Bethany Miller's List: Teacher Resources

• They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher  reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the  "summer slide" — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students  during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have  as much positive effect as attending summer school.
  
• We already knew, from research in 27 countries, that kids who grow up in a home  with 500 books stay in school longer and do better.
• They found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was  associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.
  
• Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He  cites a pile of research showing that the multi-distraction, hyperlink world  degrades people's abilities to engage in deep thought or serious  contemplation.
  
• Carr's argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests  that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a  person's ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they  say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.
  
• The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium  is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the  way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person  who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe.  There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the  bottom.
  
  A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the  works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep,  alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the  writers who transmit that wisdom.
  
• A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes  hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had  been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary  America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than  the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant  activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, anti-authority disputation.
• But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated,  mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things,  you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to  immerse yourself in a great writer's world. You have to respect the authority of  the teacher.
  
• The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary  culture still produces better students.
  
• It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how  to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious  learning.
  

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