The last few weeks I've been thinking (mainly) and creating (more recently) reading lists for college students that consist of recommendations of what they might read that are unrelated to the courses they are taking. More about this below. These recommendations are targeted at students in the Non-Course (also read the the next tab called No Tuition & No Course Credit, which explains why it is called the Non-Course.) It is assumed that students in the non-course are time abundant, so they can develop a habit of regular (I would hope daily) reading of longer pieces, reading that they do slowly, in an uninterrupted and thoughtful way.
The Non-Course itself offers a reading list that I have been compiling over the years on learning and leadership. In my view, there's about a 90% overlap between those two. As the life skill students need to acquire is learning to learn, this seems fitting as a kind of curriculum. Yet, if the students aren't regular readers already, it might not be what students should start with to encourage the reading habit. The additional reading lists I produced are aimed at making some progress with that. While the Non-Course itself is meant to include my coaching of the students, since the whole purpose is for students to be in charge, they certainly could accept some of the reading recommendations but then read them entirely on their own, with no coaching whatsoever. Those students might be interested to note that I've written about some, but not all, of the reading suggestions over the years on this Lanny on Learning blog. So the interested student might search here to make some connection with the readings suggested on the reading lists.
After a couple of weeks of thinking about this, where I reached the point of knowing how I wanted to cluster the readings, it occurred to me to use a restaurant menu metaphor for labeling the individual clusters. This would convey the suggested order for going through them.
We start with Appetizers, which are short stories, and are sequenced on that page in way where I'd hope the first few most students can get through and enjoy, while the later ones might be more of a challenge. I want to note one consideration for choosing stories that might not occur to someone who reads this post at first. Older pieces are more apt to be freely available. (This assumes the student does have Internet access and a device on which to do the reading, preferably not a smart phone.) If the student is doing a kind of experiment, one that might fail, paying for the privilege would seem to block getting started. I also had another consideration in mind, to have the readings not be connected to current events in an obvious way, because I believe those current events are a source of stress for most students, as they are for me. However, the past is connected to the present in many different ways, and even though the longer pieces listed on the page were written in other times, they do tie to the present, perhaps quite strongly. I also want to note here that even if one embraced these criteria for selecting short stories, somebody else going through this exercise might produce quite a different list. I'll return to that at the end of this post.
The next course has Salads, which are essays, the non-fiction analog of short stories. Before getting to the annotated list of essays, there is a discussion of what I take to be the critical issue. Many college students can't make good meaning of the pieces listed on the page. This inability to make good meaning implies that reading is an alien activity - it is not satisfying in itself. So these students don't read much at all. (Again, I'm not talking about text messages or micro-blogging posts. I'm talking about longer reads.) Without reading, the students don't get practice on reading to make good meaning. They operate under an assumption that they should be able to discern the meaning of the piece like a snap of the fingers and don't understand the making good meaning requires some deliberation. And lacking the practice, the students can't improve this way. Many will conclude that they are not good readers, a la Carol Dweck's fixed mindset. This is a vicious cycle that needs to be cut. The Non-Course is an experiment whose goal is to do exactly that.
The third course has full length books. It is called Alternative Entrees, because these are not books one would read to study how people learn, nor are they likely to show up in any college course. The main criterion used in selecting them is my having had a thrill while reading them and immediately after reading them. An additional criterion to warrant inclusion here is an intuition that these books have something of substance to teach the reader. So the reading should produce personal growth. Those books in the last course may be very entertaining indeed, but lack this personal growth aspect. That last course is labelled Desserts. It's the sinful pleasures that we read. To illustrate what I mean by that, the first entry is Silence of the Lambs. In normal circumstances, dessert comes at the end of the meal. But during the pandemic, I've been known to lead off with it and I suspect I'm not alone in that. Likewise for the students who use these posts as guides to their own reading. Nobody will be the wiser, unless they want to make it known.
I'm getting closer to filling out the Non-Course Website with the posts I had planned to do. The ones I've done so far with the readings still need to be proofread carefully. Then I need to write at least a couple more posts, one to discuss seguing from these readings to the reading list for the Non-Course. How can the students tell that the student is ready to make this transition? Then there will be one final post about a potential ordering in the readings on the reading list, to get the most out of them. After that, the Website will be set, at least for a while.
The Non-Course now is a theoretical possibility only. There are no students taking it at present. I've tried some early marketing of it to former students, but got nowhere with that. How to identify students who are taking a gap year remains a challenge to me. University units that do admissions may track this, but why would they partner with me on this? And I really don't want the imprimatur of a particular university on the Non-Course at this point. I'm afraid that if I were to do this, they'd find a way to undermine the structure by somehow introducing course credit and grades. I don't want that. It will kill the experiment before it gets started.
It occurred to me that a more popular instructor doing this might be able to pull off such an experiment, where I cannot. In this case, the Website I've produced might serve as a model for what that instructor does. Readings could be swapped out that better fit that instructor's preferences, but some of the structure might remain. If that were to happen, I'd be very pleased. Alternatively, a group of popular instructors might try this. If they are still full time faculty members, some division of labor would be needed to push this forward, which makes the group approach plausible. Were that to happen, I'd like to be part of the group, if possible.
In the meantime, it may be that readers of this post have ideas about how to recruit students to the Non-Course. I would love to hear about those ideas. Please post them as comments to this post or email me if you prefer.
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