What's in the News?

Christy Rheam

What's in the News?

Due 2/13/2008

Article: "Kids Can't Focus These Days. Then Again, Neither Can I." by Thomas Washington

washingtonpost.com. Sunday, February 3, 2008: pg B02

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-yn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020102825.html

Summary: This article looks into the issue of students reading. It quotes facts like "less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier", and states that the percentage of 17 year old non readers has doubled in a 20 year period, from a recent study from the National Endowment for the Arts called "To Read or Not to Read". The author, Thomas Washington, explains, however that students are still doing their business as usual. Washington points out that it is not just the students who are having trouble focusing. We are all accustomed to a technology based world in which information is quick and even librarians (Washington is a librarian) cannot stick with a long novel that does not capture them right away. Because of our technology based world, students have become better and better at picking out the important information and discarding the unimportant. He ends the article with the following questions, "What do we need to know? Why do we need to know it? And, given that by the end of our lives we will have absorbed and converted to knowledge only a sliver of the information available, should we bother knowing it?"

Response: What an interesting perspective, from a librarian, none the less. Washington's article opens a new perspective on why reading scores are low. Students are so accustomed to reading for tests and not for depth. The have become masters at picking out the important information without actually reading entire assignments. The technology based world that our students live in has trained them to multitask, allowing them to text, IM, write papers and read articles all at the same time. According to Washington, this has not caused them to be any less successful in school.

My View: Honestly, I am very much in agreement with this article. The students that I teach are not the strongest readers, however they are still succeeding in my classes. They are quite good at picking out important information from assigned readings. They openly admit to me that they have not read the information completely, however the required summaries that they have to write are generally really good. I feel that this article very much relates to Marc Prensky's idea of Digital Natives (see post from January 22). These students think and learn differently and have adapted the old fashioned assignments to their fast paced world by extracting the important information from assigned readings.

Questions: Do students need to be strong, fluent readers in order to function in the high paced, technology based world? How to we teach students to be fluent readers while still preparing them for the high paced, technology based world? Is it wrong for students to ask 'why do we need to know this'?