How much reading can we expect our students to do?

[joshwriting]

I am about to teach a course on Improbable Histories (for Voyagers, a home school resource center and collective) to junior high and senior high school students (and possibly an on-line version of the same thing). How many novels, short stories, and essays should I be assigning? How much reading is too much? How much is too little?

I have been wrestling with that question for a couple of weeks, since I committed to doing the course. As is often the case, that question came up on the web, this time around on the education policy blog I watch. The beginning is just below the link.

http://educationpolicyblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/how-much-reading-can-we-expect-our.html

Here is a vexing topic, at least for this instructor of cultural foundations of education. What can you expect students to read in a typical semester? In a 500 (master’s level, but open to advanced undergraduates) course that I teach on higher education in film and fiction, I am assigning 6 novels with a total number of pages around 2200.

So, over 16 weeks we are talking about 140 pages per week. I have been advised both ways, that this is too much for some of our students, especially those who work, while some of my professorial colleagues say this is not too much. After all, we are talking about current literary fiction such as Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, not dense theoretical or philosophical texts.

Part of the problem is that students, even graduate students, generally do not do reading these days. This commonly known fact was not the case when I went to college, or at least not for me. But today, as Rebekah Nathan points out in her book My Freshman Year, students cut corners when they can, and if reading is not tested upon or part of one’s grade, very few do it.

So, I ask you dear readers, what is the appropriate amount of reading that we can expect of students at various levels? Are 150 pages of fiction per week too much even for graduate students (for comparison, for an undergraduate course in modern literature course where I went to college the professor assigned Proust, Mann, Joyce, and other large texts, one per week)? Should we give students “reading quizzes” to assure that the reading is done?

To me, it did not seem that 6 novels over 16 weeks should be too much to ask of undergraduates, let alone graduate students. (Indeed, my HSSP classes of the past have handled that load, though more recent ones, as is suggested in the blog, have been harder to get a high level of work from. "In the old days...")


A separate entry on the course and the on-line version will probably follow shortly.

Comments

[zilsrainydayz.livejournal.com]

So you will ONLY be assigning reading material? nothing in addition? And would the majority (if not all) of the students be fairly dedicated to reading it?

When we were reading huck finn in english last, my teacher gave us a recommended pace to read at (saying what chapters each day, like assignments) but the next day she would only discuss what we read previously, not necessarily check if we had read it. Perhaps if this is conducted in an interacting conversational way (not simply as speaking to them, as my teacher does) when possible, it would have encouraged more of us to keep up with the reading. As it was, only 5 of us were mostly where we should have been 3 days before the test on the book, and that was with me still being a chapter or two behind. That was around 250-300 pages in 3 weeks.

I believe I could have read it quicker, if pressured to, but as it was simple laziness and procrastination (and not having much need to keep up with the reading) kept the majority of my class behind, including myself. Even with history reading preventing the majority of us from having any time during school nights to read, we still had weekends and random times DURING school.

Of course I have no idea of the way you'll be teaching the course, what sort of thing it is, how long, how you will handle the reading, your teaching style, the interaction you will have with the students, all those details, so I can only tell you how I've done and what I've observed in my own classes.

[siderea]

Allow me to submit the amount a reading one may expect a student to do is at least partially a function of the weight of the texts. That is, if I can throw your 300 page novel into my sack -- or a coat pocket -- and take it with me, I'll have it done in a day or two. If your 300 page novel is printed in a big hard-cover edition with a bunch of other 300 page novels, well, I can read it when I'm home, and we'll see how long it takes.

[rejoicingapathy.livejournal.com]

As an undergraduate student in history and anthropology, I expect a lot of reading to be assigned. Generally, I get about four lengthy books for five classes, which comes out to a little more than a book a week each semester.

But, in response to the article, I don't know how common it used to be to ask undergraduate students to hold full-time jobs. I know that I got all my reading and papers done when I worked less than fifteen hours a week. When went over thirty hours a week, I failed to read some of the books. I picked out the books that were least likely to impact my grades and tossed them out of my to-do list to free up space.

The people who wrote that article seem to know that; they mention students that work. But there's no solution to the problem: decent jobs require some sort of college degree, which means that all people who need the jobs have to go to college, but since their parents can't just give them all that money, they need to work. I would say that problem would need to be fixed first. Not that individual teachers can do anything about it, really.

This really has nothing to do with your problem, I suppose, because your secondary school kids are less likely to have full-time jobs.

[laughingjudge.livejournal.com]

Knowing Voyagers, some people will read everything (Sophie W. from Lexington) and other won't *runs and hides*. All of that aside, I wouldn't expect Voyagers students to work more than 7 hours/week on a subject, and even that is probably on the high end.

Consider prioritizing the assignments, pointing out to parents that students will get more out of the course if they read more. As to the 6 novels/16 weeks, I would figure you could probably even assign 1 novel every 2 weeks and get away with it.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

I'm clearly the wrong person to answer this question.

Six novels for a semester's work in a graduate level course seems like nothing to me; that sounds like the pace of my high school English classes.

For that matter I don't understand how the reading could be not part of one's grade; I'm not talking about quizzes on the reading, but that the course discussions required a mastery of the current material that could only be gotten with reading the vast majority of the material.

Then again, in high school it never occurred to me to not do the reading. By college I had learned that doing all the reading was somewhat unlikely, so I learned to skim and prioritize (for example if three essays were assigned I would read the last one first, figuring that most people wouldn't get that far, so I would have something to discuss in section that made it sound like I had read everything). Had I been a humanities major rather than a math major the reading assignments in my humanities courses would have gotten higher priority.

How much time do you want students to spend on the classwork outside class? Have you considered having two lists -- one mandatory and one optional? Do you want only students in your class who are seriously interested in the topic, or do you want to be accessible to students who are still struggling with their motivations?

[nagrom-the-pink.livejournal.com]

For me, it doesn't matter how much you assign. I'll always be 100 pages behind everybody else.

--
I'm going to break it down in a way that makes sense to me for you:

I only read maybe, 2 or 3 times a week.
You can expect me to read 1-2 hours at a time.
at 3/4 of a page per minute, that's roughly 100-250 pages per week.

100-200 pages per week sounds reasonable to me.
Using the viscosity of the material, the absorbent properties of the students' eyes, and how often their whipped as variables, I'm sure you could figure it out pretty quickly.

[nagrom-the-pink.livejournal.com]

BTW, when do you think there will be a decision on whether this will be offered online or not?

My term ends Mid-January and I'm looking for a replacement for the next tortuously boring online class I'm currently signed up for.