At the end of this post is a poll about how much reading you assign. Please take part in it if you teach philosophy courses. Thanks.
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“Stop Meeting Students Where They Are” is the title of a recent piece at The Atlantic by Walt Hunter, professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. In it, he shares what are now familiar observations about the state of college student literacy (see this post, for example), lamenting that students don’t read. He was worried. Nonetheless, he assigned lots of readings, and whole books. The result? “I regretted ever doubting my students. I am now convinced that I was wrong to listen to the ostensible wisdom of the day.”
He says:
Two things became clear in the early weeks of class. First, the students were reading. They were reading everything, or most of it. I know this because I had them identify obscure passages, without notes, devices, or books at hand. Second, they were experiencing life in a way that was not easy outside the class and its assignments. They were expected—required—to give huge chunks of time to an activity, reading, that was not monetizing their attention in real time. They had, in effect, taken back their lives, for an hour or two each day. It turned out that American literature, which so often flirts with utopian fantasies of regaining control—hello, Walden!—could do precisely that…
The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.
The article is inspiring but also a bit frustrating, as it’s unclear why Hunter’s approach worked. He shares only a few details about what he did to increase the odds of success, such as replacing take-home essays with in-class writing. It is unclear how many students he had in his class. He doesn’t acknowledge that Case Western is a prestigious university (sometimes referred to as a “hidden Ivy”) with above-average students, leaving unclear how advisable his approach would be at a typical college. Also, his is a course about fiction, and we might wonder whether he would have been as successful getting students to read nonfiction.
That said, it made me curious as to whether there are philosophy professors who, when teaching undergraduate courses, assign what they recognize to be an unusually heavy amount of reading, and who have had some good experiences or good results doing so. Are most of those students doing most of the reading? How do you assess that? And what do you do to help your students be successful at that?
Below are two poll questions about the amount of reading you assign in undergraduate philosophy courses per week: one about lower-level undergraduate courses, and one about upper-level undergraduate courses. If you teach such courses, please answer the poll. Thanks!
Archived poll interaction omitted during migration; historical article prose retained.
Archived poll interaction omitted during migration; historical article prose retained.
