Faced with a class full of students trying to discuss a text without actually having that text in front of them, my first assumption is that they're not reading. Yesterday, though, a student reminded me that there are other ways to read texts. "I'm reading it on my phone," she said.
Who reads a 450-page novel on a tiny cell-phone screen? I read Les Miserables on my Kindle over Christmas break and the vast number of screen-taps required to move through a 900-page book made my arms hurt all the way up to the elbow. Reading on the Kindle screen was comfortable enough after I learned how to adjust the size of the font and the brightness of the screen, but I wouldn't want to try reading that much text on a smaller screen.
But of course I am a dinosaur. I get that. If students want to read Cold Mountain on their phones, I should simply rejoice that they are reading.
Except they aren't. Based entirely on their (un)willingness to participate in class discussion, I would bet that three students in that class are keeping up with the reading while the others are trying to coast. This is generally a talky class, so I'm not accustomed to silence.
I suggested that they read the book over Spring Break and perhaps they did, but they're not talking about it. I saw one copy
of the text that looked so pristine it clearly had not been opened--and
we are supposed to have covered close to 200 pages by now.
Tomorrow in class we'll do some group work requiring them to come up with examples of certain concepts from within the text. Meanwhile, I'm just griping about their unwillingness to read and discuss a really wonderful novel. This morning I asked my department chair, "Why wouldn't they want to read Cold Mountain?"
"You've got the question wrong," he said. "It should be 'Why wouldn't they want to read,' period."
If that's the question, I'm afraid I don't know the answer.
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