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The Atlantic Did Me Dirty

Early this summer I was interviewed by Rose Horowitch, an editor for The Atlantic. She told me that she had heard from a university professor that incoming students were struggling to keep up with the reading load. She explained that she was working on

She attributes undergrads’ lack of reading stamina to lowered expectations in high school literature curricula, specifically arguing that limiting full-length novels and replacing long-form content with excerpts and summaries has weakened readers’ constitutions. This is not to say that there aren’t external factors affecting students’ reading stamina, but to line up such a simple series of dominoes to topple oversimplifies a complex challenge and places undue blame on the shoulders of discerning young readers and the public school teachers who work tirelessly to support them. Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading.

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