I was watching Frontline last night. They were talking about high school students and technology.

[TheMightyFavog]

On this program, they had a high school senior bragging about how he had not read a single book in four years. Instead of reading his assigned books, he hit up SparkNotes (think Cliff Notes for the 21st Century) to stay current with his classes.

Am I the only one who finds this a bit disturbing?

[AlCzervik]

1. no you aren't, it's sad and disturbing.

[newfie11]

3. I hope he doesn't go into medicine

[msongs]

2. and when did they say that kids should NOT have internet access in the bedrooms and that

kids should only have internet access on a computer in a public space in the house (unless I missed that comment somewhere)and all passwords etc should be available to parents...ALL of them. I thought there was a lot of victimhood going on from some of those parents.

Msongs

[Solly Mack]

4. He probably thinks he sounds smart

I didn't read a single book and still got passing grades!

[Warpy]

5. He'll be a good little Republic, all surface and no depth

Colleges are wise to kids who read Spark Notes and buy term papers, though, and do searches every year to turn up the cheaters.

It's not as easy as it was 15 years ago.

This little punk is cheating himself, of course, but it is going to take him time to figure that part out.

[The_Casual_Observer]

6. There are better ways to spend your youth than reading Silas Marner

& Green Mansions.

[mike_c]

7. this is an emerging problem in higher ed....

I saw a presentation recently on the general differences in learning styles across several generations, from my parent's generation to kids in high school today and the differences are profound. Many distrust and dislike textbooks, just for a start.

[dubeskin]

9. There is a huge distrust in textbooks

Mainly because they are often biased, depending on the content, publisher etc. It usually boils down to how a teacher uses it. My teachers use it often as a supplementary material, to usually counter and provide a little more in depth coverage of a topic, especially in history. Likewise, the dislike of textbooks comes with the extended period of exposure to them. Think about it, modern day school kids use textbooks throughout their school career, sometimes even as early as pre-school. It gets a little monotonous, and the longer the exposure to them, the more they become distrusted, especially when a teacher invalidates a statement made in a book.

[mike_c]

11. yet my generation largely learned from texts...

...with verbal lectures as supplemental material rather than the focus of instruction, for the most part. Here's another way to look at it-- most of my colleagues, like me, still have most or many of our college texts. I still have nearly ALL my science and math texts, and only got rid of my humanities texts and reading anthologies a few years ago. They're all really old editions now, but I keep them and use them anyway. Mine are in my office library were I still use them.

Most of my students, on the other hand, sell their books at the end of the semester. Sure, books are expensive but they've always been a significant portion of the cost of college classes. Students in my generation more often considered them investments. I never sold a single textbook when I was in college. Today, students tend to regard texts as expenses rather than as investments that hold their worth.

The reason appears to be that students today place less intrinsic value on books than students in the previous couple of generations. They part with their books relatively easily because they value them less. I can't begin to describe how alien that seems to me-- I've carried old college texts around the country at actual great expense, paying by the pound and mile to move them multiple times, many times more than the real monetary value of those texts. Yet simply holding them still has some deep meaning for me and I hate to consider parting with them.

I've been told by lots of students in the last few years that they won't buy books, so could I please make copies available on reserve in the library? Even more disturbing, like the comments made in the OP, numerous students indicate that they don't read books even if they own them. This is a REALLY bad strategy in many college classes because profs often don't lecture extensively on material contained in the text-- after all, students can read that themselves. Yet I'm finding more and more students reluctant to do that.

[cynatnite]

15. Which is better...US News & World Report or Newsweek...

Those were the discussions me and my friends had in school. Of course, we were drama/debate geeks, too. We usually knew more than other kids and hardly touched our text books. They just didn't provide enough information for us. It wasn't a matter of distrust.

[TheMightyFavog]

12. I do admit, when I was in college...

Most of the papers I wrote had exclusively electronic sources. The only papers I remember having non electronic sources, were on paper that had an article from 1985 that wasn't transcribed on EBSCO in .pdf format, and the other was for a paper on the history of broadcast indecency which had another source that EBSCO didn't have scanned into a .pdf.

[dubeskin]

8. It's not just the internet

It's the teacher and the education. I assume that since he has internet, I would also assume that he comes from a fairly normal-wealthy school district. Because of that, I would assume that they would have enough money to purchase a subscription to a site called Turnitin.com. My high school uses this - it is a plagiarism checker that scans everything on the internet remotely related to a book/though/essay topic, and compares to see copying. An exact copy from Sparknotes.com would trigger an alert at the Turnitin.com website, and thus would reflect his "plagiarism score" which is sent to the teacher.

Likewise, it also comes down to the teacher. If they are not challenging the students enough that they have to come up with original ideas as well as use tests and essays that would require an actual knowledge of the book, there is a problem. For example, quote matching: "Who said it?" kind of questions, and "describe the character" questions. These kind of things aren't always found in the Cliffnotes, as well as that it requires the book to be opened.

Just a high schooler's 2 cents.

[cynatnite]

10. I barely cracked open a text book at all during my high school years...long before the internet...

It's high school and fairly easy to pass if you know what you're doing. I made B's for the most part. Got a couple of C's.

Shortcuts like Cliff Notes have been around for years.

My teenage daughter barely cracked open a text book and she graduates on Friday. She starts UofVA Wise in the fall. I did tell her that high school is easy, but college will challenge her. She's a smart kid and ready, I think.

[JI7]

13. many kids did this even before the internet

it's probably easier now because they have instant access to it for free.

[Jade Fox]

14. I was a lot more disturbed by that girl ......

with the phony online "model" persona who kept saying how bad she felt without her website, and how much she disliked her real self. Her parents deciding to support her online activity really shocked me. Shouldn't they be trying to help her feel good about who she really is? What's she going to do, spend the rest of her life pretending to be someone else on the internet?

I don't read books anymore either. There is too much info available online. At some point I lost interest in literature, which I used to read quite a bit. For me, fiction is the only reason to read books these days.

[NashVegas]

16. The Super Mario Bros. Generation and Beyond

Grew up with "cheats" available for purchase. Now they've got kids, too, and they don't know a world where the answers aren't a Google search away.