Tomorrow, my Victorian lit class is finishing Our Mutual Friend. I'd say 85% are fully finished with it--not bad--and the others are within striking distance. I assigned 200 pages a week, less than I have in the past, but more than my current students are used to reading. (They take religious studies in the morning and academic classes until 8 or 10 at night, so we can't ask for as much homework.) Audiobooks help, as do weekly written check-ins (not quizzes but accountability).
Conversation
Notices
-
Embed this notice
Carrie Shanafelt (carrideen@c18.masto.host)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 15:19:11 JST Carrie Shanafelt
-
Embed this notice
Carrie Shanafelt (carrideen@c18.masto.host)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 15:19:07 JST Carrie Shanafelt
Every literature prof I know has had to make cuts over the past 5 years especially. No matter how little reading we assign, students will claim it took them several hours to finish it. That is what happens when you are reading half a page at a time while jumping in and out of context! Real, immersive, deep reading is a hard state to get to, but once they do it, many come to find it is a meditative refuge from attention-plucking distractions. It can be a life-saving skill to have!
-
Embed this notice
Carrie Shanafelt (carrideen@c18.masto.host)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 15:19:08 JST Carrie Shanafelt
One of my students is an EMT and is often driving around--listening is easier for him than reading. Others find it's hard to keep all the characters and information in their head without a voice giving rhetorical life and inflection to the prose. Others read while they listen. But mostly, I think it's increasingly difficult for students to get real quiet mental space away from distractions to read. I know it's hard for me. They're excited by it when it's happening but it's hard to schedule time.
Tokyo Outsider (337ppm) repeated this. -
Embed this notice
Carrie Shanafelt (carrideen@c18.masto.host)'s status on Sunday, 10-Mar-2024 15:19:09 JST Carrie Shanafelt
The big help has been Mil Nicholson's reading, freely available on Librivox. As much as my students are loving Dickens, they are absolutely ga-ga for Mil Nicholson's incredible performance of this book. It's a hilarious, breathtakingly pyrotechnic work full of unsettling metonymic accretions and polyvocal choruses--she "do the police in different voices" indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dfwpMlZkCU
-
Embed this notice