First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US.
- Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness...
- But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.
Most of our students are functionally illiterate.
This is not a joke.
By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.”..
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever.
No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read.
They just couldn’t do it.
- They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read and most certainly not the attention span to finish...
Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly.
Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided...
They also lie about it...
They also lie about it...
Read all, it gets worse!
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