You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.
Like, my assumption this whole time has been that when folks go "I misunderstood this post that says [thing] as saying [unrelated thing] because I mistook [word] for [completely different word that happens to start with the same letter]", that was a bit. What do you mean they're teaching kids a reading method that's tailored to produce this exact error?
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"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
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I knew Benton was married! I remembered from the books, but when watching the show and seeing him and Kay kiss, I was wondering if they changed that. The books had Kay dating Bill Boltz, who we find out later is not a good guy. The show also showed that there was a darker side to Benton. It showed him having a fight with Kay and getting rather drunk. He is seen hiding away in a room. A closet opens, and he has a hidden hatch on the floor. Going down, there's nothing but an empty room and a single chair. There's a piece of paper under the chair that he pulls out and looks at. At first glance, I thought it was a crime photo from a newspaper. Maybe something happened to his wife or children.
In this episode we also discover that Matt Petersen isn't and never was the killer. He was in contact with Gwen, the most recent victim from the first episode in order to try to recreate his wife using synthetic technology to create real working human organs. He would need Gwen alive in order to do this and he has no motive to kill her.
The space thing was wacky but interesting.
Ok. So in episode 6 we find out more about Benton. The picture he was looking at is from a psychology book on Sociopaths that his mother gave him after diagnosing him with sociopathy. It shows a time when he was a child struggling with OCD and his mother, a psychiatrist/psychologist diagnosing him.
This is also the episode where we learn that Bill Boltz raped Abby Turnbull. She confides in Kay after she finds her sister the most recent victim of the serial killer (1998). Tied up and raped. The book shows Kay's astonishment as she puts together that Bill is a bad man, thinking back to past moments with him where he got rough with her. But the show made it so him and Kay never dated at all so I'm curious to see how that pans out.
We are also introduced to a case from 6 months prior (present day) of a woman that was drowned by a river. She was out running but would never have any reason to go off the trail towards the water unless she was being chased. The FBI and Dr. Reedy cover it up and claim it was an accidental death but Kay clearly sees that is was a murder.
In the first episode Kay finds a penny by the body (present day) and when her and Marino go down to the river where this other body was found they find another penny. Kay believes it's his (the killers) signature. So, is he killing others with a different MO in-between the rapes or are there two killers???
I'm also really curious about what Kay has kept from Benton all these years. My suspicion is that in the book, Kay is intended to be the newest victim when Marino barges in and shoots the killer, (1998) is that why Kay is so hung up on the case? But Benton would have known Kay's involvement all those years ago when writing up and reading the reports, right?
So, for the most part they aren't making too many significant changes but two that I think are important is how Amburgey is the cause of the leaks and tampering with the evidence. In the book when Kay is brought in to talk to Amburgey, Benton, and Bill Boltz, they all head to her office after and go through the evidence, at one point some papers fall and when filing them back together Amburgey takes the extra labels for the PERKS. In the show they don't go to her office, but later Kay realizes that the extra labels have been completely taken. It's going to be interesting to see how they work that one out. In the books Kay also has a 'situationship' with Boltz and so when Abby Turnbull comes forward about him assaulting her it has a greater impact on Kay. They show Bill stalking Abby and Abby going to Kay and trying to talk to her about something 'personal' but Kay brushes her off so we don't yet know what the issue was. I suspect it has something to do with Bill.
I think there's certain aspects of the show that are a little out of place. The book made each new find a little more linear and cohesive. They definitely had enough time over the span of a whole tv season to put in more detail of the book, unlike many book to movie adaptations where they have to cut back so much due to the length of the film.
Otherwise I'm liking the show so far. Things that weren't so clear in episodes 1 and 2 are now becoming more clear. Such as the glitter on the victims, I think Marino mentions it before but if you didn't read the book you wouldn't understand the significance of it but now in these next two epsiodes the viewer has a better understanding.
I also am not a fan of Dorothy. Not in the book or show. The relationship, or lack of a relationship, she has with her daughter is appalling. And how both Kay and her treat each other, I'm one of 4 daughters so I know that siblings can have their spats but I could never fathom treating my sisters like that. And then Dorothy goes and talks to AI Janet and says she feels 'othered' by her family bc she's not into death and murder, the hypocrisy of that when her sister and daughter were both othered the majority of their lives by their peers for being intelligent. In the book Kay talks of understanding Lucy being so smart at a young age and not being able to connect with kids her own age.
But I also feel like the way Dorothy acts is just how she coped with her fathers death. Kay wanted to understand, but Dorothy took it as , "life is short, do whatever you can to live and have fun."
I also don't like Maggie. I feel like she was kinder in the book, a better ally to Kay but they've changed that for the show. But I could also have read her character wrong 🤷♀️
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Damian: i remember when i first came to Gotham, how awe-struck i was by the power of Batman and his Robins; how badly i wished to live up to the mantle and make everybody believe in me and honour me as a part of the team,
Tim: *prompting hum*
Damian: …and then i met you all.
Tim:
Tim: and now?
Damian: i feel like there’s better things to do with life.
Tim, easily: yeah, going behind the scenes really takes that respect away, doesn’t it?
Damian: so you know what i mean?
Tim: oh yeah. when i first became Robin i adored Bruce and the concept of being Robin. thought it was magical. thought it was gonna be the best time of my life.
Damian: and then?
Tim: and then Bruce started getting on my fucking nerves.
Bruce and Alfred are the only ones that can tell when there's genuine hostility between the kids.
Imagine this, the justice league meet at the manor, as friends, everything is sitting at the table and they start to hear yelling in he other room. Tim and Damian barge in, fully fighting.
Kick, screams, insults a broken vase, something is thrown around. And then Tim chases Damian out of the room.
Everyone looks at Bruce, expecting him to go intervene or something. Bruce is unfazed, still sipping on his coffee. "They're just playing." He murmurs.
Then Jason walks in, completely chill, takes some food, and sits in one of the couches. Then Cass walks in, with a bruise in her face.
"Bad night at patrol?" Jason asks.
And Cass stares at him.
Bruce is automatically up and between them, Cass walks away with a huff and Bruce starts scolding Jason for "instigating" her.
The tv series follows Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner, alongside a ex-police detective, Marino, her FBI husband, Benton Wesley, her "author" sister Dorothy and her computer genius, gay, niece, Lucy.
The series is based off of books written by Patricia Cornwell. I've read Post-Mortem, originally published in 1989 and Livid published in 2022. Based on what I've read there have been some changes done for the show.
The first season seems to be a continuation of the first novel 28 years later. In the book Post-Mortem Dr. Scarpetta, Marino and Benton track down a serial killer that is breaking into young women's homes and assaulting and killing them. One of the murders involves a husband that was away for work when his wife, the victim, was murdered, Marino finds the husband suspicious, however he doesn't end up being the killer because the real killer is caught red handed attempting to kill Dr. Scarpetta herself.
Now, in the show 28 years later another body shows up much like the women from before. Their first suspect is the suspicious husband from all those years ago. Did they catch the wrong guy?
In the show Marino ends up marrying Dorothy, which I can't remember is canon or not, the pair seem too different to be into each other. Lucy is also gay which again I don't know if it's canon or not. They also did something really weird with her character, her wife is dead and Lucy has been "coping" by talking to an AI version of her wife. I think it definitely has some potential to discuss the harm of AI within the show and as a whole but the AI being shown isn't right, AI doesn't act that way. She's portrayed too much like a person and not enough like a computer.
I really enjoy Lucy's character in the book, in Post-Mortem she's only 10 and is hacking into Kay's home computer and fixing/cleaning it up. You have to remember this was set in the 90s and so Lucy wasn't just casually guessing a password, she was in the computer writing code. Which is so cool!
They also put Kay and Benton together, again I haven't read enough of the series to remember if that is canon or not. This pairing makes sense and Benton is played by Simon Baker who also was the lead in the tv series The Mentalist, which I loved. And Benton's new FBI partner is played by Anna Diop who is Starfire from netflix's Titans! (Panicks in bisexual)
I also feel like there was enough in the show that you wouldn't understand unless you've read the book, there's flashbacks to the og case and when they mention certain evidence, the significance isn't as clear as when reading the book. The flashbacks are also not marked by any date on the screen so you kinda have to some mental gymnastics to figure out what year they're in. The past and present characters are played by different actors so that helps but I still find that a date on the screen that fades out would be helpful.
Ok, I think that's it for now. Sorry for the lengthy post I have a lot of feeling on the matter.
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