News flash: First person column in Chronicle reveals depressive self-absorption

I don't want to turn this blog into the Chronicle's loyal (or not so loyal) opposition, but this caught my attention today.

The Mediocre Professor. Shorter Chronicle: Professor Mediocre laments his mediocrity. Some might find this depressing, but I find it irritating. He wants suggestions? I've got suggestions.

Take some vitamins and show a little energy. The students respond to your energy. If all you're showing them is sighs and ennui, guess what they'll reflect back to you?

If you speak the way you write, try turning your efforts outward instead of inward: the point of teaching is communicating directly, not being Henry James with well-turned sentences. I'm not criticizing your writing; I'm just saying that teaching demands something different.

Teaching is like playing tennis, not like performing Hamlet. Students are not interested in watching you dramatically stare out the window as you ponder self-doubt and despair; leave that to the student from Wittenberg. They're adolescents, or just out of adolescence. They have enough self-doubt and despair for the both of you. It's your job to get them to hit the ball back and keep the discussion going. If they don't hit the first one, lob another. They want to talk about the literature, but you may not have served them something that they can respond to. Try a different approach.

If you really think the students are right and that the humanities are a dying carcass, have you thought about doing something that you would really like to do and giving your spot up to one of the eager hordes of Ph.D. jobseekers out there? I don't want to sound too much like Willy Loman, but in a way part of your job is to sell the humanities. You can't sell a product that you don't believe in.

All those laments about "digital twitterings" are a red herring. If you think the students are uniquely indifferent nowadays, you should look back at the laments about students from ancient times to the present.

Also, "digital" means a different form of expression, not a killer technology that swallows up books. This isn't a deathmatch between digital media and the humanities, however much the news media like to propose that it is. They're in love with the "digital natives" idea and celebrity culture, too, but that doesn't mean that they're right.

In fact, that isn't a bad starting place for a discussion with your class. How about it?

Web reading: short takes from the Chronicle

News flash from The Chronicle: "Not all young people are tech-savvy" by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

They aren't? You mean five years' worth of bloggers' comments to this effect are correct? You mean that "digital natives" are a myth? Oh, the humanity!

In other news, Mark Bauerlein channels Nicholas Carr, but he also cites an interesting study from Jakob Nielsen:

Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people's online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages "in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school." It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. "F for fast," Nielsen wrote in a column. "That's how users read your precious content." . . .

In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, "'Reading' is not even the right word." The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the "nut" and nothing else.

Bauerlein, like Carr, concludes that "reading" web texts, Twitter, etc. is not "reading" as in reading Kafka or Tolstoy. Bauerlein's solution is a little more drastic, however: "Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off."

I am not sure that digital technology is an imperial force. I mean, does it have a flag? Bauerlein has a point, though, about the rush to digitization. Can't we have both kinds of reading? Maybe the paper kind of reading needs a new motto.

"Read different."

Yeah, that's the ticket.