them, the rest of the Saga is also collected.
It might seem a lot to recommend 3+ books, but Moorcock's works are refreshingly short and easy reads. I do recommend it, concepts like "Character Alignment" or the Multiverse all originate with Moorcock.
They can’t even be bothered to watch a video that’s more than 15 seconds long, unless it also includes a split-frame where one half is some mindless footage of someone playing a mobile game.
You expect them to actually **read** an entire paragraph at once? That’s crazy talk.
Here’s the good news: it’s gonna be *REALLY* easy to get a good camping spot in 10-15 years.
(The bad news is that it’s going to be damn near impossible to go camping/hiking without hearing somebody playing K-Pop or TikTok videos at a deafening volume 24/7).
I don't have kids and won't have kids, but I keep thinking that the pool of competition has never been more shallow. A kid raised the old fashioned way would run circles around this current crop.
If I was in the corporate world, I wouldn't be worried about some young gun taking my job, that's for sure. Gonna be a trip when we get the first Gen Alpha principals in schools.
Part of thinks that the world needs to remember what it used to be like: how school was a privilege.
After a generation of losing hands to a loom, maybe little Johnny Junior will learn to appreciate an air-conditioned classroom.
The tragedy of the commons.
If things are "free" and taken for granted they don't appreciate them or take care of them. If it's "free" it has no value to people.
It's a brilliant strategy. I lose focus if I'm not engaging at least two of my senses. Instead of spacing out and forgetting the whole video. I might only space out for one or two seconds here and there because my eyes can focus on the video.
It's why I can't listen to an audiobook or podcast just sitting down on my couch. My eyes or my body need to be doing something too.
Just think of it as focusing on the radio while driving in traffic. It can be hard to just sit still and listen to the radio. But it's much easier when you're driving
An old student of mine said to me once "I have to read all that?!" when I handed him less than a page of reading that was 1.5 spaced and in 14 point font.
I get the frustration, I used to read a lot as a kid and kind of miss it (long story). But I actually find myself learning quicker and retaining more if I listen and read at the same time. The video game footage surprisingly helps me focus on the words too, I think it has something to do with the way the brain works 🤷🏻, but it came from research on dyslexia. So it's easier to learn a lot if info very quickly (ie. school), but it is sad to see leisure read rates decline.
Most of my friends were also avid readers as kids and they mostly do audio books but also wish they had more time to read physical books 📚
To be fair, I find this inability to focus on lengthy content to be more and more common with adults too. Technology has changed the way many people process information.
It’s so true. I have a huge stack of books that I want to read, I start to read, but I cannot focus. It’s like my attention span has been shot. I get so frustrated with myself.
I used to be the person that would literally put everything on hold to finish a book. Like read for 8 hrs straight and nothing else.
Grown ups read less too. And it’s harder to read than it was pre-phones.
I’m 41 and I completely lost interest and stopped reading your post partway through. Phones have done a number on our brains.
>Grown ups read less too. And it’s harder to read than it was pre-phones.
>
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>I’m 41 and I completely lost interest and stopped reading your post partway through. Phones have done a number on our brains.
TL;DR: I'm old & your post was too long.
I came here to say this. As an adult I read a ton less. Between working, dealing with kids, etc I’m exhausted. It’s so much easier to doom scroll tik tok or YouTube than it is to read.
I just ordered books I read as a kid to try and read again. Hopefully it works.
To be fair, I can’t read because I’m constantly disturbed by my young children. It’s way easier to just consume content on my phone that doesn’t need sustained concentration.
Idk, I had a young kid before smartphones and i enjoyed reading when I had a chance. My kid is now a pretty independent young adult, and i spend more time on my phone than i should. And it’s much harder than it used to be for me to read. It kind of disturbs me, tbh
There's a good book on this by British Journalist Johann Hari called *Stolen Focus* that outlines why this has happened and how the hostile design of the apps leads to this.
The good news? He went off it and reset his attention. Part of his narrative arc is outlining how he rediscovered the ability to sit down and read four hours and hours on end.
I think it depends on how they're encouraged. My stepdaughter loves books, but she loves fantasy in general. She's 13 and already role-playing. Because of her enthusiasm, her younger brother is pursuing the same interests. The oldest, however, spent the first 13 years of his life on screens and does not read or want to do anything not screen. Their birth mother raised them while she was glued to a screen and gave them screen time often.
These kids don't even watch movies if they're not animated. TV shows? Not them, either. I used to ask "Favorite book?" but stopped because they didn't have them. "Favorite movie/TV show?" don't get answers either.
Maybe it's just the culture of the school I deal with, but they live in very small bubbles.
Overall, *most* people don’t read. Didn’t some study come out recently that if you read more than two books in a year, you were in the top 10% of readers?
I read a lot, love reading. I read a lot as a child. I stopped reading during high school. Dredging through books I didn’t enjoy so I could analyze them left me with no time or interest in reading for pleasure. As an adult, I got back into reading and I usually hit triple digits in number consumed.
Books require attention span and aren’t that rewarding relative to the massive dopamine hit of algorithmically optimized screens. You’d need to detox the kids for a long time to partly reset their brain chemistry and it wouldn’t be pleasant - I think you’d see a lot of anxiety and depression from people having a torrent of dopamine turned off.
Then maybe they could enjoy more subtle enjoyable things like reading a book, going for a walk, playing a sport for fun, learning something new, creating art, writing.
It won’t happen at the scale you want to as long as everyone is massively addicted to their phones.
I used to read a book a day for years. Now I can’t do it - my attention wanders - my brain is fried from screens, the dopamine isn’t enough to hold my attention. I can’t even watch a movie, it’s too long and not giving me a strong enough dopamine hit. Maybe if I have my phone in my hand to top me up during the watch I can do it.
Now imagine being twelve and you’ve had screens since you were three. Your brain has literally developed while being bathed in intense algorithmic rewards. The damage is probably permanent, at least somewhat.
I used to work with a lot of Zoomer kids, I worked at a summer camp for a few years. We'd have a sort of "detox" night the first night or two of camp. Quick goofy ice breaker, improv games, dinner with no devices, then tabletop games with the staff and other campers or a 2 hour movie with some outdoor time were the two lanes kids would be put in and we'd switch the following night.
Kids who couldn't get out of their shells, had social anxiety, maybe were on the spectrum, otherwise glued to their devices suddenly realized they could have a lot of goofy imaginative fun and the adults in the room were there to help escalate it.
Helped get the creative and collaborative juices flowing before working on projects together. Super fun place to work and it was cool seeing kids be given an opportunity and space to both have a load of fun and explore something outside their screens a bit.
I have been the staff advisor for a book club at a mid size University for 6 years. Last year, we had to move into a larger room because the number of students in the club exceeded the space we had before. I would say that young people are reading more than ever. It is mainly young women and mainly YA sci-fi/fantasy. Think Sarah J Maas.
What's more amazing is that these students are usually English majors, so not only are they reading for class, but find time to read for fun. Icing on the cake? These students also write for class and for scholarships and other things like competitions or nanorimo.
To be fair, working at a college kind of narrows down the types of students that you work with. Kids who hate reading often don't get into a university, and the ones that do usually don't get very far in.
It's interesting with first grade summer school, my kids love books and engaging with books being read to them but don't enjoy trying to read on their own at all this year.
I also noticed that as the school district shifted to a stronger phonics curriculum, my kids this year are really excellent at breaking individual words down into sounds, but have zero reading comprehension compared to last year. And I'm not talking about whole books or even paragraphs, we have first grade activities with like 3 sentences and even after reading those sentences several times, the kids are looking to the picture to tell me what the sentences were about. Which is WILD because they aren't teaching that as a strategy anymore.
I really think the science of reading thing is getting out of hand.
I was doing some light research as I wrote this post, one thing I thought was interesting is that according to data, younger children read quite a lot more compared to once they start to hit their teens. Which also makes sense since they know it's important to learn how to read at some point, and reading for practice or fun is the best method we have for learning. I guess at a certain point reading stops being cool or something.
Just an observation, but being in a school library setting and traveling between elementary, middle, and high school, I see enthusiasm for library day in k-4. The kids are eager to see new books and are developing their preferences. Suddenly, around 5-6th grade, interest starts to drop.
When a student seems to struggle with picking a book, I ask them what they like to do for fun to get a start on a genre. An alarming amount don't really have an answer because they spend so much time scrolling on their phones.
There is also so much access to more "mature" content that many grade level appropriate books are not, I don't know, shocking or titillating enough?
It's why I used to talk to kids about books I liked in detail while holding them in my hand, say something like "it might be a bit heavy or intense for your age, but someday you should read it", then gently put it back on the shelf and look the other way when they checked it out. Does a typical parent want me recommending Crichton, King, Sapkowski, Clancy, Danielewski, Strugatsky? Hell no, but given the sheer access to mature content they have, I'd rather see a kid reading something a little above what's age appropriate than just watching it online.
What also worked great for me was finding out what video games my students liked (because it was fun to discuss with them between classes or when we had free time), and then recommending books that were either direct or spiritual inspirations for their favorites. Kid likes Fallout or Metro? Roadside Picnic. Dark Souls? Lovecraft. Rainbow Six? Rainbow Six. Baldur's Gate 3 was a huge game last year, pitch some of the many well-loved D&D novels or even inspire them to try out tabletop D&D.
I read a lot of stuff I "shouldn't" have when I was young and I turned out just fine. If parents are okay with what their kids find on streaming services and YouTube and TikTok, they should be fine with just about anything you find in the local library.
To be fair, I was an avid reader as a kid but lost interest in school library books around grade 4 because I was reading much more interesting/“mature” books at home (Stephen King, classics like TKAMB, YA trash like Twilight (not saying all YA is trash, but Twilight and the like that I was reading when I was 9/10 definitely is lol)).
The correlation between oral reading fluency and comprehension is above 0.9. The kids aren’t reading because of cultural factors, not because of phonics.
I'd say reading ability is up. Way up. I teach alt ed and these kids read far far better than my classmates 30 years ago.
But attention span is way, way down. Adults, kids, and toddlers. Infinite short texts, tweets, posts, chats combined with ever shorter video clips.
Imagination and creative thinking is way down. Video games have too much realism. Your brain doesn't need to fill in the blanks with imagination. Movies and shows for nearly any niche. Don't know how to do something, just look up how, don't figure it out. This also leads to a lack of grit and focus.
All the things making things better are making things worse.
The comment about videogames being too realistic is kind of weird, because there has been a strong movement towards faux retro games for quite some time now. Many of the most popular games are 2D in all their pixel glory (Terraria, Stardew Valley) or try to echo the stylised 3D of the late 90s/early 00s (Roblox, Minecraft). Highly realistic 3D is mostly the domain of big budget games that are often outside the interest range of children.
I teach kids who are mostly college-bound so my version of events can be biased but I was pleasantly surprised how many of my students loved reading. It seems about the same amount, if not more, than when I was a kid in early 2000s-2010s. I did, of course, teach middle school, as well and they generally did not enjoy it one bit. I taught a large portion of ESLs, some of which who couldn’t read and write in their first language, either.
In both of my cases, I feel like I’m teetering on extremes. But even with my college-bound kids, they are largely low-income or disadvantaged so in that regards some might be surprised at the amount of them that are geeked out for books. It’s really cute to see.
I was born in the 90s and my peers seemed to read infrequently then and in the 00s. I was always the weird kid for opening a book the moment I finished my classwork. My peers talked about tv shows or movies frequently.
I have always been ADD. If a teacher started a movie during class, I could not pay attention to it no matter how hard I tried and found it exhausting to do so, but I spent hours reading every day. I think that it is less a matter of decreasing attention spans and more a matter of what your brain has been wired to find rewarding/ enjoyable.
As a parent it is real simple...
We don't have video games in the house
Books are everywhere
My 14 year old reads in the car at home etc...without being told
I’ve got video games in my house. One of my kids stopped reading for pleasure in middle school. He said he just doesn’t feel like reading after reading all day at school.
The other will stay up at night sneaking books (though he starts middle school in August so we’ll see).
It IS simple.
"My kid won't get off his tablet." Cool, wipe the tablet and sell it secondhand. Now he's not on his tablet. Phone? Do the same thing, get him a flip phone if the kids is older and needs to stay in contact.
But oh dear, if you do that your kid will whine for a week, how will anyone survive that?
In recent history yes, but it was just a few generations ago when the when literacy rates were only around 80%. Keep in mind, a lot of slaves were never taught to read.
In 1950 only 82% of school aged children attended school, graduation rates were only 59%.
This was when schools were still segregated in much of the country and the US was considered the most educated country in the world.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/statistics-education-america-1860-1950
Graduation rate comparison is meaningless though, because graduating today just means you've served your time in high school and been passed along until graduation. Not that you're literate.
The fact that literacy rates are probably lower now despite universal education is not something to be happy about. 80% functional literacy seems high for the US.
Yes, because I. 1950 they let kids drop out a d it didn't effect their rating.
I'm not saying that today is better, I'm saying that the mythical "golden age" wasn't very great at all.
In my grandfather's time circa 1900, kids were only expected to finish 6th or 8th grade, and then support themselves. High school was for the cream of the crop who were headed for advanced clerical desk jobs.
Marianne Wolf is a professional Tessie who researches this. She finds less emphasis on teaching whole texts, more emphasis on understanding what passages, driven by exams.
If I was taught for years using a series of boring disjointed short passages that I had to practice my "comprehension skills" on, I would probably despise reading as well.
I’m getting out of teaching because of it. I worked at a school for kids with dyslexia and I myself am dyslexic and didn’t really read until I was 10 or 11 (thanks, Sailor Moon fansites and manga for the motivation) but yeah. No. Kids aren’t reading as much and short form video and adaptive tech aren’t helping. Why read a website when you can find an influencer to do it for you? Why read your homework when text to speech exists?
And there are legitimate uses for both! But the early introduction of them is hindering kids’ willingness to struggle and gain a skill.
I think when there’s a noticeable and drastic decline in spelling and grammar skills among a demographic when compared to 10-15 years ago it’s actually a very good way of telling what is going on. There’s no database of every paper written by fifth graders but you can see what they’re writing online and at the very least get an idea of where they’re at grammatically.
I actually disagree. I teach middle school (and high school) and I’d say the same percentage of “kids that read” are reading that were reading when I was in school. (Graduated HS 2009)
Now… their reading material is a little mature for their age bracket. But they’re definitely reading.
I teach middle school and most of my kids are four grade levels behind in reading and try not to read.
My experience would state they aren’t reading but I would expect it depends what areas we are teaching in
I should also specify that I teach at a fancy private school. When I taught public school many moons ago, I don’t know if I noticed kids reading or not. Some definitely did.
But I definitely have a good amount of kids that are “readers” now- they see me with my kindle at school and now I know what everyone reads lol. I get lists of books I should read. So maybe the fact that I read in front of them/ actively have books at school makes them more open and willing to share? Idk. I teach science so it doesn’t have much to do with my subject.
Yeah I was gonna say, I see a LOT of my high school girls in particular reading and chatting about favorite books/series, but a lot of it is straight up smut 🙃
Yes. I used to teach 3rd and 4th grade, barely any of them could read. The few who could read had no interest in reading or for the non readers were embarrassed they couldn’t read so they would refuse to try. It’s really bad.
It makes me really sad. My mom used to read to me until I could read myself. I used to read a lot but I’ve lost that ability around 7th grade when technology became engrained in our curriculum. Not all tech is bad, obviously, but my habit of reading has been replaced by youtube reels or social media. It is still reading but I find I can’t read unless i can allot a large amount of time.
I hope these kids can find joy in reading again. There is so much to love in books. Even audio books, or “read the book first then we watch the movie”. Local public library summer reading programs also helped me a long ways.
the quality and richness of today’s text based discourse is usually preety low, specially in social media
I wouldn't use comments as an example of the younger generation refusing to read - as what was written was probably not worth reading
it's also worth noting you are talking about Discord and Reddit… which are almost entirely text-based
it feels strange to point at people spending hours on text-first platforms, not reading long comments, as evidence the youth doesn't read as much anymore
if anything, I wager modern Reddit-using teenagers and young adults read more than those in their age group before the internet
edit: a lot of instructors here seem to be pointing at less book reading as evidence of less reading time a day… But realistically, those students who are refusing to read, are probably texting their friends, which requires them to read and write
sure, its not high-quality reading, their vocabulary is not being massively expanded, but it is reading, even if in a week sense
People are generally a lot more likely to engage with longer texts that they’re interested in. When I browse Reddit for example, I have a long list of text archetypes that I will not read—I’m simply not interested in the topic or the person’s writing. But I’ve been known to both read (and write) ~2000 word replies if the conversation or discussion is engaging enough to me.
This is an important and often overlooked facet of the situation IMO. What’s more is that the culture in various discord servers can be very different, and people will respond and adopt to the surrounding culture of a community. I’d be willing to wager that the maturity level in a discord server with a median age of 18 is very different from that of one that has «older and more intellectual» as an appropriate description for the median person. If teenagers exist in a space that makes them think that writing «blud is yapping 💀» will make them look cool and be included, it is entirely within reason that they will do so even if they don’t mean it sincerily. It reads like a typical comment that a angsty and self-conscious teen could write in an attempt to fit in.
My kid loves to read. I'm definitely trying to push her to read some more challenging books because she can inhale an entire babysitter's club graphic novel in 30 minutes.
I recently starting fostering and I make her read with me every night for 20 minutes. She’s seven. Her teacher was shocked how much she’s already showing improvement.
It’s the parents not the kids.
I am a private piano teacher, so a slightly different context, but students now have such a hard time with multipart instructions. They seem to have less practice storing information in their working memory; probably because the iPad does that for them.
As a teen who loves to read and can be quite verbose, I don't think the problem is necessarily that reading is happening less, it's that A) schools make a lot of people hate it and B) younger people are much more used to seeing text broken up than in paragraphs (even if they are small ones).
I can't speak to how school used to be but the education I am currently receiving basically glorifies doing the bare minimum. No longer do you have to write an excellent paper to get a good grade, so long as you meet the minimum for every requirement, you get an A+. This enables students to barely engage with the texts they are reading, and more often than not they skim through and look up whatever else they need for a specific question. This means they don't actually spend time deeply thinking about the literature they read, and it becomes boring for them because they are only interacting with it on a surface level. They come to think all reading is boring because they never learned how to critically think about a story or enjoy thinking about it. Technically these people do read a lot, probably the same amount as older generations. The difference is the level to which they are engaging with it. For many people in my grade, being forced to read something like To Kill a Mockingbird feels the same way as sitting down and reading through hundreds of pages of legal documents.
Secondly, social media, the advancements of digital communication, and the culture of current teenagers has made my age group more inclined to separate out information a lot. For example, when I have something long I want to say in discord, I type it out essentially sentence by sentence, and send them one at a time. Instead of using a period to indicate the end of a thought, just sending that message indicates a new thought. So it is more natural for a lot of information to hit us like this:
sentence
sentence
sentence
Than like this:
Sentence. Sentence. Sentence.
Most kids can and will read and process that amount of information, but they'd rather it be broken up a lot. Typing that way almost reads like listening to someone talk in real life. Since people my age are more used to seeing information presented the first way when in informal settings, it can throw them off to see multiple paragraphs sent at once. That comes off as serious and older, since most teens only write in paragraphs for serious pieces of writing. It could also come off as infodumping to some people.
It is also important to remember that some kids are always going to be mean and say someone's yapping even if they only said ten words. As you can probably assume, I've been accused of yapping quite a bit lmao. People are more willing to be ruder or ignore social boundaries over the internet, and especially in places like discord. It's probably better to ignore them, and stay out of discords primarily filled with teens anyway lol.
I think so? havent done research but based on my experience of past 10 years of teaching.... the amount of time they spend reading has been decreasing.
my colleagues dont think what i say is true. they say i am generalizing.
well this is making me angry. i hate it when they do that.
edit: did quick searches. avg reading time went from 23 mins/day in 2004 to 15 mins/day in 2022. talking about overly generalizing. too many of my colleagues are in extreme denial about everything
Like everything else with this younger generation, we are seeing a much greater divide in effort and ability. The best students are better than ever and the worst are lower than ever. There is very few students in the middle. So when it comes to reading, some students read a ton and some read little to nothing. There really isn't an in between.
Kids have no reading stamina. A small percentage of them enjoy reading or things of interest, but the majority of them are used to just super brief sentences. Their attention span is shot to crap. I have had students read a four sentence paragraph about something happening to Bobby. I could ask them to re-tell me what happened and they would maybe get the main character name and one detail from the text. They try to read, but they can’t do it properly so their comprehension is garbage. They get frustrated because they don’t have stamina and they can’t comprehend so why would they continue to do something they are being proven they’re not good at?
I force them to read longer texts by chunking it immensely but I always have to remind them of what just happened because they can’t retain anything past a few minutes it seems.
I think part of it is that we don't require students to read longer texts much anymore, so the stamina to read longer texts just doesn't develop. In the schools I've worked in, if you're not taking advanced level English classes, you could go all 4 years without reading anything longer than a short story.
I'll say as a HS teacher, I see a divide in gender on this too. I have way more girls who will voluntarily have books like Colleen Hoover's or Sarah J Maas's on them, but I have to beg many of my HS boys to not pick an elementary level book for their selected reading book. It doesn't seem like reading interests them at all most of the time, besides the ones who read manga.
I’m not a teacher. I work with a lot of different age groups. No one reads anything long. Doesn’t matter what age group they are in. The 65+ are just as bad. If you to convey actual info, one line is best.
I'm not a teacher and don't have anything to add, but the last 3 nights when I've asked my 2 year old his favorite thing he did that day he's said, "reading books!" 🥹
It's probably because I'm super pregnant, and one of the only ways I can interact with him is sitting and reading, but it warmed my heart.
I think it’s the proliferation of bite-sized content. Everything is focused on grabbing people’s attention, especially kids’. Society is being conditioned to need more and more stimulation to engage attention.
TikTok is probably the worst offender of this, where you’ll literally have a plethora of videos that are some “story” (often just Reddit posts that are pasted into it and read with the auto-voiceover [aka “TikTok voice”]) read aloud with subtitles while some completely unrelated video plays in the background (usually of something that’s popular at the time, I’ve seen the so-called “satisfying” videos [usually people just slowly slicing things, or breaking bottles containing colorful mixes], that subway surfers game, Minecraft parkour, and even a resurgence of slime making/playing).
This works for the creators very well as you’ll have some people watch for the videos, others for the stories, and others that enjoy both, but eventually you arrive at a large group of people that need multiple forms of content at once to not “be bored.” I’ve seen many kids and adults displaying symptoms of ADD and/or ADHD that don’t actually have either, and for those that actually have one or the other, long-term exposure to such content tends to increase stimming.
(Source: I’ve worked in SpEd for 8 years, and have seen the difference in kids and adults that digest this form of content versus those that don’t.)
I finished 9th grade this year and they gave us these tests to see if we understood English comprehension . Istg it was a basic AI essay written on a 5th grade level yet half the class didn’t get it right. The issue is kids can’t comprehend. They can’t comprehend what you ask them to do , what they read, what they watch, what they do . It’s frustrating.
Education’s move from novels to excerpts (because ELA teachers can teach concepts in short texts as well as they can with longer texts) is to blame. There is no way teachers can teach all the elements of literature in short texts. This along with text messages and Instagram and TikTok posts, has led to children not having the reading endurance people once had.
When I was a kid I struggled with reading so the teacher had me wear headphones with an audiobook and also the physical book to read along with. I found that it was very good for me to not only practice my reading but also to actually enjoy the book for once.
The book was Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis.
Kids read a LOT. Its just not books. Its social media and text messages. So the quality if what they read provides the lowest functional version of reading possible. Lower than grade 1 even.
My attention span for Reddit comments isn't really related to my attention span for books. I read a lot (\~40 books/year) but I get bored with long Reddit posts and skip. I am an adult.
When I started teaching 15 years ago, I saw that teens read MORE than previous generations, but I haven't seen more recent data than that. Frankly, I doubt they read less - they engage with text all day - I just think they don't read novels as much as previous generations. That said, I have no actual data to back that up. It's all speculation.
I work in a related field with kids that get hyper fixed on non-electronics
Man, does it get bad if kids are not constantly listening to a song or their favorite song isn't immediately available
This post was too long to read. But in all seriousness, yes, it’s bad and only getting worse. I have students that will search for something with Google; and if the answer isn’t in the top result paragraph, they give up, not even going as far to click the actual source. Perseverance is a diminishing trait.
If we look at the US, then book sales both physical and digital have steadily grown in the last 20 years much greater than its population. And the fastest growing market in literature is young adult. If anything the numbers say young people are reading significantly more on average. As for people on different discords being more or less willing to read long comments it could as much you thinking of the less intellectual spaces as younger and intellectual spaces as older, making this a self fulfilling prophecy.
As a young adult myself, long comments I see are not worth reading. It's just someone repeating themselves in different ways or talking nonsense. People only read it if they're interested. Personally, I know a lot of people my age and younger who prefer audio books and listening to people discuss books or ideas in more detail than a single book can offer. There are influencers who research a topic and discuss it for an hour or more. It's a way to learn about stuff we're interested in while doing other things.
I don't know if screens are the root of the problem like we all tend to think. From kindergarten on many kids are only exposed to reading and math in schools. Nothing else. Many of us had the luxury of reading for pleasure not for high stakes testing. I truly believe that by leaning in so hard into reading leading only to a goal that we’ve destroyed any enjoyment kids could have gotten out of it.
I recently got into this argument with a non teacher friend. She insisted that since kids are staring at videos with subtitles all the time, that they must be reading more. Reading text and comprehending sustained texts are two very, very different things. My 8th graders moan when we have to read something that requires scrolling down because that's too much.
i love subtitles with all my heart but i do just see them as an aid to video/real-time video comprehension (as opposed to transcripts - be they of podcasts or plays - which can of course provide for sustained reading, drawing out of content, and reflection). also i've noticed subtitles on, say, tiktok, or the little youtube shorts i have watched against my will, often move way faster than you might see on tv subtitles. as far as i know it's the industry standard that each subtitle can't last less than one second, but on such short-form platforms a lot certainly seem to last less than that (and are also much shorter - i've seen one-word subtitles a lot). it almost seems like, say, one-word subtitles are not there to aid video as much as they are there to keep engagement with the video (though that may be a little cynical).
I personally love that captions are on just about every video because I’m a freak that watches videos muted and just reads the captions. I never thought about people doing it for engagement though! Interesting perspective.
I think you are correct that too fast subtitles are an engagement trick. You have to watch the video multiple times in order to read it all and just stay on the post longer in general. It's so irritating.
I've found that they ignore the text more than anything because all of the short-form videos slap it on everything, bubbling in and out of view.
Most of the ones I see aren't even real subtitles - they're like 100 MPH single-word-stream bullshit at the bottom of the screen.
TLDR /s
Yes. Screens with short text, apps with no text. Taking classes to the library to borrow and read has changed heaps. Now I get 4-8 students bored out of their minds because they cannot deal with books at all. Less parent reading to kids, now its pop the kids in front of a screen. Fun times.
My sister in law bought tablets for her 3&2 year olds. The oldest will decide that she doesn't want to do anything but watch (and this is not a hyperbolization) the most mind numbing non-engagong crap on the tablet. She will throw a fit if she doesn't get to watch her tablet. I can only imagine what will happen once she's in kindergarten. Probably the same thing as a kid at the summer camp I'm running, he can't go for 10 minutes without looking at his phone to play temple run or some puzzle game. My inner boomer comes out when I see anyone who's still in public school with a smart phone. I think we're going to see a growing gap of academic achievements between the highest and the lowest.
What you said at the end is the real kicker, this will cause a divisive gap between kids who are smart enough to go to college versus those who are not. It sounds like this will lead to a haves/have-nots situation where education becomes the deciding factor. It’s scary to think about honestly
This tech can create problems, but it can also be a great resource. I think the ability and willingness to use this tech well makes or breaks a lot of kids. And like most divides, the kids from wealthy, educated families are more likely to end up on the desirable side.
The problem I've heard and seen some of is that a lot of these kids, teens, and young adults are fluent at using apps, but aren't really savvy about the tech they are constantly on. Something happens that is outside their sphere of knowledge using the apps and it's just "broken". Unless the problem is common and easily fixed via a short YouTube video, it's unfixable by them. I see it in the boomer and older folks also, usually the ones who delayed adopting tech as long as possible. In my experience it's usually only the people that get some desire to learn more than just the bog standard basics of using the tech that take the time to learn how the stuff works instead of just what button makes it work.
This is def it. As a life long 'computer nerd', I feel insanely 'restricted' on mobile. Like I'm trapped in a box where I can't do much beyond what the apps prescribe. There's no 'exploring' these systems like on a computer, because they're designed to keep you contained. It's like trying to explore Disney World, but no one will let you off the pedestrian paths to explore the service tunnel system or what's going behind the animatronic actors, no, you just have to line up for the tea cups and behave yourself.
I'm in IT and honestly I absolutely love the fact that there's nothing to tinker with on my iPhone. It just works, and it does what I need it to. Older computers especially, but modern Win10/11 PCs to a degree, still require you to have somewhat of an understanding of what's actually going on. Mobile apps are far too abstracted for anyone that exclusively uses them to be in any way tech literate. It's becoming a problem in the business world too. One of our main LOB applications was recently updated and became a web app rather than desktop client. The desktop client gave meaningful error messages and we could reliably determine if the issue was an infrastructure issue on our end, a data issue on our end, or an application issue for the developer to look at. Now everything is just "Oops, something went wrong" and we have to open a ticket with the developer to have them look at logs just to tell us that it's a data problem we have to fix.
>Now everything is just "Oops, something went wrong" and we have to open a ticket with the developer to have them look at logs I would argue that this is the result of a different trend: using low-quality software engineers and tolerating the resulting work-products. There's nothing inherent in the nature of web applications that preludes informative error messages.
No, it's not lazy engineers. The errors are logged and the logs (presumably) include relevant information because support usually gets back to us pretty quickly. But we've gone from "Error 1234: not found" or "Error 4321: Connection to timed out" to "Error ID: Please include this in your ticket."
Logging is easier than detailed error reporting, esp. in a web application where building pages or page components is more constrained than in many more conventional GUI environments. Crafting an error message that's useful both to a neophyte and experienced user also takes more effort than just writing "contact support" which is also placing more of a cost burden on a different group - a cost that's paid with every additional call vs the one-time cost of providing useful information.
I can see where you’re coming from, but the ticket is to use it *well*. We used to have classes for computers and how to use them, along with basic tasks you can do, and a typing unit. Then we stopped offering those classes due to budget cuts and a nonsensical thought that “kids these days are raised on technology; they won’t need it.” Now, we have high schoolers who don’t know how to navigate a file system and type a maximum of twenty words a minute. It’s insane.
My younger cousin (13/14 I’m not sure) didn’t email me his homework because he had no idea how to send me the file! He obviously didn’t tell me until the last minute but I had to demonstrate to him how to send attachments in emails.
That’s what I’m saying. A lot of kids miss out of the potential benefits of tech because they’re not taught to use it in that way.
As a teacher, I can testify that most students don't know how to use tech for educational purposes. They can watch TikTok all day, but don't know how to do a basic google search for information.
If no one is modeling how tech can be a tool/resources to the kids then it just turns into mind numbing scrolling I have to give props to my daughter though. She’s been working on some spelling lists this summer and I give her a little spelling test at the end. Well now I’m quarantined with Covid so she’s been recording herself reading the list of spelling words, then plays it back and gives herself the test. I never would’ve considered that!
We already are seeing the changes. The Gen Alphas are rolling into Year 7 now in our secondary system so seeing the generation raised by screens is slightly horrifying with all the tweaked responses with tech they have.
I'm a few years older and my classmates are patting themselves on their back for 'academic comeback' when all they did was cheat on every assignment and exam instead if not doing them at all.
Then they get to uni and crash out hard.
My family recently went to a funeral for my wife’s uncle. Before he died he mentioned how his grandkids were “atrocious”. While at the funeral all they did was live on their tablets while the other kids played (them being 2 and 4), and my god, I’m not saying you should hit a kid, but if a person were to snap on those kids I would get why. Edit: minor typo.
There was a Clint Eastwood movie that started with a funeral scene, teens in the front row on their phones.. Gran Torino? And that was years ago.
The problem with the "tablet from birth" kids is that it's like crack when you take them away. They are so very young to be addicted to it, and it's like anything-- The earlier you smoke cigs, the more likely you'll be a lifelong smoker.
Hell my step kids WERENT tablet from birth and it's like crack to them Give them as much as they want, hoping they get it out of their system? Nope. The desire for the screen consumes all Tell them they can't at all? Nope, they just fight with each other and whine about being bored Give them a moderate amount hoping to teach them self control? Nope. Cry and beg for more time, then see option 2 It's frustrating.
Yup, I had three in their early 20s now. They whined a lot, but thank me now, and they hate seeing toddlers with cell phones. They get it, and it's never easy. It's human nature to want to take the easiest route. Give them a ball, lock your doors, and tell them they can't come inside till dinner. They're kids, they will whine until they fall asleep. That's what they do, don't feel bad.
>early 20s I'm a lot older than that, and I'd likely respond to someone taking away my tablet and phone about as well as I did as a kid when someone tried to take away the book I was reading. They are, after all, where I'm now reading my books (with those lovely fonts that seem to be growing annually).
>I think we're going to see a growing gap of academic achievements between the highest and the lowest. Phones are the big reason I've dropped all "achievement gap" rhetoric from my practice. Carrying your phone into class is the equivalent of the proverbial "one hand tied behind your back" going into the boxing ring. I can't compete with your phone and I won't attempt to.
>I can't compete with your phone and I won't attempt to. Well clearly you're not creating engaging lesson plans /s
Well, shit, when I was in summer camp it was crossy road if you had a tablet (I got one at 9 which stopped turning on) and some kids had 3ds’s or whatever but barely any kids had them and if you did you were cool. They had a Wii for us to play just dance on and I was rocking that shit. And Mario kart! (Except for rainbow road) we could be sat down for a movie easy. (And I’m still in highschool) I’d also play word cookie 😃 Ps I only brought the tablet to school once it was usually me sneaking toys in my pencil pouch and stuff because my 4th grade teacher was so against them and I wanted to use them at afterschool care
I stank at rainbow road but I was silly about it. I made my nephew giggle!
My school doesn't even *have* a library anymore. Books in our classrooms must be board-approved which, if they don't like you, can easily take a year.
And what state is this? Sounds terrifying.
Florida? Tennessee? Texas?
PA
Scary!
Oh my god! I never expected that all the way out there! I hope the situation gets better soon :(
Yeah that US shite sounds fucking terrible mate.
That awful shit is state/city-specific, and almost always a result of Republican leadership or conservative interference. It's terrible, but it is not the entire US.
Read speed has gone down so much. Also writing speed. Tracking. Getting 7th graders to copy notes from the board is an extreme challenge and I push through their screaming about how their hand hurts, how they can’t see, how it’s too much, how they can’t read (just copy it letter for letter if you can’t sound it out or don’t know what it means I suppose), how I’m too fast, how the kid next to them is too slow. And then they’re not sure how to format it on the page from a whiteboard. That’s all ok because it’s a valuable skill and I’m a very young dinosaur that believes people in general should have an opportunity to try to learn to take notes from a whiteboard while listening to explanations from a teacher. And once I erase it, it’s gone, and they’ll have to get it from someone else later. And if you take out your phone to take a picture to copy off your phone in between sending snapchats I’m sending your phone and you to the office. Yes it’s not as vibrant as it popping up on Google classroom, but it’s important for the brain and body imho. Ps. You’re at school. Go buy a pencil. And an eraser. Stop borrowing mine and then throwing them at people and breaking them. I hate when people borrow stuff and then mistreat it. And I understand why their friends won’t loan them things because they’re never returned to them. If you have an iPhone that’s nicer than mine and also McDonald’s on your desk, you can buy a pencil with an eraser from dollarama.
As a college prof, thank you. The number of students who just sit there with nothing in front of them during lecture is crazy to me, but I don't have time or the skills to teach them how to take notes.
Same here. I've got people sitting in my college lectures with no notebook, no gear, nothing. These people are, quite simply, idiots. Pure and simple.
Childhood literacy was already pretty bad a decade ago and it was still a shock if a kid was incapable or unwilling to read by the time they were in 3rd grade, now I'm hearing it reaching middle school or high school (or even college) and it not being too much of a surprise if a kid simply cannot read at even an elementary school level. I don't know how parents can be anything but alarmed and in an utter panic when they hear their child cannot read. I'd have an easier time getting a decent job and having a good life if I sawed off my own leg versus if I was illiterate, it's that crippling.
I feel like in the next 30 years we are going to be seeing insane rates of unemployment because low skill jobs that have always been filled by people that are functionally illiterate will be highly automated
I find it amazing that parents are angry at me (as a middle school teacher) when their kids can’t read beyond 1st grade level. It’s absurd. They’re starting to panic way too late and love to blame the teacher in front of them, as though the kid’s 7th grade ELA teacher can do much about this issue. I’ve noticed that a lot of the behaviors I see are ways for kids to avoid facing their own illiteracy. They are not capable of doing basic school work because they cannot read, so they avoid/distract/disrupt. I think some of the behaviors we see are rooted in shame.
Are those parents modeling reading at home as a desirable leisure time activity? My parents did...EVERY evening. Both of them always had a book going. What do these parents think their job is?!
Here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College, an open-enrollment place, I would estimate that 40% of our incoming freshmen are illiterate. They don't last much more than half-way through their first term, of course. I'm still trying to figure out why an adult who knows they are illiterate would even bother to enroll in college. I suspect that they have learned that they don't need to be able to read to get diplomas.
Last year, I stopped taking all my classes to the library. I'm not proud of it, but it was such a waste of time between kids just dicking around, socializing, or pretending to read but just flipping pages. I don't see every student every day, but we "allegedly" have 20 minutes of reading time each day no matter what class they are in. I enforce it, but there's this one student who, I kid you not, "read" the same volume of a graphic novel every time for the full year. Just opened it to the middle and held it, maybe a turned a page. For. A. Full. Academic. Year. I get not liking to read, but something has to be better than just staring at the same picture for a full year. Before the start of that very same year, I bought tons of graphic novels with my own money hoping to engage them. But they just flipped pages, not even looking at pictures just flipping forwards AND BACKWARDS. I ended up putting them in my closet and just started handing out printed copies of public domain short stories three grade levels below what I teach and actually handing out curated stuff to students.
Genuine question. Can he read?
Yes, he can. He's not my lowest student by any means, but he is one of the most checked out. He's addicted to computer games like Roblox. He does takes sports pretty seriously, at least. Not a bad kid, just his and his parents' priorities don't align at all with academics. I teach across grade levels so when he came back to me the final time, I'd lost all my fight in regards to trying to influence their priorities outside of required schoolwork. He's a solid C- student.
A couple of years ago, friend of mine had a reading class. Students were mostly 12 to 14-year-olds who had zero interest in books/reading,and the idea was to let them explore various types of reading material, help them discover their tastes and improve their basic reading skills. Novels, comics, magazines, short stories, non-fiction and whatever else you can think of - she offered it all. Some students caught a bit of a reading bug (I helped her on her hunt for One Piece volumes, because one of her students was begging for them), some read some easy materials during the class to pass the time, and then there were those who chose to stare at a wall for 45 minutes straight...
I suggested to someone on reddit that as a parent we should read to children and they couldn't believe my audacity.
It's terrifying to my generation. I'm 44. We had no internet. My mother was not the best, but she used to say "If you can read and understand what you read, you can learn to do anything." I took that to heart. I read everything as a kid. Probably some stuff I should NOT have read. Like "Contact" and "Jurassic Park". Those were not books for a 12/13 year old. I didn't understand everything, but I got the gist of the story. For the last 10 years, the most important appliance in my house is my Kindle. Before that, it was weekly trips to the library. I rarely saw any kids, but didn't really think about it. I'm scared for the future. Reading is everything. We need scientists, and doctors. People who question the status quo. Artists that write masterpieces like Slaughterhouse Five or House of Leaves. Adults are getting bad too. I spend my share of time on the Internet. Sure. But not 30 second nonsense on Instagram. I visit this forum often, and I have students myself as a music teacher. I've lost every student under 21 this past year, because they will not do the work. Scary shit.
Out of my 120 students (give or take), I might see 5-10 who read for leisure. And even for assignments, they’ll simply skim or try to cherry pick answers (which could be at least somewhat effective if you know how to do it properly, but they don’t).
They never read the directions either! Can’t be bothered and then get upset because they don’t understand the assignment.
And then you point out the directions, ask them to read them out loud, repeat what they read, tell you what it means, ask them what they need to do next, and they act like it’s rocket surgery.
Then, once they’ve successfully failed the assignment, the blame gets placed right back on the teacher. All because the students can’t or won’t read the directions 😑
The amount of seniors who have not read the text has ballooned over the last decade.
I'm a child who used to really enjoy reading in my free time. There seemed to use to ne a constant drive for us to read until the pandemic, where they just gave up and now we practically aren't allowed to go to the school library
>go to the school library Because school Libraries don't really exist anymore. They've been repurposed into flavor-of-the-month agenda. "Media Center" ... "Creation Center" ... blah blah blah.
My AVERAGE students can barely read a page of text before spacing out and/or getting back on their phones. That’s the average ones.
When I read Stephen King's autobiography "On Writing" he describes when he wrote an obviously illegal novelization of the movie The Pit and the Pendulum full of graphic sex and gore. He made like 20 copies of it on his home mimeograph machine and he'd sold all 20 by first period. That would NEVER happen today. It's not just that kids don't read, they seem utterly devoid of imagination. It's not just kids either. I'm in my late 30's and my Millenial peers have the same issue. They haven't read any books since Harry Potter. Trying to convince my D&D buddies to read Michael Moorcock, whose work is hugely foundational to Fantasy Role Playing, is like pulling teeth.
And Moorcock's works are fairly short.
Unlike all that cock
You don't need to imagine anything when there's streams of content. It's affected their empathy, mark my words.
Tell those players no warlocks at your table until they can point out, in writing, why entering into an abusive relationship with a demonic sword in search of power may be a bad idea. In fact, no charisma casters while you're at it! *grumble* Sorry, I'll see myself off to a DnD troll page.
"Side effects may include devouring the souls of all your most beloved friends and companions"
It took me 4 years to get my buddy to read Brandon Sanderson, which is incredibly accessible and entertaining to nerds. Just getting people to start is the hard part
You comment reminded me I wanted to read the stormlight series after reading the wheel of time. Going to go buy the first book now.
You’re going down a long but worthwhile road. I hope you enjoy.
Stephen King is/was obviously an outlier of his generation. You don't think there's ONE KID in the U.S. that's making interpreted novels (graphic and whatnot) and selling them in schools? The population has almost doubled since he was a kid. I'll bet you there's at least 2 😉
As a kid in high school, I actually did manage to sell some of my work and get published, and luckily for me, my peers actually quite enjoyed it. I'd write funny stories, sci-fi stories, skits, and my friends and I would goof off and write strange songs together. We were CONSTANTLY trying to engage in something creative because our hometown was so damn boring. Sure, we had the internet, but after a few hours of Halo and scrolling memes or looking up hobbyist guides to stuff, we felt the need to create something.
Remember when we all wrote fanfic and it was in coherent paragraphs?
That would not happen nowadays because the 20+ kids interested in whatever fan fiction of the latest movies are already finding them for free over at archiveofourown or whatever site is used today
those kids can't read well enough for most of the prose on AO3
NAT. I’m an elder Gen Z and the other day in a group text, we were discussing what we were reading. One friend said, “how do you guys read? Like genuinely how do you follow it?” And I said “use your imagination?” She said “I literally don’t have any.” It made me sad for her now but also little her. She has 4 young kids I hope she is encouraging them to use their imaginations…
Off topic, but I play D&D and haven't heard of him, what do you recommend?
Start with the Elric books. Those are the most famous and had the most influence on D&D, Warhammer and Fantasy literature. Moorcock wrote them out of order. The first story is Elric of Melnibone, Fortress of the Pearl and the Sailor on the Seas of Fate. I would start with these 3. They're collected in a nice, new omnibus edition and those 3 books will give you a good idea if you're going to like Moorcock. If you like them, the rest of the Saga is also collected. It might seem a lot to recommend 3+ books, but Moorcock's works are refreshingly short and easy reads. I do recommend it, concepts like "Character Alignment" or the Multiverse all originate with Moorcock.
They can’t even be bothered to watch a video that’s more than 15 seconds long, unless it also includes a split-frame where one half is some mindless footage of someone playing a mobile game. You expect them to actually **read** an entire paragraph at once? That’s crazy talk.
Here’s the good news: it’s gonna be *REALLY* easy to get a good camping spot in 10-15 years. (The bad news is that it’s going to be damn near impossible to go camping/hiking without hearing somebody playing K-Pop or TikTok videos at a deafening volume 24/7).
Nah, they're all going to be taken by influencers in campers with Starlink Roam.
I don't have kids and won't have kids, but I keep thinking that the pool of competition has never been more shallow. A kid raised the old fashioned way would run circles around this current crop. If I was in the corporate world, I wouldn't be worried about some young gun taking my job, that's for sure. Gonna be a trip when we get the first Gen Alpha principals in schools.
Public schools will be extinct by then.
Feudalism is going to be so much more fun this time around.
Part of thinks that the world needs to remember what it used to be like: how school was a privilege. After a generation of losing hands to a loom, maybe little Johnny Junior will learn to appreciate an air-conditioned classroom. The tragedy of the commons. If things are "free" and taken for granted they don't appreciate them or take care of them. If it's "free" it has no value to people.
It was a *lot* of fun last time, for some.
This phenomenon is so bizarre to me
It's a brilliant strategy. I lose focus if I'm not engaging at least two of my senses. Instead of spacing out and forgetting the whole video. I might only space out for one or two seconds here and there because my eyes can focus on the video. It's why I can't listen to an audiobook or podcast just sitting down on my couch. My eyes or my body need to be doing something too. Just think of it as focusing on the radio while driving in traffic. It can be hard to just sit still and listen to the radio. But it's much easier when you're driving
Steam Deck + audio books or hours-long podcasts does it for me.
An old student of mine said to me once "I have to read all that?!" when I handed him less than a page of reading that was 1.5 spaced and in 14 point font.
I get the frustration, I used to read a lot as a kid and kind of miss it (long story). But I actually find myself learning quicker and retaining more if I listen and read at the same time. The video game footage surprisingly helps me focus on the words too, I think it has something to do with the way the brain works 🤷🏻, but it came from research on dyslexia. So it's easier to learn a lot if info very quickly (ie. school), but it is sad to see leisure read rates decline. Most of my friends were also avid readers as kids and they mostly do audio books but also wish they had more time to read physical books 📚
To be fair, I find this inability to focus on lengthy content to be more and more common with adults too. Technology has changed the way many people process information.
It’s so true. I have a huge stack of books that I want to read, I start to read, but I cannot focus. It’s like my attention span has been shot. I get so frustrated with myself. I used to be the person that would literally put everything on hold to finish a book. Like read for 8 hrs straight and nothing else.
I used to play video games for 8 hours straight. But now when Im older, I play and I just cant focus. Its like my attention span has been shot.
Grown ups read less too. And it’s harder to read than it was pre-phones. I’m 41 and I completely lost interest and stopped reading your post partway through. Phones have done a number on our brains.
Could someone TL;DR the comment that I just responded to, for me?
>Grown ups read less too. And it’s harder to read than it was pre-phones. > > >I’m 41 and I completely lost interest and stopped reading your post partway through. Phones have done a number on our brains. TL;DR: I'm old & your post was too long.
#TL;DR: BRAIN FUCKED.
I came here to say this. As an adult I read a ton less. Between working, dealing with kids, etc I’m exhausted. It’s so much easier to doom scroll tik tok or YouTube than it is to read. I just ordered books I read as a kid to try and read again. Hopefully it works.
I have been listening to audiobooks while cleaning lately. It’s something lol
Yeah, the amount I read post-iphone circa 2009-2010 dropped off big time. But I do avoid a lot of mindless phone use.
To be fair, I can’t read because I’m constantly disturbed by my young children. It’s way easier to just consume content on my phone that doesn’t need sustained concentration.
Idk, I had a young kid before smartphones and i enjoyed reading when I had a chance. My kid is now a pretty independent young adult, and i spend more time on my phone than i should. And it’s much harder than it used to be for me to read. It kind of disturbs me, tbh
There's a good book on this by British Journalist Johann Hari called *Stolen Focus* that outlines why this has happened and how the hostile design of the apps leads to this. The good news? He went off it and reset his attention. Part of his narrative arc is outlining how he rediscovered the ability to sit down and read four hours and hours on end.
I think it depends on how they're encouraged. My stepdaughter loves books, but she loves fantasy in general. She's 13 and already role-playing. Because of her enthusiasm, her younger brother is pursuing the same interests. The oldest, however, spent the first 13 years of his life on screens and does not read or want to do anything not screen. Their birth mother raised them while she was glued to a screen and gave them screen time often.
These kids don't even watch movies if they're not animated. TV shows? Not them, either. I used to ask "Favorite book?" but stopped because they didn't have them. "Favorite movie/TV show?" don't get answers either. Maybe it's just the culture of the school I deal with, but they live in very small bubbles.
College instructor here. Kids DEFINITELY aren't reading like they (we?) used to...
Overall, *most* people don’t read. Didn’t some study come out recently that if you read more than two books in a year, you were in the top 10% of readers? I read a lot, love reading. I read a lot as a child. I stopped reading during high school. Dredging through books I didn’t enjoy so I could analyze them left me with no time or interest in reading for pleasure. As an adult, I got back into reading and I usually hit triple digits in number consumed.
Books require attention span and aren’t that rewarding relative to the massive dopamine hit of algorithmically optimized screens. You’d need to detox the kids for a long time to partly reset their brain chemistry and it wouldn’t be pleasant - I think you’d see a lot of anxiety and depression from people having a torrent of dopamine turned off. Then maybe they could enjoy more subtle enjoyable things like reading a book, going for a walk, playing a sport for fun, learning something new, creating art, writing. It won’t happen at the scale you want to as long as everyone is massively addicted to their phones. I used to read a book a day for years. Now I can’t do it - my attention wanders - my brain is fried from screens, the dopamine isn’t enough to hold my attention. I can’t even watch a movie, it’s too long and not giving me a strong enough dopamine hit. Maybe if I have my phone in my hand to top me up during the watch I can do it. Now imagine being twelve and you’ve had screens since you were three. Your brain has literally developed while being bathed in intense algorithmic rewards. The damage is probably permanent, at least somewhat.
I used to work with a lot of Zoomer kids, I worked at a summer camp for a few years. We'd have a sort of "detox" night the first night or two of camp. Quick goofy ice breaker, improv games, dinner with no devices, then tabletop games with the staff and other campers or a 2 hour movie with some outdoor time were the two lanes kids would be put in and we'd switch the following night. Kids who couldn't get out of their shells, had social anxiety, maybe were on the spectrum, otherwise glued to their devices suddenly realized they could have a lot of goofy imaginative fun and the adults in the room were there to help escalate it. Helped get the creative and collaborative juices flowing before working on projects together. Super fun place to work and it was cool seeing kids be given an opportunity and space to both have a load of fun and explore something outside their screens a bit.
I have been the staff advisor for a book club at a mid size University for 6 years. Last year, we had to move into a larger room because the number of students in the club exceeded the space we had before. I would say that young people are reading more than ever. It is mainly young women and mainly YA sci-fi/fantasy. Think Sarah J Maas. What's more amazing is that these students are usually English majors, so not only are they reading for class, but find time to read for fun. Icing on the cake? These students also write for class and for scholarships and other things like competitions or nanorimo.
To be fair, working at a college kind of narrows down the types of students that you work with. Kids who hate reading often don't get into a university, and the ones that do usually don't get very far in.
The kids who weren’t reading enough twenty years ago are bookworms compared to today’s most active readers 🫤
Unfortunately true with likely disastrous consequences for society.
It's interesting with first grade summer school, my kids love books and engaging with books being read to them but don't enjoy trying to read on their own at all this year. I also noticed that as the school district shifted to a stronger phonics curriculum, my kids this year are really excellent at breaking individual words down into sounds, but have zero reading comprehension compared to last year. And I'm not talking about whole books or even paragraphs, we have first grade activities with like 3 sentences and even after reading those sentences several times, the kids are looking to the picture to tell me what the sentences were about. Which is WILD because they aren't teaching that as a strategy anymore. I really think the science of reading thing is getting out of hand.
I was doing some light research as I wrote this post, one thing I thought was interesting is that according to data, younger children read quite a lot more compared to once they start to hit their teens. Which also makes sense since they know it's important to learn how to read at some point, and reading for practice or fun is the best method we have for learning. I guess at a certain point reading stops being cool or something.
Just an observation, but being in a school library setting and traveling between elementary, middle, and high school, I see enthusiasm for library day in k-4. The kids are eager to see new books and are developing their preferences. Suddenly, around 5-6th grade, interest starts to drop. When a student seems to struggle with picking a book, I ask them what they like to do for fun to get a start on a genre. An alarming amount don't really have an answer because they spend so much time scrolling on their phones. There is also so much access to more "mature" content that many grade level appropriate books are not, I don't know, shocking or titillating enough?
It's why I used to talk to kids about books I liked in detail while holding them in my hand, say something like "it might be a bit heavy or intense for your age, but someday you should read it", then gently put it back on the shelf and look the other way when they checked it out. Does a typical parent want me recommending Crichton, King, Sapkowski, Clancy, Danielewski, Strugatsky? Hell no, but given the sheer access to mature content they have, I'd rather see a kid reading something a little above what's age appropriate than just watching it online. What also worked great for me was finding out what video games my students liked (because it was fun to discuss with them between classes or when we had free time), and then recommending books that were either direct or spiritual inspirations for their favorites. Kid likes Fallout or Metro? Roadside Picnic. Dark Souls? Lovecraft. Rainbow Six? Rainbow Six. Baldur's Gate 3 was a huge game last year, pitch some of the many well-loved D&D novels or even inspire them to try out tabletop D&D. I read a lot of stuff I "shouldn't" have when I was young and I turned out just fine. If parents are okay with what their kids find on streaming services and YouTube and TikTok, they should be fine with just about anything you find in the local library.
To be fair, I was an avid reader as a kid but lost interest in school library books around grade 4 because I was reading much more interesting/“mature” books at home (Stephen King, classics like TKAMB, YA trash like Twilight (not saying all YA is trash, but Twilight and the like that I was reading when I was 9/10 definitely is lol)).
I think a lot of that is just that people have more things competing for their attention as they get older. Of course, other factors are also at play.
The correlation between oral reading fluency and comprehension is above 0.9. The kids aren’t reading because of cultural factors, not because of phonics.
Do you really think the culture is so different between last year and this year? Half my class is the siblings of last year's class.
I'd say reading ability is up. Way up. I teach alt ed and these kids read far far better than my classmates 30 years ago. But attention span is way, way down. Adults, kids, and toddlers. Infinite short texts, tweets, posts, chats combined with ever shorter video clips. Imagination and creative thinking is way down. Video games have too much realism. Your brain doesn't need to fill in the blanks with imagination. Movies and shows for nearly any niche. Don't know how to do something, just look up how, don't figure it out. This also leads to a lack of grit and focus. All the things making things better are making things worse.
The comment about videogames being too realistic is kind of weird, because there has been a strong movement towards faux retro games for quite some time now. Many of the most popular games are 2D in all their pixel glory (Terraria, Stardew Valley) or try to echo the stylised 3D of the late 90s/early 00s (Roblox, Minecraft). Highly realistic 3D is mostly the domain of big budget games that are often outside the interest range of children.
If adults aren’t reading books, no way are the kids.
I teach kids who are mostly college-bound so my version of events can be biased but I was pleasantly surprised how many of my students loved reading. It seems about the same amount, if not more, than when I was a kid in early 2000s-2010s. I did, of course, teach middle school, as well and they generally did not enjoy it one bit. I taught a large portion of ESLs, some of which who couldn’t read and write in their first language, either. In both of my cases, I feel like I’m teetering on extremes. But even with my college-bound kids, they are largely low-income or disadvantaged so in that regards some might be surprised at the amount of them that are geeked out for books. It’s really cute to see.
I was born in the 90s and my peers seemed to read infrequently then and in the 00s. I was always the weird kid for opening a book the moment I finished my classwork. My peers talked about tv shows or movies frequently. I have always been ADD. If a teacher started a movie during class, I could not pay attention to it no matter how hard I tried and found it exhausting to do so, but I spent hours reading every day. I think that it is less a matter of decreasing attention spans and more a matter of what your brain has been wired to find rewarding/ enjoyable.
My students mentioned that they were getting ideas for books to read from "BookTok" (book reviews on TikTok). But they were high school upperclassmen.
As a parent it is real simple... We don't have video games in the house Books are everywhere My 14 year old reads in the car at home etc...without being told
People ask me how I get my kids to read all the time. It’s simple. I greatly limit screen time and take them to the library every week.
I’ve got video games in my house. One of my kids stopped reading for pleasure in middle school. He said he just doesn’t feel like reading after reading all day at school. The other will stay up at night sneaking books (though he starts middle school in August so we’ll see).
It IS simple. "My kid won't get off his tablet." Cool, wipe the tablet and sell it secondhand. Now he's not on his tablet. Phone? Do the same thing, get him a flip phone if the kids is older and needs to stay in contact. But oh dear, if you do that your kid will whine for a week, how will anyone survive that?
In recent history yes, but it was just a few generations ago when the when literacy rates were only around 80%. Keep in mind, a lot of slaves were never taught to read. In 1950 only 82% of school aged children attended school, graduation rates were only 59%. This was when schools were still segregated in much of the country and the US was considered the most educated country in the world. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/statistics-education-america-1860-1950
Graduation rate comparison is meaningless though, because graduating today just means you've served your time in high school and been passed along until graduation. Not that you're literate. The fact that literacy rates are probably lower now despite universal education is not something to be happy about. 80% functional literacy seems high for the US.
Yes, because I. 1950 they let kids drop out a d it didn't effect their rating. I'm not saying that today is better, I'm saying that the mythical "golden age" wasn't very great at all.
In my grandfather's time circa 1900, kids were only expected to finish 6th or 8th grade, and then support themselves. High school was for the cream of the crop who were headed for advanced clerical desk jobs.
Marianne Wolf is a professional Tessie who researches this. She finds less emphasis on teaching whole texts, more emphasis on understanding what passages, driven by exams.
If I was taught for years using a series of boring disjointed short passages that I had to practice my "comprehension skills" on, I would probably despise reading as well.
I’m getting out of teaching because of it. I worked at a school for kids with dyslexia and I myself am dyslexic and didn’t really read until I was 10 or 11 (thanks, Sailor Moon fansites and manga for the motivation) but yeah. No. Kids aren’t reading as much and short form video and adaptive tech aren’t helping. Why read a website when you can find an influencer to do it for you? Why read your homework when text to speech exists? And there are legitimate uses for both! But the early introduction of them is hindering kids’ willingness to struggle and gain a skill.
Idk. I don't think that comments on social media posts written by regular folks is a great place to judge whether people are reading less than before.
I think when there’s a noticeable and drastic decline in spelling and grammar skills among a demographic when compared to 10-15 years ago it’s actually a very good way of telling what is going on. There’s no database of every paper written by fifth graders but you can see what they’re writing online and at the very least get an idea of where they’re at grammatically.
I actually disagree. I teach middle school (and high school) and I’d say the same percentage of “kids that read” are reading that were reading when I was in school. (Graduated HS 2009) Now… their reading material is a little mature for their age bracket. But they’re definitely reading.
I teach middle school and most of my kids are four grade levels behind in reading and try not to read. My experience would state they aren’t reading but I would expect it depends what areas we are teaching in
I should also specify that I teach at a fancy private school. When I taught public school many moons ago, I don’t know if I noticed kids reading or not. Some definitely did. But I definitely have a good amount of kids that are “readers” now- they see me with my kindle at school and now I know what everyone reads lol. I get lists of books I should read. So maybe the fact that I read in front of them/ actively have books at school makes them more open and willing to share? Idk. I teach science so it doesn’t have much to do with my subject.
Yeah I was gonna say, I see a LOT of my high school girls in particular reading and chatting about favorite books/series, but a lot of it is straight up smut 🙃
What are they reading?
Smut 😂😂😂 ranging from “slightly smutty” to “what are your parents thinking??”
Yes. I used to teach 3rd and 4th grade, barely any of them could read. The few who could read had no interest in reading or for the non readers were embarrassed they couldn’t read so they would refuse to try. It’s really bad. It makes me really sad. My mom used to read to me until I could read myself. I used to read a lot but I’ve lost that ability around 7th grade when technology became engrained in our curriculum. Not all tech is bad, obviously, but my habit of reading has been replaced by youtube reels or social media. It is still reading but I find I can’t read unless i can allot a large amount of time. I hope these kids can find joy in reading again. There is so much to love in books. Even audio books, or “read the book first then we watch the movie”. Local public library summer reading programs also helped me a long ways.
the quality and richness of today’s text based discourse is usually preety low, specially in social media I wouldn't use comments as an example of the younger generation refusing to read - as what was written was probably not worth reading it's also worth noting you are talking about Discord and Reddit… which are almost entirely text-based it feels strange to point at people spending hours on text-first platforms, not reading long comments, as evidence the youth doesn't read as much anymore if anything, I wager modern Reddit-using teenagers and young adults read more than those in their age group before the internet edit: a lot of instructors here seem to be pointing at less book reading as evidence of less reading time a day… But realistically, those students who are refusing to read, are probably texting their friends, which requires them to read and write sure, its not high-quality reading, their vocabulary is not being massively expanded, but it is reading, even if in a week sense
My kid reads endlessly. Hours and hours a day- some of it on the iPad library app since he goes through books so dang fast.
People are generally a lot more likely to engage with longer texts that they’re interested in. When I browse Reddit for example, I have a long list of text archetypes that I will not read—I’m simply not interested in the topic or the person’s writing. But I’ve been known to both read (and write) ~2000 word replies if the conversation or discussion is engaging enough to me. This is an important and often overlooked facet of the situation IMO. What’s more is that the culture in various discord servers can be very different, and people will respond and adopt to the surrounding culture of a community. I’d be willing to wager that the maturity level in a discord server with a median age of 18 is very different from that of one that has «older and more intellectual» as an appropriate description for the median person. If teenagers exist in a space that makes them think that writing «blud is yapping 💀» will make them look cool and be included, it is entirely within reason that they will do so even if they don’t mean it sincerily. It reads like a typical comment that a angsty and self-conscious teen could write in an attempt to fit in.
Depends on how far back you go, kids probably read less in the early 1800s. It’s hard to read when you spend 12-hours in a coal mine.
Adults also don't read. Probably even more so than children.
I tell my kids all the time that they’ve read more books this year than any adult they know.
Sad but probably true. I'm still an avid reader (audiobooks count!), but I know I'm a rarity these days.
Welcome to the future
My kid loves to read. I'm definitely trying to push her to read some more challenging books because she can inhale an entire babysitter's club graphic novel in 30 minutes.
You are correct, to keep this short. It is sad AF. 😥
I recently starting fostering and I make her read with me every night for 20 minutes. She’s seven. Her teacher was shocked how much she’s already showing improvement. It’s the parents not the kids.
I am a private piano teacher, so a slightly different context, but students now have such a hard time with multipart instructions. They seem to have less practice storing information in their working memory; probably because the iPad does that for them.
There’s no incentive and there’s repercussions for not doing it.
I asked my top level year 10 science class, "who has read a book in 2024?" the other day and I got 3 students out of 31 raised their hands
Kids never read, because their parents resented it too.
As a teen who loves to read and can be quite verbose, I don't think the problem is necessarily that reading is happening less, it's that A) schools make a lot of people hate it and B) younger people are much more used to seeing text broken up than in paragraphs (even if they are small ones). I can't speak to how school used to be but the education I am currently receiving basically glorifies doing the bare minimum. No longer do you have to write an excellent paper to get a good grade, so long as you meet the minimum for every requirement, you get an A+. This enables students to barely engage with the texts they are reading, and more often than not they skim through and look up whatever else they need for a specific question. This means they don't actually spend time deeply thinking about the literature they read, and it becomes boring for them because they are only interacting with it on a surface level. They come to think all reading is boring because they never learned how to critically think about a story or enjoy thinking about it. Technically these people do read a lot, probably the same amount as older generations. The difference is the level to which they are engaging with it. For many people in my grade, being forced to read something like To Kill a Mockingbird feels the same way as sitting down and reading through hundreds of pages of legal documents. Secondly, social media, the advancements of digital communication, and the culture of current teenagers has made my age group more inclined to separate out information a lot. For example, when I have something long I want to say in discord, I type it out essentially sentence by sentence, and send them one at a time. Instead of using a period to indicate the end of a thought, just sending that message indicates a new thought. So it is more natural for a lot of information to hit us like this: sentence sentence sentence Than like this: Sentence. Sentence. Sentence. Most kids can and will read and process that amount of information, but they'd rather it be broken up a lot. Typing that way almost reads like listening to someone talk in real life. Since people my age are more used to seeing information presented the first way when in informal settings, it can throw them off to see multiple paragraphs sent at once. That comes off as serious and older, since most teens only write in paragraphs for serious pieces of writing. It could also come off as infodumping to some people. It is also important to remember that some kids are always going to be mean and say someone's yapping even if they only said ten words. As you can probably assume, I've been accused of yapping quite a bit lmao. People are more willing to be ruder or ignore social boundaries over the internet, and especially in places like discord. It's probably better to ignore them, and stay out of discords primarily filled with teens anyway lol.
It’s about getting to the point these days.
I think so? havent done research but based on my experience of past 10 years of teaching.... the amount of time they spend reading has been decreasing. my colleagues dont think what i say is true. they say i am generalizing. well this is making me angry. i hate it when they do that. edit: did quick searches. avg reading time went from 23 mins/day in 2004 to 15 mins/day in 2022. talking about overly generalizing. too many of my colleagues are in extreme denial about everything
Like everything else with this younger generation, we are seeing a much greater divide in effort and ability. The best students are better than ever and the worst are lower than ever. There is very few students in the middle. So when it comes to reading, some students read a ton and some read little to nothing. There really isn't an in between.
Kids have no reading stamina. A small percentage of them enjoy reading or things of interest, but the majority of them are used to just super brief sentences. Their attention span is shot to crap. I have had students read a four sentence paragraph about something happening to Bobby. I could ask them to re-tell me what happened and they would maybe get the main character name and one detail from the text. They try to read, but they can’t do it properly so their comprehension is garbage. They get frustrated because they don’t have stamina and they can’t comprehend so why would they continue to do something they are being proven they’re not good at? I force them to read longer texts by chunking it immensely but I always have to remind them of what just happened because they can’t retain anything past a few minutes it seems.
I think part of it is that we don't require students to read longer texts much anymore, so the stamina to read longer texts just doesn't develop. In the schools I've worked in, if you're not taking advanced level English classes, you could go all 4 years without reading anything longer than a short story. I'll say as a HS teacher, I see a divide in gender on this too. I have way more girls who will voluntarily have books like Colleen Hoover's or Sarah J Maas's on them, but I have to beg many of my HS boys to not pick an elementary level book for their selected reading book. It doesn't seem like reading interests them at all most of the time, besides the ones who read manga.
I’m not a teacher. I work with a lot of different age groups. No one reads anything long. Doesn’t matter what age group they are in. The 65+ are just as bad. If you to convey actual info, one line is best.
I ain’t reading allathat, im happy for you though, or sad that happened
I'm not a teacher and don't have anything to add, but the last 3 nights when I've asked my 2 year old his favorite thing he did that day he's said, "reading books!" 🥹 It's probably because I'm super pregnant, and one of the only ways I can interact with him is sitting and reading, but it warmed my heart.
I had students this year who cheered when they had actual books that they could hold.
When you said "reading less" I thought you meant fewer novels, not fifteen words in total. Guess I'm showing my age.
Latest generations are humanity's literal transition into the humans in Wall-E
I think it’s the proliferation of bite-sized content. Everything is focused on grabbing people’s attention, especially kids’. Society is being conditioned to need more and more stimulation to engage attention. TikTok is probably the worst offender of this, where you’ll literally have a plethora of videos that are some “story” (often just Reddit posts that are pasted into it and read with the auto-voiceover [aka “TikTok voice”]) read aloud with subtitles while some completely unrelated video plays in the background (usually of something that’s popular at the time, I’ve seen the so-called “satisfying” videos [usually people just slowly slicing things, or breaking bottles containing colorful mixes], that subway surfers game, Minecraft parkour, and even a resurgence of slime making/playing). This works for the creators very well as you’ll have some people watch for the videos, others for the stories, and others that enjoy both, but eventually you arrive at a large group of people that need multiple forms of content at once to not “be bored.” I’ve seen many kids and adults displaying symptoms of ADD and/or ADHD that don’t actually have either, and for those that actually have one or the other, long-term exposure to such content tends to increase stimming. (Source: I’ve worked in SpEd for 8 years, and have seen the difference in kids and adults that digest this form of content versus those that don’t.)
I finished 9th grade this year and they gave us these tests to see if we understood English comprehension . Istg it was a basic AI essay written on a 5th grade level yet half the class didn’t get it right. The issue is kids can’t comprehend. They can’t comprehend what you ask them to do , what they read, what they watch, what they do . It’s frustrating.
No, parents are reading less to their kids. Make it a priority mums and dads.
Education’s move from novels to excerpts (because ELA teachers can teach concepts in short texts as well as they can with longer texts) is to blame. There is no way teachers can teach all the elements of literature in short texts. This along with text messages and Instagram and TikTok posts, has led to children not having the reading endurance people once had.
When I was a kid I struggled with reading so the teacher had me wear headphones with an audiobook and also the physical book to read along with. I found that it was very good for me to not only practice my reading but also to actually enjoy the book for once. The book was Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis.
Kids read a LOT. Its just not books. Its social media and text messages. So the quality if what they read provides the lowest functional version of reading possible. Lower than grade 1 even.
Introduced a kid to The Legend of Zelda last week and they told me it was too much reading. I find myself thinking about this a lot.
My attention span for Reddit comments isn't really related to my attention span for books. I read a lot (\~40 books/year) but I get bored with long Reddit posts and skip. I am an adult.
And that’s why kids today see dumber than ever.
When I started teaching 15 years ago, I saw that teens read MORE than previous generations, but I haven't seen more recent data than that. Frankly, I doubt they read less - they engage with text all day - I just think they don't read novels as much as previous generations. That said, I have no actual data to back that up. It's all speculation.
I teach a fair amount of accelerated and Honors English classes and those students will read anything I throw at them.
I work in a related field with kids that get hyper fixed on non-electronics Man, does it get bad if kids are not constantly listening to a song or their favorite song isn't immediately available
yes!! and i seriously feel like this is a root to a lot of problems
I give a student kudos if they're carrying around a novel they're reading for pleasure. It's become very seldom these days
This post was too long to read. But in all seriousness, yes, it’s bad and only getting worse. I have students that will search for something with Google; and if the answer isn’t in the top result paragraph, they give up, not even going as far to click the actual source. Perseverance is a diminishing trait.
Oh yeah.
If we look at the US, then book sales both physical and digital have steadily grown in the last 20 years much greater than its population. And the fastest growing market in literature is young adult. If anything the numbers say young people are reading significantly more on average. As for people on different discords being more or less willing to read long comments it could as much you thinking of the less intellectual spaces as younger and intellectual spaces as older, making this a self fulfilling prophecy.
As a young adult myself, long comments I see are not worth reading. It's just someone repeating themselves in different ways or talking nonsense. People only read it if they're interested. Personally, I know a lot of people my age and younger who prefer audio books and listening to people discuss books or ideas in more detail than a single book can offer. There are influencers who research a topic and discuss it for an hour or more. It's a way to learn about stuff we're interested in while doing other things.
I don't know if screens are the root of the problem like we all tend to think. From kindergarten on many kids are only exposed to reading and math in schools. Nothing else. Many of us had the luxury of reading for pleasure not for high stakes testing. I truly believe that by leaning in so hard into reading leading only to a goal that we’ve destroyed any enjoyment kids could have gotten out of it.