If by "read" you mean "can explain every passage in the first seven paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House
- The authors administered a reading comprehension test that by their own estimate less than 3% of the general population of students should be able to pass. 5% did, which is a bit more than you would expect for a mean ACT of 22.4. This is a couple regional public universities in Kansas, not Lake Woebegone. Not every kid who goes there is above average.
I can’t help but read the authors’ own rationale as Straussian — when they write “As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own”, I can only believe they understand perfectly well this assumption is nonsensical, doomed, a farce. And indeed, to their credit, they don’t pretend that they know how to bring the “problematic” readers up to proficiency.
I got a fuckin' 29 on the ACT and was offered full-ride scholarships to a few different midwest liberal arts schools. Not everybody needs to cough up an essay on the underlying themes of Ulysses.
Dickens may not have been paid by the word, but he was paid for being a verbose mfer
- London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”
Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor’s court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents, principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal application “to purge himself of his contempt,” which, being a solitary surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day’s business and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out “My Lord!” in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers’ clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger on the chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal weather a little.
I'd love for this to be repeated with a piece of text that is not that. A friend who works as an English teacher at a community college pointed out that there might be a bit of cognitive bottlenecking going on - the inability to parse the text declines very quickly once you go above a certain percentage of missing vocabulary. This comment on there also adds some extra nuance: I fully expect the underlying point, that college student literacy has collapsed, is true, but I think the people who designed this test failed to build it in a way that it could possibly prove or disprove their hypotheses. At this level of difficulty, reading a text like this is a test of subject matter knowledge and reasoning ability, not literacy or English language skills. I used to get poor marks in French listening, speaking, and writing, but ace reading comprehension, because I had general knowledge and the ability to reason well with incomplete information. It wasn't reflective of my French skills when I overperformed in one of four French tests.I'm inclined to be very sympathetic to the students here. Those paragraphs may as well be in a different language, they're filled with words no-one uses anymore, or which are being used in ways these kids have never seen before (if you haven't encountered "whiskers" or "wonderful" in these contexts before you won't think to look them up in the dictionary just in case) and it's entirely reasonable for college students not to have learned the words for 19th century phenomena they will never encounter in their own lives (horse blinkers, Michaelmas). Even the fact they had a dictionary isn't the catch-all excuse you want it to be because if they have no incentive to get these questions right they won't be motivated to do twenty minutes of linguistic archaeology to answer these questions.
Here's the problem: stupid vocabulary and tortured sentence structure are the hallmarks of advanced reading. That's the register. Much like the commenter, I absolutely dominated early childhood cognitive tests that required you to learn nonsense words, remember them for 48 hours, and then answer questions about their definitions. Problem was, they weren't nonsense words they were obscure English words and I generally knew most of them through reading. Here's Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, 1926: Here's Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, 1924: of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. That shit's so impenetrable that if you look it up online the glossary comes with. In fact, early assessment of Finnegan's Wake was that it was a piece of shit: Although the base language of the novel is English, it is an English that Joyce modified by combining and altering words from many languages into his own distinctive idiom. Some commentators believe this technique was Joyce's attempt to reproduce the way that memories, people, and places are mixed together and transformed in a dreaming or half-awakened state. What happened next, of course, is three generations of English majors climbed that Matterhorn to prove they could, then clapped each other on the back for their mountain climbing acumen, then looked down their noses at everyone who thinks Hemingway has any literary value. Take it from a pompous asshole. The key to literacy is to read the works of pompous assholes. The key to being celebrated by pompous assholes is to write like a pompous asshole.Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
The initial reception of Finnegans Wake was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of language to open hostility towards its seeming pointlessness and lack of respect for literary conventions. Joyce, however, asserted that every syllable was justified. Its allusive and experimental style has resulted in it having a reputation as one of the most difficult works in literature.
Slowly the book's critical capital began to rise to the point that, in 1957, Northrop Frye described Finnegans Wake as the "chief ironic epic of our time" and Anthony Burgess lauded the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page." Concerning the importance of such laughter, Darragh Greene has argued that the Wake through its series of puns, neologisms, compounds, and riddles shows the play of Wittgensteinian language-games, and by laughing at them, the reader learns how language makes the world and is freed from its snares and bewitchment.
Maybe, but those examples seem to suggest that the kids weren't looking for metaphors, and couldn't let context take form from the abstract. My wife took a writing course at our local CC just a year or so after immigrating from China. She was by far the best writer in the class. It was like her peers were elementary school students.
Your wife is married to a white Ph.D scientist with a wikipedia page. She is, as the MAGAts like to say, a "global elite." Sure, she may not have been married to you at the time but it's not like you ordered her up out of the back of a magazine. I took some courses at a couple community colleges. I had the tallest degree in the room. "local community college" is not and should not be a wellspring of intellectual excellence.
Don't stigmatise the reading of not-so-great books? I'll admit to smirking when told I don't read that much by comparison, only to hear a litany of YA novels that'd make Eragon read like Zamyatin... but don't put folks down for choosing to read for pleasure. Reading utter crap won't boost your vocab, but it's leagues (or would 'miles' be more appropriate for the modern reader?) better for you than vegetating in front of a screen. This isn't easy; going from academic to vernacular register is on par with translating from a foreign language, effort-wise. Doubly so for Dickens, who takes a page to say a sentence. veen's mention of a vocabulary percentage is on point, as reading (in a foreign language) with comprehension is painful below 90-98%, especially if the goal is for the reader to acquire new vocabulary. It's why comprehensible input is so huge in classical languages these days (and historically, before German school reforms grammaticised it): Latin isn't difficult to read if you start with an introductory text (Orberg: Roma in Italia est. Italia in Europa est. Graecia in Europa est. Italia et Graecia in Europa sunt.) rather than introductory author (Caesar: Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur).And indeed, to their credit, they don’t pretend that they know how to bring the “problematic” readers up to proficiency.
As the students read, they must translate what they read into modern English, explaining what each passage means.
It's a fine definition of reading for someone looking to be awarded a B.A. in English. If you want a B.S. in physics, you've gotta learn to do some electrodynamics. Both are difficult and esoteric. The truth is that I needed teachers and professors to get me to understand electrodynamics, but for the most part, I grokked Bleak House because I read a ton of books before it that weren't part of my educational curriculum.
It'd be easy to grokk CED if the Poynting vector was as easily experienced as classism or poverty or long-winded descriptions of weather.The truth is that I needed teachers and professors to get me to understand electrodynamics, but for the most part, I grokked Bleak House because I read a ton of books before it that weren't part of my educational curriculum.
You're presuming that this test run 40 years ago would have different results and I don't think that's a safe presumption. My mother taught college-level biology, physiology, anatomy and microbiology for 20 years. My father taught physics in the Peace Corps. My mother didn't disagree with my father's assertion that one week ahead of your students is far enough when you're teaching the rudiments; every time she taught a new course she had to learn a new course. The authors don't name "Kansas Regional Universities" 1 and 2 but considering two of the three teach at Pitt, it's a safe bet Pitt is one of them. If you check their notable alumni you see a lot of football players. Here's where the students were on "a ton of books that weren't part of their educational curriculum": The results from the questionnaire revealed that most of these subjects could not rely on previous knowledge to help them with Bleak House; in fact, they could not remember much of what they had studied in previous or current English classes. When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own. The majority also could not [End Page 4] access any detail on the information they recalled; they could mention the Industrial Revolution, for example, but could not define what it was. These results suggest that the majority of the subjects in our study were not transferring the literary texts or information from previous classes into their long-term memories. You're talkin' undergrad English majors at a party school who were not answering quiz questions, they were jawboning about Dickens with peers: Because we wanted to see how well students could read a complex text on their own, we told the facilitators not to help the subjects interpret the text. Instead, facilitators were there to record how subjects were understanding the material and to stop them every few sentences to request an interpretation. The taped recordings show that facilitators followed this training and politely refused any request for help from subjects. Facilitators also provided subjects with access to online resources and dictionaries and told them that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. If subjects did go to Google or an outside website for help, the facilitator recorded that fact. At the end of each reading study, the facilitator asked each subject a brief series of questions on what the subject thought would happen next and their comfort level in reading the rest of the novel. These questions were designed to see how well our subjects understood the passage and how they perceived their own success with reading the text. All responded that they believed that they could read the rest of Bleak House with no problem. A follow-up study would be to see if the results are the same with a proctor outside their peer group. 'cuz I tell you what, I'ma slag on Dickens hella less if my conversational counterpart has patches on his elbows.Each taped reading test began with a brief questionnaire in which subjects were asked to give authors and titles of specific nineteenth-century American and British literary works and to explain briefly what they knew about nineteenth-century American and British history and culture. The purpose of these questions was to see how much literary and/or cultural knowledge the subjects possessed. According to Wolfgang Iser in The Act of Reading, one’s ability to read complex literature is partly dependent on one’s knowledge of what he calls the “repertoire” of the text, “the form of references to earlier works, or to social and historical norms, or to the whole culture from which the text has emerged” (69). With Bleak House, this knowledge is crucial.
Our next step was the individual think-aloud study. Each subject was tested in a private, one-on-one taped 20-minute session with a facilitator. We made sure that the facilitators were not familiar with the specific subjects whom they were testing. For the KRU1 study, the facilitators were English graduate students; for the KRU2 study, the facilitators were English undergraduate students from KRU1. During the sessions, subjects were asked to read out loud and then translate each sentence of the passage from Bleak House. Subjects were encouraged to go at their own pace and were not required to finish the entire passage. Those who were uncomfortable reading out loud had the option to read silently.
Maybe 40 years ago, but not 22 years ago: Perhaps a BA in English used to mean something more, but it doesn't seem to mean much today. Yes, this was not a perfect study, but at least it was a study.You're presuming that this test run 40 years ago would have different results and I don't think that's a safe presumption.