Dear Commons Community,

I already blogged about the new Mitch McConnell biography,  The Price of Power by Michael Tackett. Below is a review by Jennifer Szalai of The New York Times which reveals a legislator for whom political survival has been a top priority — even when it means supporting a “sleazeball” for the presidency. This review gives more context to the book and to McConnell’s prioritizing political power over his personal convictions.

It is well-done!

Tony

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Courtesy of ABC News.

Dear Commons Community,

Airlines in the United States are now required to give passengers cash refunds if their flight is significantly delayed or canceled, even if that person does not explicitly ask for a refund.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) says the final federal rule requiring that airlines dole out refunds — not vouchers — went into effect yesterday.  As reported by CNN and ABC News.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made the announcement on X after he first presented the proposed rule back in April. “Today, our automatic refund rule goes into full effect,” Buttigieg posted. “Passengers deserve to get their money back when an airline owes them—without headaches or haggling.”

The new rule mandates that refunds are automatically processed by an airline if a passenger’s flight is “canceled or significantly changed, and they do not accept the significantly changed flight, rebooking on an alternative flight, or alternative compensation.”   The DOT says airlines must refund a passenger within seven business days if they bought a ticket on a credit card and within 20 calendar days if they used another form of payment.

Airlines can no longer decide how long a delay must be before a refund is issued. Under the new DOT rules, the delays covered would be more than three hours for domestic flights and more than six hours for international flights, the agency said.

DOT will also require airlines to give cash refunds if your bags are lost and not delivered within 12 hours.

The move has faced pushback from the airline industry. In July, Buttigieg told airlines that they must make clear to passengers when they are entitled to a refund.

In a statement, industry lobby Airlines for America said, “we support the automatic refund rule and are happy to accommodate customers with a refund when they choose not to be rebooked.”

This rule is long overdue!

Tony

Martha Strever, a math teacher at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, N.Y. Flynn Larsen for Education Week.

Dear Commons Community,

This posting is taken from an Education Week article.

When Martha Strever began teaching 63 years ago, the home computer did not exist and the first human had yet to walk on the moon.

There were 23 amendments to the constitution instead of the current 27, John F. Kennedy was president, and the civil rights March on Washington had not happened.

A lot has changed since 1961. But one constant is Linden Avenue Middle School’s math teacher.

Strever, now in her mid-80s, has been a fixture at the Red Hook, N.Y., school in the intervening 63 years, teaching thousands of students math—in some cases three generations of students from the same family—while navigating momentous changes in both the world around her and the education profession.

“I never could have imagined when I started some of the things we’d see and do in my career,” Strever said. “It has certainly been interesting.”

On Sept. 4, she began her 64th year of teaching, an incredible feat as districts contend with high levels of teacher burnout and turnover, with more than 40 percent of teachers leaving the profession in their first five years.

For Strever, it’s challenging work, just as it is for everyone else. But it’s also work that she’s molded her entire life around and that she’s as committed to as ever. She doesn’t plan to quit anytime soon.

“I can’t imagine doing anything else,” she said.

Strever had a love of teaching from a young age

Strever grew up in Hyde Park, about 20 minutes south of Red Hook.

When she was 7, Strever would sneak up to her parents’ room after school and stand in front of their full-length mirror, mimicking her favorite teachers.

She had already decided she wanted to follow in their footsteps.

It took Strever a few more years to figure out exactly what subject she wanted to teach, but once she dropped a high school social studies class midyear to make room for an additional math course, the answer was obvious—she was going to be a math teacher.

She received a few scholarships that made it possible for her to attend college, and she landed a student-teaching job at none other than Linden Avenue Middle School, about an hour south of Albany.

Strever was offered a full-time teaching job at the school after she completed her student-teaching stint. She took it despite attractive teaching job offers elsewhere.

In 1971, Strever became the first female department chair in the Red Hook district, overseeing math instruction, a position she held for 49 years, until the onset of the pandemic.

The biggest draw: The position allowed her to continue teaching.

Not being in the classroom “is a dealbreaker for me,” Strever said.

“There was another opportunity in another district, but it would have taken me out of the classroom, and that’s just where my heart is.”

Strever has taught multiple generations of students

Strever is well beyond teachers’ average retirement age of 59 and almost double the age of the average American educator (43).

In her career, she’s taught students after teaching their parents and their parents’ parents. Strever believes she’s also taught some more recent students’ great-grandparents.

She’s taught a district assistant superintendent, as well as a handful of other administrators, and at least one former school board member.

Stacie Fenn Smith took Strever’s math class 30 years ago, and remembers the teacher striking the right balance between strict and personable.

Fenn Smith remembers Strever as the type of teacher who expected students to show up prepared—she didn’t hand out spare pencils if someone showed up without one—and ready to spend the hour focused on their work.

But Strever also took the time to learn about her students and create a special bond with them, Fenn Smith said.

“She was very strict and serious as your teacher, but you also knew that that came from a place of wanting you to do well,” she said.

Fenn Smith is now the principal of Linden Avenue Middle School, where she is Strever’s boss.

In the decades since Fenn Smith was Strever’s student, Fenn Smith has worked alongside her as a teacher and assistant principal before taking the helm at the school in 2021. Over the years, she’s watched Strever evolve.

Early in her career, Strever taught advanced math classes, typically with students who needed less guidance to develop fundamental skills. In more recent years, Strever began co-teaching the math courses for students who need more help, working with students with disabilities and learning disorders, who often need more instruction and encouragement.

Christopher Wood, a special education teacher, has co-taught the higher-needs classes with Strever for the past four years. He said her structured disposition has “made a world of difference” for students because it provides routine, predictability, and clear expectations.

Her structure and “meticulousness” complement Wood’s more relaxed approach, he said.

The duo are quite different but somehow work in perfect tandem, Wood said, often finishing each other’s sentences or predicting what the other might need.

“It amazes me, the dedication she has to this profession and these kids, and all of the things she’s seen and done, but is still going strong,” Wood said. “It’s been really inspiring working with her.”

For Strever, once the strict teacher who pushed the highest-achieving students to new heights, said now focusing on helping struggling students find ways to excel “is the delight of my day, every day.”

For Strever, tackling new technology is a manageable challenge

In the 1970s, when personal computers came out, Strever had already been teaching for more than a decade. She didn’t really know anything about the technology but somehow later found herself tasked with training the school staff on how to use computers as they gained popularity.

Determined as ever, Strever spent hours with the staff at the local Radio Shack so she could lead the training.

“When I got my master’s degree in ‘66, these didn’t even exist,” Strever said.

That was the first time, but certainly not the last, when a new technology challenged Strever. There were also heated debates among educators about how calculators would affect children’s learning and academic progress, and the machines are now commonplace in American classrooms.

When Strever thinks about artificial intelligence, now the hot topic of education technology debates, she feels much like she did all those years ago about the calculator: “We all made a big deal about that and how it would ruin kids’ ability to think and problem-solve on their own, but it found its place, and I think AI is going to be the same.”

But when asked what has changed the most in education over the past 63 years, Strever said it’s students’ behavior and confidence.

There are far more disciplinary problems districtwide, she said, and fewer students truly believe in themselves and their abilities.

Research, surveys, and polls from recent years back her up.

In the classroom, this translates to students “not feeling as empowered to reach for the top goals,” Strever said.

“They’ll tell me it’s OK that they got a 65 on a test, and I say, ‘No it isn’t. I know you’ve got more. Give it to me,’” she said. “And when I push them, they start to do it.”

That belief in her students is what makes Strever so effective, Fenn Smith said.

“That idea that students know you believe they can do it, we know it is a huge marker for academic success, and you can certainly feel that in her classroom,” she said.

Strever’s career could break world records

On a hot Friday in August, Fenn Smith called Strever to talk about a potential recognition for her long teaching career. Strever picked up the phone, midway through staining the wishing well on her property. Yes, she was doing the job by herself.

In the summers, she mows her own lawn. In the winters, she shovels snow from the sidewalk.

This year, Fenn Smith recruited another staff member to help Strever set up her classroom, just to be safe. It’s not unusual to find Strever, who’s barely 5 feet tall, standing on a ladder to hang up a poster.

She’s quirky, too: There’s an “urban legend,” as Fenn Smith called it, that Strever has preplanned outfits for each day of the school year and doesn’t repeat attire. Strever said she recalls a former student who kept track of her outfits she wore by tallying them on the paper book cover of their math textbook.

It may have been true at one point, Strever said, but in recent years she’s occasionally had a repeat outfit, mostly because it’s difficult to find clothes that fit her petite frame. It is true, though, that Strever only wears dresses or skirts to school (and to do yard work). She wears pants just one day per year, on field day.

“Everybody knows when field day is just by my outfit,” Strever said.

Strever was an only child growing up, and never married or had children of her own. She has made her home at Linden Avenue Middle School.

“This is my family,” Strever said. “They’re so kind to me. This is where I want to be.”

So, it should come as no surprise that Strever has no plans to retire. And administrators want her to stay as long as she wants. It’s not out of loyalty or obligation to a longtime staff member, Fenn Smith said. It’s exactly the opposite: The staff and students benefit from Strever’s expertise, and she is highly respected.

When Strever speaks, people listen. When she teaches, students thrive.

“She sometimes worries if she should keep staying or if she might get pushed out eventually,” Fenn Smith said. “But I’ve told her: ‘I will not take your name off your board until you choose to take it off yourself.’”

Fenn Smith recently nominated Strever for two Guinness World Records, and the nominations are under review: longest teaching tenure in a single school and longest-tenured math teacher, both of which she appears to have beaten by several years. She is currently the longest-tenured teacher in New York state, according to state records, and among the longest-tenured in the United States.

Guinness World Records doesn’t officially track the record for individual countries, but some state teachers’ unions have said unofficially that a former social studies teacher from Florida who taught for 72 years likely holds that title.

Happy and healthy, and with no plans to retire, Strever could hold that title in due time, too.

Go for it, Martha!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For the past several weeks, the news has been inundated with polls by any number of organizations, newspapers, and other media. With the actual election a week away, polling will shortly come to an end and the only poll that really matters (the election itself) will take place.  The Associated Press yesterday had a featured article entitled, “Will the polls be right in 2024? What polling on the presidential race can and can’t tell you!”. It provides a reality check on the reliability of polls. 

The entire article is below.

Tony

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The Associated press

Will the polls be right in 2024? What polling on the presidential race can and can’t tell you

The presidential race is competitive.

That’s about as much as the national polls can tell us right now, even if it looks like Democrat Kamala Harris is down in one poll or Republican Donald Trump is up in another.

And that’s just fine.

Even though polls are sometimes treated as projections, they aren’t designed to tell you who is likely to win.

Polls are better for some things than others. Tracking shifts in voter intention is hard to do with a survey, particularly when the number of truly persuadable voters is relatively small. Voters’ opinions can change before Election Day and they often do. Horse race polls can only capture people’s viewpoints during a single moment in time. Even then, a margin that looks like one that could decide an election — say, one candidate has 48% support and the other has 45% support — might not be a real difference at all.

When reporters at The Associated Press are covering the election, horse race polling numbers don’t take center stage. The reason for this is that the AP believes that focusing on preelection polling can overstate the significance or reliability of those numbers.

Election-year polls are still useful, particularly when they’re trying to assess how the public is feeling about the candidates or the state of the country. They told us quite clearly, for instance, that many Americans wanted Democratic President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race. But they’re not the same thing as an election result, and even a poll conducted just before Election Day still reflects opinion before all ballots have been cast.

Even in high-quality polls, each finding is just an estimate

Polls are useful tools, but it’s important not to overstate their accuracy. After all, a polling organization can’t talk to every single person in the country. They instead rely on a sample to produce a statistically valid estimate of the views of all adults. Even though polls can give a reasonable approximation of the views of the larger group, the question is how much each finding could vary.

The margin of error, which all high-quality pollsters will share along with their results, helps capture some of that uncertainty. It means that in a poll with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, a finding that 47% of voters say they’ll support a particular candidate actually means that there’s a very good chance that anywhere between 50% and 44% of voters are supporting that candidate. If the other candidate has 45% support, which could really be anywhere from 42% to 48%, the 2 percentage point difference isn’t statistically meaningful.

That’s why the AP will only say a candidate is leading if that candidate is ahead by more than twice the margin of error.

When you’re looking at a subgroup, rather than a national sample, the potential error is even larger. The fewer people interviewed, the larger the margin of error. This means that state-level polls or polls that measure the views of a subgroup such as women, men, Hispanic Americans or Black Americans are subject to even more error than a national finding.

The margin of sampling error is not the only source of survey error. It is simply the only one that can be quantified using established statistical methods. But there are other factors, too. The wording and order of questions can affect how people answer. An interviewer’s skill can have an effect. Even in high-quality polls, some respondents may be less likely to answer, which means their views can be underrepresented.

Don’t forget about the Electoral College

National polls measure how voters all over the country are thinking about the election. But that’s not how we elect presidents.

The Electoral College system means that presidential elections are functionally decided by a small number of states. So in some ways, looking at polls of those states is a better way to assess the state of the race.

But state-level polls introduce their own challenges. They’re not conducted as frequently as national polls and some states get polled more often than others. Also, the number of people surveyed for state polls is often smaller than for national polls, which means the margin of error is broader.

What about polling averages?

Some media outlets or organizations publish polling averages or aggregates that combine the results of multiple polls into a single estimate. There are some organizations that create polling averages or models during elections that attempt to determine which candidate is leading in overall polls.

But averaging poll results does not eliminate polling error and it can introduce additional problems. Polling averages contain their own methodological decisions, such as which polls are included or receive greater weight. Some of them also include other factors such as the state of the economy to turn those estimates into forecasts.

In election polling, survey averages can provide a general sense of the state of a race. But it’s also important to not overstate the accuracy of an average or expect it to be a crystal ball into the election outcome. Sometimes the individual results of multiple different polls can provide a better sense of the potential array of outcomes than an average boiled down to a single number.

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column yesterday entitled, How Bad Do You Want It, Ladies?, sets the presidential election up as coming down to a gender contest. She references Ari Emanuel and states:

“This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes,” Ari said. “You probably have 60 percent of the male vote for Trump, and the female vote is 60-40 for Kamala. It’s a jump ball. We’re gonna find out who wants this more — men or women.”

Are we back to the days of Mars versus Venus? Or did we never leave?

It is the ultimate battle of the sexes in the most visceral of elections. Who will prevail? The women, especially young women, who are appalled at the cartoonish macho posturing and benighted stances of Donald Trump and his entourage? Or the men, including many young men, union men, Latino and Black men, who are drawn to Trump’s swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy.”

She concludes by quoting Barack Obama:

“Barack Obama punctured the MAGA macho myth at a rally with Kamala on Thursday. Putting down people is not “real strength,” he said. Real strength is standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. “That’s what we should want in our daughters and our sons,” Obama said. “And that’s what I want to see in the president of the United States of America.”

I agree with Dowd’s assessment.

The entire column is below.

Tony

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The New York Times

How Bad Do You Want It, Ladies?

Oct. 26, 2024

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

Usually, I get political wisdom from Rahm Emanuel, not his brother Ari.

But a quote from Ari, the Hollywood macher, to Puck’s Matthew Belloni about the gender chasm in 2024 caught my eye.

“This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes,” Ari said. “You probably have 60 percent of the male vote for Trump, and the female vote is 60-40 for Kamala. It’s a jump ball. We’re gonna find out who wants this more — men or women.”

Are we back to the days of Mars versus Venus? Or did we never leave?

It is the ultimate battle of the sexes in the most visceral of elections. Who will prevail? The women, especially young women, who are appalled at the cartoonish macho posturing and benighted stances of Donald Trump and his entourage? Or the men, including many young men, union men, Latino and Black men, who are drawn to Trump’s swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy.

Drilling into the primal yearnings of men and women — their priorities, identities, anger and frustration — makes this election even more fraught. When I wrote a book about gender in 2005, I assumed that, a couple of decades later, we’d all be living peacefully on the same planet. But no Cassandra, I. The sexual revolution intensified our muddle, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence in the 21st century. The more we imitated men, the more we realized how different we were.

Progress zigzags. But it was dispiriting to see the fierce backlash to Geraldine Ferraro, Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton’s co-presidency and candidacy.

In Kamala Harris’s case, the backlash is evident even before the election. Surveys reflect the same doubts about a woman in the White House that I saw covering Ferraro in 1984. Many men — and many women — still wonder if women are too emotional to deal with world leaders and lead the military.

Other countries overcame this stereotypical thinking about women leaders, but there is still a thick strain of it in America.

Harris is running way behind where Joe Biden was in 2020 with both white and Black men. It would sting if Black men sunk the chance for the first Black woman to become president, just as enough white women spurned Hillary in 2016 to tip the balance.

It is sad that women had to be stripped of their basic right to control their bodies — and to be threatened with the loss of lifesaving medical care — for Kamala to even have a chance to get the votes of enough women to offset losing the votes of so many men.

Trump is running a hypermasculine campaign — with Chief Bro Elon Musk bizarrely bouncing up and down — that is breathtakingly offensive to women. Trump is exploiting the crisis among Gen Z men, a crisis driven by loneliness, Covid isolation, economic insecurity, a lack of purpose and a feeling that the modern world seems more accommodating to young women.

Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, told Vanity Fair that straight, white, Christian males are tired of being painted as colonizers, noting, “They want to be part of a political movement that doesn’t hate them.”

Trump is a renowned predator and groper who has been found liable for sexual abuse. But he has the gall to cast Kamala as “retarded,” “lazy as hell” and a “bitch” and ask, “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”

At a Trump rally in Georgia on Wednesday, Tucker Carlson gave a rant that became an instant classic of perversion.

In a shrill tone, he spun out a metaphor in which America is like a house where the children are misbehaving. The toddler is smearing feces on the wall; a 14-year-old is lighting a joint at the breakfast table.

“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home,” Carlson said ominously, to raucous applause. “Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed!”

He’s most pissed at the 15-year-old daughter, who has flipped off her parents and stormed to her room. Playing the dad, Carlson intoned: “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl. And you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.”

When Trump came out, some screamed, “Daddy’s home!” and “Daddy Don!”

Somehow, Carlson was even more creepy and retrogressive than JD Vance, with his denunciations of “childless cat ladies” and his dissing of postmenopausal women.

Trump is phallocentric — always a sign of insecurity. At a rally in Latrobe, Pa., he rhapsodized about Arnold Palmer’s anatomy.

“This is a guy that was all man,” Trump said, adding, “When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s unbelievable.’”

Barack Obama punctured the MAGA macho myth at a rally with Kamala on Thursday. Putting down people is not “real strength,” he said. Real strength is standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. “That’s what we should want in our daughters and our sons,” Obama said. “And that’s what I want to see in the president of the United States of America.”

Tim Walz in a red-flanneled shirt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Michael M. Santiago. Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

With his Midwestern twang and folksiness, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has been figured much like the guy next door. It’s only fitting then, like most Americans, he’s no millionaire.  As reported by Fortune.

Walz and his wife Gwen Walz, are worth from $112,003 to $330,000, according to his financial disclosures from 2019. Tim made $127,629 annually as a governor, and declined a raise in 2023, according to Minnesota’s Legislative Reference Library. As an educator, Gwen made a little over $51,000 yearly, per the Wall Street Journal. His other assets include a 529 college plan and life insurance policies, financial disclosures said.

By comparison, current vice president and Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, is worth about $8 million (alongside her husband Doug Emhoff), according to Forbes. Former President Donald Trump’s finances are a little bit murkier, but Forbes estimates that he’s worth $6.5 billion. The other potential veep, JD Vance, is estimated to be worth $10 million, the outlet said.

And Walz is starkly different from many in political office, as he does not invest. The Minnesota governor has not invested in any stocks, according to the 2019 financial disclosure, which was also confirmed by a spokesperson to Axios.

He also does not own his home. After moving into the governor’s mansion, Walz sold his home for $315,000 in 2019, reports CNBC. He initially bought the property for $145,000 in 1997.

“I’m not easily surprised by political information. But to see that he owns no stock?” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, told Time. “I think there are a whole lot of people out there saying, ‘Hey, yeah, that’s kind of who I am. I’ve got a little pension, if I’m lucky,’” she added.

Meanwhile, Walz’s federal pension plans from working as a teacher and for the state could add about $800,000 to his wealth, according to estimates from The Wall Street Journal.

Despite their popularity as a pathway to a comfortable retirement, pensions have become an increasingly rare benefit. The number of people actively participating in private-sector pension plans dropped from 27 million to fewer than 13 million between 1975 and 2019, according to a congressional report.

It’s partly attributable to the decline in unions. As of March 2022, only 7% of the private industry’s nonunion workers were participants of a defined benefit plan, CNN says of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But most workers in a union were active participants in said benefit, the outlet adds.

God bless pensions!

Tony

Michelle Obama speaks at a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Kalamazoo, Michigan. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Obama challenged men to support Kamala Harris ′ bid to be America’s first female president, warning at a rally in Michigan on Saturday that women’s lives would be at risk if Donald Trump returned to the White House.  As reported by The Associated Press.

The former first lady described the assault on abortion rights as the harbinger of dangerous limitations on healthcare for women. Some men may be tempted to vote for Trump because of their anger at the slow pace of progress, Obama said, but “your rage does not exist in a vacuum.”

”If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage,” Obama said. “So are you as men prepared to look into the eyes of the women and children you love and tell them you supported this assault on our safety?”

The rally in Kalamazoo was Obama’s first appearance on the campaign trail since she spoke at the Democratic National Convention over the summer, and her remarks were searing and passionate in their support of Harris.

“By every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready,” the former first lady said. “The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment?”

Obama added, “Do not buy into the lies that we do not know who Kamala is or what she stands for. This is somebody who understands you, all of you.”

Although Obama has been a reluctant campaigner over the years, she showed no hesitation on Saturday as her speech stretched from the political to the personal. Obama said she fears for the country and struggles to understand why the presidential race remains close.

“I lay awake at night wondering, ‘What in the world is going on?’” she said.

Her voice vibrating with emotion, Obama talked about the struggle for women to understand and care for their own bodies, whether it’s their menstrual cycles or menopause. And she spoke about the dangers of childbirth, when a split-second decision can mean the difference between life and death for a mother and her baby.

“I am asking y’all from the core of my being to take our lives seriously,” Obama pleaded.

Harris took the stage after Obama and promised the crowd that she would keep their interests in mind — unlike Trump, who she accused of only being interested in himself.

“There is a yearning in our country for a president who sees the people, not just looking in the mirror all the time, but sees the people, who gets you and who will fight for you,” she said.

The rally in Kalamazoo followed Harris’ visit to a local doctor’s office in Portage to talk with health care providers and medical students about the impact of abortion restrictions. One of them said they have patients visiting from other parts of the country where there are strict limitations on abortion, and another said she’s worried that people won’t want to practice in important areas of medicine because of fears about government intrusion.

“We are looking at a health care crisis in America that is affecting people of every background and gender,” Harris told reporters before visiting the doctor’s office.

I wish Michelle Obama had been more actively campaigning for Harris over the passed few weeks.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Jonathon Malesic,  who teaches writing at Southern Methodist University, and is the author of  The End of Burnout, had a guest essay in The New York Times yesterday entitled, “There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore”. His message is that college students no longer do reading assignments because

“it looks to them as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies. If this is the economy students believe they’re entering, then why should they make the effort to read?”

Having taught for decades,  I have not seen the same situation among my students, however, there may be a kernel of truth in what Malesic is saying  based on the interests and goals of the students he teaches.  Without a doubt, society has moved to multi-modal forms of information delivery (Internet, Google, Youtube, AI) and I have incorporated more video-based assignments in my lessons that have supplemented and in some cases, replaced reading assignments. I do not use textbooks and instead assign articles and other shorter reading pieces. However, in most classes, I continue to assign a standard “book report” based on current books related to education, culture, and biography.  I am fairly confident that students do the reading based on their written and oral reporting.  Over the past year, I have also encouraged my students to use AI in these assignments as long as they make proper citation and attribution.

Below is Malesic’s entire essay.  

I agree with his final statement that assigning nine books in one class is too many.

Tony

———————————————-

The New York Times

Guest Essay

There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore

Oct. 25, 2024

By Jonathan Malesic

In 2011, I taught a college class on the meaning and value of work. It was a general-education class, the sort that students say they have to “get out of the way” before they move on to their major courses. Few of the students were avid readers, and many held jobs that constrained their study time.

I assigned them nine books. I knew I was asking a lot, but the students did great. Most of them aced their reading quizzes on Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and Plato’s “The Republic.” In class, our desks in a circle, we had lively discussions.

After 13 years that included a pandemic and the advent of generative A.I., that reading list seems not just ambitious but absurd. I haven’t assigned an entire book in four years.

Nationwide, college professors report steep declines in students’ willingness and ability to read on their own. To adapt, instructors are assigning less reading and giving students time in class to complete it.

It’s tempting to lament the death of a reliable pathway to learning and even pleasure. But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes.

Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide.

Even in the ostensibly true depictions of working life that students see, like the “day in my life” videos that were popular on TikTok a couple of years ago, intellectual labor seems optional and entry-level corporate positions seem like a series of rooftop hangouts, free lunches and team-building happy hours — less a job than a lifestyle. And of course the ultimate lifestyle job is being an influencer, a tantalizing prospect that seems always just one viral post away.

The most visible college students are big-time athletes, who these days can earn money — in some cases, millions of dollars — through sponsorship deals. But however hard these students push themselves, their earnings are officially not for their work on the field but for their marketability off it.

Once students graduate, the jobs they most ardently desire are in what they proudly call the “sellout” fields of finance, consulting and tech. To outsiders, these industries are abstract and opaque, trading on bluster and jargon. One thing is certain, though: That’s where the money is.

All in all, it looks as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies. If this is the economy students believe they’re entering, then why should they make the effort to read? For that matter, how will any effort in school prepare them for careers in which, apparently, effort is not rewarded?

Given all this, it’s easy to lose faith in humanistic learning. Universities themselves offer little solace. They constantly promote the idea that a degree is about earning power above all else. They embrace influencer culture and probably benefit from viral phenomena like Bama Rush. They certainly aren’t shooing away corporate recruiters.

But teaching is an inherently hopeful profession, and as much as students worry me, they also give me hope. I often see my writing students push themselves past what’s easy or rational. They get excited about their research projects; sometimes they even ponder whether to use a period or a semicolon to separate two sentences.

The fact is, not all students aim to sail on vibes. Some want to do work that makes more than money. Some finance majors do, too. And others, God bless them, just want to learn what they can and worry about work later.

It’s up to students to decide whether they’ll resist intellectual inertia. All I can do is demonstrate that it is worth it to read, to pause, to think, to revise, to reread, to discuss, to revise again. I can, in the time students are with me, offer them chances to defy their incentives and see what happens.

I need to get back to assigning books. Nine is too many. But one? They can read one. Next semester, they will.

Dear Commons Community,

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested yesterday (see video below) that new reporting on GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s alleged praise of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler isn’t the so-called October surprise of the 2024 election.

Instead, the surprise(s) are the controversial and often divisive comments that the former president is saying himself, with less than two weeks until Election Day.

The “Morning Joe” co-host cited Trump’s recent escalating authoritarian rhetoric such as his vow to purge political opponents, declaration he would use the military on U.S. citizens and description of high-profile Democrats as “enemies from within.”

“That’s the October surprise and that’s Donald Trump’s biggest problem right now,” Scarborough said.

I hope Scarborough is right!

Tony