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There has to be a change, I'm sure
Today was just a day fading into another
And that can't be what a life is for.
-- Counting Crows, Amy Hit the Atmosphere
Just in time to soften the blow from another round of course evaluations, Robert Zaretsky published the following piece in The Baffler:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/burdened-by-books-zaretsky
Here Zaretsky laments the apparent futility of the work he's paid to do: teaching college students whose culture is primarily oral, not written. Recent studies all indicate that the crucial practice of deep reading is on the wane, with time spent on smart phones and social media increasing to fill the hours of the day. Tellingly, the shift away from deep reading was already underway before the first smart phone came onto the market; economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks documented a decline in study time from twenty-four hours a week to fourteen hours a week, between 1961 and 2003. The purveyors of handheld devices for connectivity and diversion can point to the Babcock/Marks study to justify their claim that they didn't create the demand, they only designed products to satisfy it.
One of the comments on this semester's course evaluations expressed astonishment that the teacher assigned so much homework and expected it to be completed in the given timeframe. The demand for increased leisure time, which a year of remote teaching did nothing to discourage, certainly explains part of this student's comment. Another contribution to the disconnect between teachers' and students' expectations is our modern culture's systemic undermining of long-term memory and reflection, leading students to view books as Sisyphus regarded his boulder: "the kind of work that is erased at the end of a semester".
In satisfying a demand for increased leisure, manufacturers like Apple and Samsung are helping to unravel the complex neural circuitry that emerges from generation to generation, in a culture centered on deep reading. As Zaretsky says, students these days are more adept at "life in the shallows of [their] flat screens, ... mostly floating on the surface." They have internalized the wisdom that all things are impermanent, eschewing the ownership of physical books in favor of e-readers or printouts. The easy deletion of computer files or the recycling of paper printouts better aligns with the incentives implicit in higher education today. In this incentive structure, a degree is only valuable insofar as it signals to future employers one's willingness to jump through arbitrary hoops.
Because the value of a college degree is not directly tied to the mastery of course objectives, students have no incentive to carry over their learning from one semester to the next. And so as math teachers we encounter calculus students who aren't comfortable using laws of exponents, or business math students who struggle with simple linear equations. When a student has to relearn from scratch all the prerequisite knowledge needed for this semester's homework, then of course it will take more time to complete! A professor who calibrates the length of homework assignments under the assumption that students
have all the prerequisite skills at their fingertips will wildly overestimate how many problems can be completed each night.
I've been admonished by colleagues for designing my courses around the types of students we might have served in the past, rather than the students who come through our doors today. I wonder if Robert Zaretsky has heard the same criticism from his colleagues. He offers a compelling diagnosis of the disconnect between the students' and the teachers' preferred communication styles, but stops short of offering a remedy.
Another diagnosis of the disconnect between the lofty goals of higher education and the demands of the modern economy was given by the late David Graeber, in his book Bullshit Jobs. Unlike Zaretsky's piece, Bullshit Jobs does include some policy recommendations in its final chapter, but not before painting a dismal picture of a workplace that deliberately underutilizes its best and its brightest. An unchallenging work environment snuffs out the flames of youthful idealism before they have a chance to spark mass resignations and the adoption of new tribal structures (as predicted by Daniel Quinn in Beyond Civilization). Here is Graeber on the state of the workplace that awaits most college graduates:
The most common complaint among those trapped in offices doing nothing all day is just how difficult it is to repurpose the time for anything worthwhile. One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet ... might spark some sort of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place.
What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there's nothing for them to do, they still can't admit it openly.
Zaretsky's piece echoes this characterization of the popular culture that emerges when an increased demand for leisure time is combined with a lack of patience for solitary thought:
Scholars compare the vocal-dance performances of pre-literate peoples to the rapid riffs that come and go on Twitter and TikTok. But it also seems to differ. Digital orality, unlike ancient orality, is based on interjections and exclamations. The media scholar Andrey Mir argues that it operates with emotions and objects—--memes, pictures, videos and so on—--rather than with meanings.
Andrey Mir's assertion that meaning is no longer highly valued by the ascendant culture of digital orality, while emotions and objects become the primary focus, dovetails with another observation I read on the Math Educators StackExchange this week: "... if [attention to logical reasoning] is not done from the beginning of arithmetic, it simply causes students to create for themselves a deep quagmire of guesswork in order to heuristically write down things which they believe will get them their grades". Combatting this reliance on heuristics and guesswork will be a recurring challenge with each new cohort of students that signs up for my classes, in light of the atrophied habit of deep reading documented in Zaretsky's essay.
Baltimore Ave and Paint Branch, 2003--2004
Potomac Ave and Stadium Drive, 2005--2006
Philadelphia and Ann Arbor, 2006--2007
Rosslyn and Riverdale, 2008--2009
Roosevelt Center and College Park Woods, 2009--2010
Takoma Park with an Interlude in Austin, 2011--2014
Sligo Creek and Rock Creek, 2015
Cosmopolitan Drive and Northwest Branch, 2018--2019