There’s only one class left in the semester, my 370 students have taken their Composition Mastery Exam — which the entire faculty will grade on Thursday — and the Spring 2007 semester marathon is almost over. And while I submitted my text requests for the fall semester, I’m still looking for new texts and stories for my English 1 & 4 students. But the problem in doing this is always the same: the vast majority of my students do not read for pleasure. And they also struggle to read their assignments, which for them are decidedly not pleasurable.
The cause for this non-reading state would seem to be that they have too much else they can do. More than that, there seems to be so little silence in their lives, required to have a conversation with an author, which seems like a good topic for this week’s column: Reading and silence.
