hey everyone hi welcome or welcome back to my Channel today I am going to be talking about why people aren't reading anymore this is a direct response to a video Jared Henderson did on his channel and I was so surprised at how much what he was relaying some of his theories as to why people don't read anymore is actually aligned with my teaching experience and my experience in education so I'm going to share that experience with you now if you are new to my channel then hi I'm Shelly I love thinking about reading why we
read what's going on with reading in our society and in our world but mostly I talk about what I read and the books that I buy on this channel if you're liking the vibe I would encourage you to subscribe stick around without any further rambling on let's go ahead and get into the meat of this video I will leave Jared Henderson's brilliant video linked down below it was absolutely thought-provoking which is why I'm doing this video today so Jared talks about how there's this new phenomenon going on among college students those who are actually admitted
into Elite universities like Colombia college students have recently confessed that reading a book a week is actually too much too much of a workload for them and so it's begs the question why is that so he ends up going back to how we actually learn language for a very very long time we learned through Phonics that the most popular way to teach reading is through breaking words into sounds and once we learn the sounds we can actually sound out words and then thus read um as a very simplified version of phonics but back in the
1960s we shifted the educational system in a lot of different places shifted to whole language learning which is more about encountering whole text whole words and not necessarily beginning with the building blocks of letters and sounds and putting them together and through the years we have learned that whole language learning is less effective really it's not a very great great tool to teach kids learning that really we ought to go back to phonics but those who learned with whole language learning maybe never really got the grasp of reading as a pleasurable thing that it is
always going to be a struggle and since it happened in the US for such a long period of time that there are a lot of people a lot of adults that still find reading incred difficult and that was kind of the first point that Jared made the second point that he made was more about standardized testing and No Child Left Behind here is actually where my personal story converges quite a bit with what Jared Henderson was saying it has to do with standardized testing in particular now if you don't know or have not been in
the educational system testing is massive it carries a huge weight in our Educational Systems today it is the thing for which we get funding for at least a lot of schools get funding through whether you get kids to grow how well they perform there are kids that broke are broken into classes because of how they test on one single test rather than looking at the whole child testing is scrutinized and theorized and looked at so so much and a lot of it hinges on maybe a couple of tests per year so I didn't know this
when I was a bright-eyed and bushy tailed teacher or when I wanted to get into teaching and actually the first time I encountered K12 public education was when I was a teacher because I was H schooled and for any of you Cur curious minds out there my mother taught me how to read through the phonics system so I came into public school not really knowing much about the public school experience and coming in as an adult just wanting to share my love for reading and language and literature with the students that I encountered and I
was assigned and got a job as a sixth and seventh grade English teacher now what I didn't know was how much I would be discouraged discouraged to read whole text whole texts with my students but I'm getting slightly ahead of myself I noticed right away that we were as teachers were implored to teach students Snippets of text that we were supposed to derive meaning and understanding from a few paragraphs that our responses my my students should be responding in writing verbally to only a page or two of text and at most five or 10 pages
of a text but we weren't reading an entire book and so that first year I remember trying to sneak an entire novel in and what I mean by sneak is that it was very discouraged that we read entire novels and I'm not talking novels that weren't approved by the county that I was working for I'm talking about novels that were 100% approved by our you know by the school district by the school that these novels were ready and available and yet I could not use them because they said the district my curriculum coaches at the
time all of them were saying that students are not going to encounter an entire novel on a test rather they're going to be encountering exerpts of informational text literature and so on and so we need to get them ready for the test and this was told to me pretty much from day one and so in my 5 years of teaching public education I tried and tried and tried again to sneak a novel in I was a little rebellious I will tell you that I was slightly disobedient in that I would always try and teach a
novel and inevitably someone I even had change changes in leadership while I was teaching at this particular school every single year I would get caught teaching a novel as if that is something shameful and I was told to go back to teaching uh Snippets to teaching exerpts and getting the students to analyze poetry literature informational text but only in pieces those at who are thinking now about these college students at Elite universities scratching their head as to why students are unable to keep keep up with a pace of reading a novel a week that they
trace it back to the fact that students are only taught how to perform well on tests and that is so in line with my experience as a teacher it was it was a really frustrating and disappointing experience to constantly be told you're doing it wrong if you want to read a novel with your class you're doing it wrong you're not teaching the way that we want you to teach if you want to experience a novel with your students so then it brings uh Jared Henderson to his final point in his video which is how we
lack some of the stamina or we do lack the stamina to sit down and do something boring or really less stimulating than looking on our phones our video games iPads looking at our devices our attention is constantly being grabbed at because we have a phone nearby or we're checking our phone right before we read which really just gets us sucked into a black hole of scrolling and thus um putting off the thing that we need to do which in in the end reading is far more rewarding than Doom scrolling on one's phone or really just
scrolling in General on one's phone but sometimes we get caught up in uh our phones our iPads and we don't have the discipline and at school we're not being taught the discipline to sit down and read for 20 minutes or to sit down and not look at a device and read for an hour so even though many of these students who have gotten into the universities are capable of reading a novel a week they often La lack the attention span to do so I have uh something chearful to end on in that I have switched
from public education to private education I now teach at a private school and very early on I was so impressed and excited by our cell phone policy at the school that I teach at and actually at the school that I've taught at in all private school educations I've taught at a couple of them now and they all Implement a really strict self phone policy the policy is that the phones need to be off and Away not even seen you can't check it during meal time it is off and away we don't even want to know
you have it in this setting we have 8 hours of a a time in which we don't look at screens I will sometimes play a video that has to do with the curriculum I will sometimes play a video that ties in with our learning for that day there are devices in the room but the students attention is not being grabbed at by their own personal device while they are learning and I think as a teacher there's so it's so much better for the brain not to mention I could go on and on about the social
aspects of of not having devices in front of us all the time there is a real presence that the students have they're not in their own little world they're connecting with each other they're connecting with me what's important is connecting with me what is important is that they're connecting with each other and they are not being constantly distracted with their cell phone at all times I wonder this if in some time from now there might be a study in which people focus on researchers rather focus on the public versus private school education or really not
that not that not that harsh of a divide but the education of a school in which there were no cell phones allowed in the classroom and in which we do read the entire novels we study entire novels versus only reading exerpts and having cell phones in the classroom as a distraction I wonder if there will show some seismic differences between the two Educational Systems and settings I would be very curious as to what that data would look like and what it would say about how we learn and how children are learning in this age where
so much is vying for our attention thank you so much to Jared for making the video and giving me some food for thought I really appreciate it and I hope to see you all in my next one bye [Music]
