第2465期:Do Students in American Schools Read Long Books Anymore2?

“There was a trend, it happened when COVID hit, to stop reading full-length novels because students were in trauma; we were in a pandemic. The problem is we haven’t quite come back from that,” she said. “当新冠疫情来袭时，出现了一种趋势，即停止阅读长篇小说，因为学生们正处于创伤之中；我们正处于大流行之中。问题是我们还没有完全恢复过来，”她说。 Other teachers blame standardized testing and the influence of education technology. 其他教师则将此归咎于标准化考试和教育技术的影响。 Some students struggle to read. Only one third of fourth and eighth graders reached reading proficiency in the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress. 有些学生读书有困难。在 2022 年国家教育进步评估中，只有三分之一的四年级和八年级学生达到了阅读水平。 Leah van Belle is the director of the non-profit literacy coalition 313Reads in Detroit, Michigan. Van Belle said, when her son read the book Peter Pan in elementary school, it was too difficult for most children. She said her son’s school does not have a library. Leah van Belle 是密歇根州底特律非营利扫盲联盟 313Reads 的主任。范贝尔说，当她的儿子在小学读《彼得潘》这本书时，对大多数孩子来说太难了。她说她儿子的学校没有图书馆。 Still, she said it makes sense for English classes to use shorter reading material. 尽管如此，她表示英语课程使用较短的阅读材料是有意义的。 “As an adult, if I want to learn about a topic and research it, be it personal or professional, I’m using interactive digital text to do that,” she said. “作为一个成年人，如果我想了解一个主题并进行研究，无论是个人的还是专业的，我都会使用交互式数字文本来做到这一点，”她说。Even in schools with many resources, time is always in short supply. 即使在资源丰富的学校，时间也总是紧张。 Terri White teaches at South Windsor High School in Connecticut. White no longer assigns the book To Kill a Mockingbird to her class. 特丽·怀特 (Terri White) 在康涅狄格州南温莎高中任教。怀特不再将《杀死一只知更鸟》这本书分配给她的班级。 She assigns about one third of the book and provides a synopsis, or a very short version, of the rest. White says the reason is that the class has to move quickly so she can teach all the required material. 她分配了这本书大约三分之一的篇幅，并提供了其余部分的概要或非常简短的版本。怀特说，原因是课程必须快速进行，这样她才能教授所有需要的材料。 White also assigns less homework because students have sports and other activities. She said she wanted her class to be “more about helping student become stronger and more critical readers, writers and thinkers, while taking their social-emotional well-being into account.”怀特还分配了较少的家庭作业，因为学生有运动和其他活动。她说，她希望她的课程“更多地帮助学生成为更强大、更挑剔的读者、作家和思想家，同时考虑到他们的社会情感健康。 The synopses method alone, however, can harm student critical thinking skills says Alden Jones, a literature professor at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. 然而，马萨诸塞州波士顿爱默生学院的文学教授奥尔登·琼斯 （Alden Jones） 说，单独的概要方法会损害学生的批判性思维能力。 Jones assigns fewer books than before but gives more small tests to make sure students are reading. 琼斯分配的书籍比以前少了，但给出了更多的小测试，以确保学生正在阅读。 “We don’t value the thinking time that we used to have. It’s all time we could be on our phone accomplishing tasks,” she said. “我们不珍惜过去的思考时间。我们随时都可以用手机完成任务，”她说。Will Higgins is an English teacher at Dartmouth High School in Massachusetts. Higgins said he still believes in teaching the classics. But he said students do not have enough time, so teachers have cut back on the number of books they teach. 威尔·希金斯是马萨诸塞州达特茅斯高中的英语老师。希金斯说他仍然相信教授古典文学。但他说学生没有足够的时间，所以老师们减少了教书的数量。 “We haven’t given up on Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. We haven’t given up on Hamlet or The Great Gatsby,” he said. But Higgins admitted giving up on assigning a long book like A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. “我们没有放弃《简·爱》和《傲慢与偏见》。我们没有放弃《哈姆雷特》或《了不起的盖茨比》，”他说。但希金斯承认放弃了分配像查尔斯·狄更斯的《两座城市的故事》这样的长书。