BUZZ
Watching movies used to be considered fun homework. Now, some students are struggling to get through a whole film, professors recently told The Atlantic.
The report this week adds to similar complaints from professors about how many students struggle to read more than a few pages at a time or complete basic mathematics problems.
“I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the magazine. “But students will not do it.”
Erpelding is one of 20 film professors who expressed similar concerns to The Atlantic about students’ attention spans:
… over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones. …
Akira Mizuta Lippit, a cinema and media-studies professor at the University of Southern California—home to perhaps the top film program in the country—said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings: The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget. Eventually, they give in. He recently screened the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola classic The Conversation. At the outset, he told students that even if they ignored parts of the film, they needed to watch the famously essential and prophetic final scene. Even that request proved too much for some of the class. When the scene played, Lippit noticed that several students were staring at their phones, he told me. “You do have to just pay attention at the very end, and I just can’t get everybody to do that,” he said.
However, a few other film professors, including Lynn Spigel at Northwestern University, said they have not noticed a significant change. Specifically when it comes to old movies, Spigel said students typically struggle to keep focused.
“But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are,” she told The Atlantic.
Other recent articles at The Hechinger Report, the Associated Press, and more indicate young adults are struggling to read long passages of literature – including students accepted to America’s top universities.
Many blame the COVID-19 shutdown-connected learning losses, as well as students’ over-dependence on technology. Some professors have shifted back to zero-technology classrooms and print books as a result.
MORE: Gen Z students unable to read a sentence, Pepperdine professor says
