High school teachers are under systemic pressures that prevent them from assigning entire books, while our whole media ecosystem encourages short-form streaming aliteracy, and I don't know how to get students to read long-form texts under these conditions. Feels bad man

You can’t let them get overwhelmed with lengthy works so you gotta start off with chapterbooks and that have short, digestible chapters that are only 2-4 pages long, like Moby Dick

The added little bit I get from my HS English teacher friends is that all the kids who are pretty competent at reading and extending their comprehension/writing abilities are either exchange students or the weird religious/tradcath kids.

Like, you feel a whole world of knowledge and experience just . . . liquefying

I remember in high school (not recently) when we read The Jungle we were told we didn’t have to read the last few chapters - the part about socialism

I've had a lot of success with serialized reading. I did a section of Beloved with them every Friday over a whole term and it worked, especially when I talked about it in terms of binge-watchinh.

I hear similar issue from Music Theorists (I teach humanities classes at a music school): Students come to music school with much less facility in music theory than they did a decade+ ago. They are technically proficient on their instruments, but many struggle reading/understanding a score