‘Reaching a crisis point’: UC Berkeley humanities professors lower expectations for assigned readings

[Anonymous]

I think this started with Common Core. With my DS (who is attending college now), I noticed that he was assigned a lot of excerpts starting in elementary school. Why this became a feature of Common Core, I don’t know. Perhaps, there was an emphasis on trying to teach different kinds of reading more efficiently, if so, that was a mistake.

[Anonymous]

This is the fault of the UC system.

When you have thousands of UCSD students incapable of doing middle school math, or UC Berkeley students who can't do pre-calculus, it is the system.

It rewards mediocrity at the altar of diversity and equity.

This is apparent to anyone looking at how, who and why the UC's admit its students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think this started with Common Core. With my DS (who is attending college now), I noticed that he was assigned a lot of excerpts starting in elementary school. Why this became a feature of Common Core, I don’t know. Perhaps, there was an emphasis on trying to teach different kinds of reading more efficiently, if so, that was a mistake.

This was not a part of the common core curriculum. You may be confusing that much of the changes under NCLB required a ton of standardized testing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is the fault of the UC system.

When you have thousands of UCSD students incapable of doing middle school math, or UC Berkeley students who can't do pre-calculus, it is the system.

It rewards mediocrity at the altar of diversity and equity.

This is apparent to anyone looking at how, who and why the UC's admit its students.

Hasn’t this always been true? Berkeley isn’t just engineers.

[Anonymous]

Why are they blaming the students for this? The students aren’t the ones changing the reading requirements.


I have been teaching medical students and residents for the last 15 years, and even good students pretty much do the amount of reading that they feel they have to do.
Even the students obsessed with their grades will spend their free time doing practice questions rather than doing reading that they don’t feel they need to do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It really depends on the discipline. For studying literature, you should be reading full texts. The entire point is to study this work in its full form. Reading "excerpts" of Dickens or epic poems will produce shallow understanding of the texts.

History, however, can be covered a variety of ways. Older, denser texts on ancient history can be excerpted and anthologized. This method has long been used to teach undergraduate students. Those who have the interest to explore full texts can do so in graduate work.

The history professor interviewed sounds ridiculous. I guarantee his students have been skimming large swaths of his assignments for decades. What he is likely really annoyed by is the inability to give students who truly do not learn the material the low grades they deserve without getting harassed. But that is another issue.

The bolded is a great way for unintentional biases to infect our view of history even more. Like - would you really want your kid getting an excerpt from historical sources on the Pilgrims in the 1950s? Or 1880s? So much stuff that we now consider important might be cherry picked over to make them meet the view of the Pilgrims at the time, for example.

It's bad enough that certain historical authors often get backgrounded to make a point (for example when we try to show how bad white European men of the 16th century are we tend to ignore the ones who were questioning the terrible practices of the time, versus when we use to try to glorify the Pilgrims in order to make New Englanders feel like the source of American culture we tend to ignore some of their worse traits). This would just amplify that.

I'd much rather our historians be able to read and analyze as much primary source material as possible.

[Anonymous]

Generally speaking, in 10-15 years, the ones who didn’t read will be reporting to the ones who did.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Generally speaking, in 10-15 years, the ones who didn’t read will be reporting to the ones who did.

True, but the objective is not to allocate the pie, but to grow it -- without growth, things - as grim as they are -- will become much, much grimmer. You want people who read/analyze well reporting to people who read/analyze better, which is generally how things work today in everything but politics and things (including politics) for which universities are neither necessary nor useful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It really depends on the discipline. For studying literature, you should be reading full texts. The entire point is to study this work in its full form. Reading "excerpts" of Dickens or epic poems will produce shallow understanding of the texts.

History, however, can be covered a variety of ways. Older, denser texts on ancient history can be excerpted and anthologized. This method has long been used to teach undergraduate students. Those who have the interest to explore full texts can do so in graduate work.

The history professor interviewed sounds ridiculous. I guarantee his students have been skimming large swaths of his assignments for decades. What he is likely really annoyed by is the inability to give students who truly do not learn the material the low grades they deserve without getting harassed. But that is another issue.

The bolded is a great way for unintentional biases to infect our view of history even more. Like - would you really want your kid getting an excerpt from historical sources on the Pilgrims in the 1950s? Or 1880s? So much stuff that we now consider important might be cherry picked over to make them meet the view of the Pilgrims at the time, for example.

It's bad enough that certain historical authors often get backgrounded to make a point (for example when we try to show how bad white European men of the 16th century are we tend to ignore the ones who were questioning the terrible practices of the time, versus when we use to try to glorify the Pilgrims in order to make New Englanders feel like the source of American culture we tend to ignore some of their worse traits). This would just amplify that.

I'd much rather our historians be able to read and analyze as much primary source material as possible.

What a strange example because we know which viewpoint is more dominant and lasted up till the 20th century. It’s not making white men evil- it’s that there’s just a factual history of discrimination that was institutionalized and relied on a supremacy narrative, along with the fact that women just didn’t hold much political and economic power until the 70s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It really depends on the discipline. For studying literature, you should be reading full texts. The entire point is to study this work in its full form. Reading "excerpts" of Dickens or epic poems will produce shallow understanding of the texts.

History, however, can be covered a variety of ways. Older, denser texts on ancient history can be excerpted and anthologized. This method has long been used to teach undergraduate students. Those who have the interest to explore full texts can do so in graduate work.

The history professor interviewed sounds ridiculous. I guarantee his students have been skimming large swaths of his assignments for decades. What he is likely really annoyed by is the inability to give students who truly do not learn the material the low grades they deserve without getting harassed. But that is another issue.

The bolded is a great way for unintentional biases to infect our view of history even more. Like - would you really want your kid getting an excerpt from historical sources on the Pilgrims in the 1950s? Or 1880s? So much stuff that we now consider important might be cherry picked over to make them meet the view of the Pilgrims at the time, for example.

It's bad enough that certain historical authors often get backgrounded to make a point (for example when we try to show how bad white European men of the 16th century are we tend to ignore the ones who were questioning the terrible practices of the time, versus when we use to try to glorify the Pilgrims in order to make New Englanders feel like the source of American culture we tend to ignore some of their worse traits). This would just amplify that.

I'd much rather our historians be able to read and analyze as much primary source material as possible.

That's good for historians but not necessarily for history students. The teacher is there to teach. They need to decide excerpts and anthologies, present biases. It doesn't all need to be full texts for a required "Eastern History" course fulfillment or whatever.

[Anonymous]

I can't wrap my brain around how competitive the top schools are and x kid with perfect scores and perfect on paper who got into 12 ivies can't do the reading at college?!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It really depends on the discipline. For studying literature, you should be reading full texts. The entire point is to study this work in its full form. Reading "excerpts" of Dickens or epic poems will produce shallow understanding of the texts.

History, however, can be covered a variety of ways. Older, denser texts on ancient history can be excerpted and anthologized. This method has long been used to teach undergraduate students. Those who have the interest to explore full texts can do so in graduate work.

The history professor interviewed sounds ridiculous. I guarantee his students have been skimming large swaths of his assignments for decades. What he is likely really annoyed by is the inability to give students who truly do not learn the material the low grades they deserve without getting harassed. But that is another issue.

The bolded is a great way for unintentional biases to infect our view of history even more. Like - would you really want your kid getting an excerpt from historical sources on the Pilgrims in the 1950s? Or 1880s? So much stuff that we now consider important might be cherry picked over to make them meet the view of the Pilgrims at the time, for example.

It's bad enough that certain historical authors often get backgrounded to make a point (for example when we try to show how bad white European men of the 16th century are we tend to ignore the ones who were questioning the terrible practices of the time, versus when we use to try to glorify the Pilgrims in order to make New Englanders feel like the source of American culture we tend to ignore some of their worse traits). This would just amplify that.

I'd much rather our historians be able to read and analyze as much primary source material as possible.

That's good for historians but not necessarily for history students. The teacher is there to teach. They need to decide excerpts and anthologies, present biases. It doesn't all need to be full texts for a required "Eastern History" course fulfillment or whatever.

DP. Maybe not for general education classes, but my experience as a history major was that there was very little excerpting in classes aimed at people concentrating in history. We read mostly full text primary sources. Some of that is going to differ based on specialty, because we have a lot more primary sources to wade through for some periods (I did mostly took classes in periods where we don't have a lot of texts).

A person who graduates with a BA in history should be able to hit a masters program ready to do the work. If they've not regularly grappled with full primary sources, I don't see how they'll do that.

[Anonymous]

I guess it is finally dawning on the general public that the UCs have chosen to admit students not by looking at the state-wide applicant pool but by individual high schools. California's public high schools are mostly horrible. It has a large amount of very, very good high schools. But it is a testament to the inequality experienced in the state.

If you recruit most of your college students from mediocre high schools, you will end up with more mediocre college students.

That's why California exports so many students to T20's and T50's. A lot choose to leave the massive public colleges with 1,000 student lectures, buying and selling class registration slots, etc. behind, sitting next to a student who can't do middle school math, etc. behind.

The UC's reputation was cut on its graduate programs. It's undergraduate reputation is going into the toilet right now. We'll have to see how that impacts its grad programs.