Comment by Xenoamorphous
20 days ago
It has happened to me, I don’t need to look at following generations. I was an avid reader in my teenage years, I was devouring anything Crichton, Grisham, Cussler or Robin Cook were putting out (hardly Dostoevsky but I was an average teen).
Now I devote my life to work and my 3yo daughter and when I have ~1h for myself on a working day (after she’s gone to bed) I just mindlessly scroll on my phone, and when I’ve tried to read a book I just lost any kind of attention span I had and I realised that I’ve “read” a couple of pages but I wouldn’t be able to say what they were about because my mind was elsewhere. So I end up reading a lot of text on any given day but never literature, it’s either code, emails, Slack messages, technical docs or websites…
I had to retrain myself to read fiction for pleasure. This is what worked for me:
Read a paragraph. If you feel like the info isn't going in, restart the paragraph, but this time slow down enough so you can sound out the words in your head. If the meaning still doesn't go in, restart and actually read the words aloud. If that still doesn't work, get some sleep and try again tomorrow.
Good advice.
I've also had to "relearn" how to read after a decade of attention-span-killing apps.
The method I used worked well but it's slow at first. Read a paragraph then stop and have a conversation with yourself about what just happened. If that's still too hard, do it every sentence and build up.
Eventually move on to every page and eventually every chapter.
Think of it like weightlifting: You were a an olympic lifter but you had an accident that left you immobile for years or even decades. Now you're getting back to it. Don't get down on yourself for not deadlifting like an olympian right away. Start with light weights and focus on form.
> Read a paragraph then stop and have a conversation with yourself about what just happened.
I like that approach, as it combines the training of attention span and memorizing.
I've come to the painful realization that we are not only losing our attention span --our capacity to concentrate--, we are also concurrently losing our deep memorizing abilities --our capacity to retain the information we managed to intake--. So it's really a double whammy effect, making it even more difficult to revert.
All the progress I have made in that direction came from one thing: more free time. The amount I read is directly proportional to that.
Perhaps students don't do all these things because they're busy as hell trying to keep up with life's endless demands.