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joshwritingI 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
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.
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.
