The Fiction Treehouse

We barely know anything about Madagascar pre-500CE. We don’t even know whether the island had a permanent population before then, despite finding a bunch of much older signs of temporary human presence.

Malagasy mythology makes mention of the vazimba, a “precursor” ethnic group that might or might not be distinct from Madagascar’s current population.

The point is, we do not know.

So you were in Madagascar when the pyramids were being built in Egypt, i.e. during one of the most obscure, most undocumented parts of Madagascar’s human history?

People of tumblr, I believe in you. I trust you to make the right choice. I truly believe we can make this a reality. We have the power. We can achieve anything we put our minds to.

Original post

For one, in some cultures asking an obvious question is just a polite way of acknowledging the situation. So for example, if you just put your jacket on and start clocking out, a co-worker asking "oh, you done for the day and heading out now?" doesn't deserve you sneering at them like an idiot, scoffing, and saying "uh duh, just like I do every day at this time" when it's likely they knew the answer, but were just asking as a polite way of acknowledging the situation.

But even if they were genuinely unsure that you're leaving even though it seems obvious to you from context clues, so what? What does being rude and condescending to them achieve? Maybe they couldn't sleep last night so they're really out of it today, maybe they're dissociating, maybe they're about to pass out from low blood sugar, maybe some other employees sometimes put on their jacket and only clock out briefly but come back.

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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"

One time Mr. Robinson closed the door to the classroom furtively and asked a student near the door to keep an eye on the door’s window in case anyone from the administration was coming.

He explained the next curriculum was one he had been explicitly disallowed from, but he didn’t know how we were going to cover the next portion of our history work fairly without covering it first. He said if any of us were offended by it or felt it threatened our beliefs to be discussing it, please talk to him and he would gladly find alternative work for us to do instead. But he asked if we would be okay not broadcasting too loudly to the administration (our parents were fine) about it.

At this point we’re on the edge of our seat. Forbidden curriculum? YES PLEASE.

“All right, do I have a promise from you you won’t tell on me to the principal?”

We, of course, promised.

“Good. Then let’s talk about World Religions.”

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(A side note here, if you ever have a not-forbidden courseload you want your students to really enthusiastically consume, I think pretending it’d forbidden will up interest levels immensely. The work was informative and we loved it, but the Secret Agent-ness of doing a SECRET ASSIGNMENTS and having SECRET PROJECTS and LOOKOUTS FOR THE FUZZ upped our investment in the material beyond description. Even if you DON’T have secret coursework, PLEASE DO THIS WITH YOUR CLASS SOMETIME. IT’S FUN.)

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At the start of the Great Gender Debate when someone would try to say boys and girls aren’t different and they can do whatever the other does, he’d super respectively ask them if they really thought that, or if they were saying it because they thought that’s what they were supposed to say, and encouraged us being honest about how we actually felt about the difference between between boys and girls and who was better.

Then lots of super fun shouting and throwing paper at each other and making desk barricades and more yelling.

(Keep in mind, this was 1999/2000. A lot of people didn’t even have internet at home. This was a small conservative town. Being trans or nonbinary wouldn’t have even been an option we knew about.)

Then he eventually stepped back into the fray of the Great Gender Debate and made us break down our points, which he had been taking notes of, on the white board and then had us carefully and intentionally refute or discuss them one at a time. Until we had reached a real and honest consensus that actually we’d been tricked into thinking gender was anything at all. Now when we said we thought neither was better than the other and being a boy or girl didn’t mean anything about what you could or couldn’t do, we fucking meant it.

One of our male classmates started wearing nail polish the next week and we told him it looked rad.

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One time it was a nice day out and even though we weren’t doing trig at that point he was like, “Wanna learn something cool? I’m gonna show you how to calculate how tall something is using shadows” and then we went outside and learned how to find out how tall things are by measuring their shadows and measuring the shadows of stuff we knew the length of, and then for fun we also independently worked out the world was round and how big it was.

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One of the times the cops were called on us it was because we were having a Hot Air Balloon making contest and people thought there were UFOs or spy planes.

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Another time we were just setting off dry ice bombs, lol.

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They changed the milk at lunch and we hated it and Mr. Robinson may have given us ideas about civil disobedience and direct action that led to the lunch room sit-in the schoolchildren ended up staging until they would switch the milk back. At the time it felt like he was being really cool, and he was, but thinking on it he may have also been using us as props to prank the administration and also give himself an afternoon off while all the administration tried to get a hundred 11-12 year olds to leave the damn cafeteria while we chanted about milk.

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We grew up in a town that was about 2% black. It was not uncommon for people living there to not know any black people at all.

One day Mr. Robinson told us we were going to be having a very important speaker come talk to us, and that he expected us to treat her with respect and deference. That she was one of the most important people we could be learning from, and we were honored to have her come to us. We all sat up, wondering who this important woman could be.

And he opened the door and it was one of the ladies who worked the front office, accepting our tardy slips and making us wait for the school nurse. A black woman, one of the only black people you’d find in the school.

She then sat down with us and talked to us about the racial history of our town. Explained to us what a Sundown Town was. Explained to us the racism she experienced growing up there. Explained the mistreatment of the police.

She wasn’t even that old. It struck us all. But you’re not even old. Is this still happening? Why didn’t you leave? Did anyone help you?

It was an incredibly powerful day.

When I went home to talk to my parents about it, they had no idea about any of it, even though this was the same town they had grown up in.

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Mr. Robinson would occasionally repeat this habit of special guests were not academics, just people who had lived in our town for a while, bringing in a lunch lady or a janitor, making us talk to them, learn our town’s history, learn to respect their jobs, learn manners and deference for the working class.

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One time he gave us bread, water, and ziploc bags and set us loose on the school to rub the bread on stuff, drip water on it, seal it, and watch what mold grew. The kid that got the grimiest piece of bread with the most enthusiastic mold would win.

We learned that many of the surfaces we consider the most dirty get the most regular cleaning, and so are in fact the least likely to produce mold. While many of the surfaces we eat off of and touch regularly are nasty as hell.

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Similar to the Great Gender Debate, one time he let class go wildly off course while we debated hotly for over an hour about The Lion King. I do not, for the life of me, remember the substance of this debate. I think The Little Mermaid may also have been a point of conversation? I just remember it got HEATED, and Mr. Robinson always thought these heated debates were REALLY ENTERTAINING and would quietly sit back and egg them on.

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One time he gave me detention and I cried through the whole thing thinking my parents were gonna kill me when I got home and instead when I got home my mom hugged me and told me how he’d called her and said I’d been really honest and showed moral fiber in standing up for a friend and taking the detention in the first place and she was really proud of me for being a good person or whatever and idk if he actually was impressed with my actions or if he saw that I was stressed about my parent’s reactions and wanted to mitigate that, but that was such a good move.

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IDK. I just have a hard time thinking of any teacher I ever had both as capable of chaotic dry amusement and completely upright righteous anger. He modeled for us what it was like to evaluate things based on merit rather than based on rules and expectations, and you felt that energy constantly.

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Thriving: "I got this"

Calm and steady with minor mood fluctuations

Able to take things in stride

Consistent performance

Able to take feedback and to adjust to changes or plans

Able to focus

Able to communicate effectively

Normal sleep patterns and appetite

Surviving: "Something isn't right"

Nervousness, sadness, increased mood fluctuations

Inconsistent performance

More easily overwhelmed or irritated

Increased need for control and difficulty adjusting to changes

Trouble sleeping or eating

Activities and relationships you used to enjoy seem less interesting or even stressful

Muscle tension, low energy, headaches

Struggling: "I can't keep this up"

Persistent fear, panic, anxiety, anger, pervasive sadness, hopelessness

Exhaustion

Poor performance and difficulty making decisions or concentrating

Avoiding interaction with coworkers, family and friends

Fatigue, aches and pains

Restless, disturbed sleep

Self-medicating with substances, food, or other numbing activities

In Crisis: "I can't survive this"

Disabling distress and loss of function

Panic attacks

Nightmares or flashbacks

Unable to fall or stay asleep

Intrusive thoughts

Thoughts of self-harm or suicide

Easily enraged or aggressive

Careless mistakes and inability to focus

Feeling numb, lost, or out of control

Withdrawal from relationships

Dependence on substances, food, or other numbing activities to cope