Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
the future is r-slurred 
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I had two awkward experiences from not completing assigned reading for a course in college:
(1) In an Italian lit course I took, I only skimmed the reading before writing the essay. So, before the next class, the prof calls me aside and says he has something he needs to talk to me about my essay. He said he was so impressed that he wanted to read it to the class but wanted my approval before doing so. It was a satirical treatment of cheese breads in the style of what we had read; I don't remember anything more about it.
(2) In a rhetoric course focused on political theory, I didn't do the reading for one essay (but had for others). The instructor (a long-standing political author) wrote me an email at the end of the semester candidly describing the chasm of difference in quality between the two essays -- and that he kinda could tell I had phoned one in. The email said that I probably didn't deserve the "A" I had ended up with. I ran into him like a year later, and he apologized, saying I had earned the grade I got. It felt weird because I thought he was right the first time.
The latter was a healthy experience in realizing that someone attuned enough can tell when you phone in a job.
!sophistry
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The best instruction is that which hurts a little to give.
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That's why you phone it in from the start so they never learn to expect more out of you.
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Boo!
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