Why I Still Assign the Whole Book

Everything pushes toward the excerpt, the chapter, the summary. I keep assigning the whole book anyway. Here's the case for the most inefficient thing I do.

I took lots of speed reading classes in college, and they taught me not to sub-vocalize, to expand my fixation span, and to use a card to cover the words as I scanned them with my eyes. In a year, I was reading 300 page books in the span of a few hours, but I found out I couldn’t remember anything about what I read. Speed reading just doesn’t stick.

I eventually ended up teaching high school chemistry, where I began assigning a full book. I expected my students to read the entire thing with no summary, no study guide, no in-class reading, and no support at all. Groaning was the most polite and justified response I got. I really did make a room of 16 and 17 year-olds do the exact thing I paid to learn how to avoid.

April will always hold the magical month for every teacher: when class energy drops and students start counting down the days until the end of the year. There’s a spike in distracted hormones and mood swings (break ups, make ups, etc). After observing this for several years, I noticed a clear trend: I got the reading value question mostly from students who never finished a full long novel, while the ones who did finish novels never asked the question.

The data collected reveals even more. Based on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 12th grade students have reading scores that decreased three points from 2019 and ten points from the 1992 baseline. Additionally, 32% of students scored below the NAEP Basic standard. To elaborate, the NAEP has two reading series: the main NAAP for grade 12 started in 1992 and has decreased by 10 points, and the long-term trend NAEP for 17 year-olds started in 1971 and has remained unchanged for decades.

Moreover, according to the 2025 RAND American Youth Panel survey, which surveyed 1,000 students ages 12 to 29, reports that in the 5 months from May to December, AI homework use increased from 48% to 62%. The participants noted that the habit was negatively influencing their critical thinking skills, and the number of participants that agreed with that statement increased from 54% in May. When the survey results were published, Heather Schwartz, the vice president of RAND’s Education, Employment, and Infrastructure division, stated that although students were using AI to assist them in learning, they were admitting that this was in fact negatively impacting their learning.

In my last year teaching high school, one of my students came up to me after class and told me that she had read the book I assigned her, not once, but twice. She had not retained anything the first time she read it, so she had to start over on her own time. There was no incentive for her to do that. There was no spot for the extra effort in my grade book.

Today, an AI summary generates a succinct paragraph with a convincing conclusion in seconds. In contrast, reading a whole book requires readers to traverse the mental space the author traveled: through the introductions, the asides, the qualifications, the characters, and the building of the case or the story. By the time you reach page ten, you either have a love or hate for the book. This uncertainty adds to the experience of reading a book.

To the best of my knowledge, AI summaries of The Radium Girls have not impacted anyone (although I do acknowledge the possibility of a sub-reddit one exactly this). If an AI summary has achieved such a remarkable feat, it has done so by directing readers to the book, and all the impact has occurred there, in the long term companionship with the characters. It is the duration and the effort that have the effect. You have to take the walk to get exercise, not by looking at a map.

My post from July 14 expressed an objection to something I had been thinking about. If indeed ‘deep reading’ is becoming a two-tiered skill, then providing students with entire books, who have never been taught to read books critically, serves as a sorting mechanism masquerading as a standard. Certainly, this is the case when the book is provided in a vacuum. However, if the assignment is coupled with the book and is explicit about the type of thinking and the steps of the cognitive apprenticeship that are involved, then the activity is still very much worthwhile.

For me, there is always too much to read and too little time. When I was younger, the answer was to read everything faster. Now that I’m older and wiser, I understand the value of reading fewer things but reading them more thoroughly and with a critical mind.

So, I assign the whole book, teach the whole book, and, honestly, lose a bunch of students (who, by the way, are now most often teachers). The students I do reach are the students who read often. The part that really counts, the part that I really care about, is helping people read in more critical and thoughtful ways. That’s what I’ve been focusing on in my research, practice, and here.

I was really happy when a student I taught years ago sent me a copy of a book we read in my high school class about the periodic table. She took the time to send it to me because the spine was broken, pages were dog-eared, and there were a bunch of notes scribbled in the margins. She offered it as congratulations for finishing my doctorate, and I received it as a dear reminder of why I do this work. I keep the book on my desk.