the words decay and fall

[freckles_and_doubt]

Interesting article in the M&G this week, nicked from The Guardian: last week Susan Greenfield gave an address to the House of Lords, questioning the effect of media society on learning patterns and brain activity. (She's a neurobiologist). The paragraph that really caught my attention:

[Greenfield] begins by analysing the process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so "build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys... One might argue that this is the basis of education ... It is the building up of a personalised conceptual framework, where we can relate incoming information to what we know already. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it significance." Traditional education, she says, enables us to "turn information into knowledge."

This hits home, because I've spent a lot of the weekend marking second-year essays, and have had my nose forcibly re-rubbed in the perennial and increasing problem that undergrads have no idea how to structure an argument, to relate concepts logically. They don't read, and therefore text, particularly in large, literate quantities, is monstrously alienating to them. Increasingly, year after year, their essays are cobbled-together Frankenstein's monsters of quotes, details and plot descriptions, lurching around in circles with no underlying coherence at all.

We all know how this ends. Torches and pitchforks, and those of us who represent the last bastion of literacy (and a slew of really low essay marks) looking on apprehensively as the mob swarms up the hill.

Comments

Re: The not reading thing

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

I remain glad I teach maths and not a humanities (or commerce!) subject. Your problem is that once you had students who *could* read and write. I've never had students (barring those occasional cases, but they're statistical outliers) who could string a maths argument together, and, quite frankly, nor could I in 1st year. You've been spoiled, that's all :) I never learned to have any optimism in that line.

Re: The not reading thing

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Actually, despite my whinging, some of them can read and write at least as well as they ever could. I've given a couple of firsts in this batch of essays, one of them a high first, so it can be done. It's the undistinguished middle clumpers who are slipping inexorably down the scale, and the bottom feeders have fallen off it completely. Bright kids who can write are still bright kids who can write :>.