The challenge of “How to Get Your Students to Read” is the subject of a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (August 2nd, p. 36).
Getting students to read is, to be sure, an admirable goal, but it ignores the painful truth that reading in college is….so….so….OVER. Navigating a book page-by-page may have been a cool thing to do in the 19th and 20th centuries, but in the 21st there is no way it can compete with listening to Megan Thee Stallion on one’s earbuds.
Fortunately, help is on the way. McGraw Hill Publishing Company has partnered with Frito-Lay and the Department of Neuroscience at Purdue University to develop Edible Classics: notable books genetically embedded in popular snack items.
Simon Allen, McGraw Hill’s CEO, poses the question: “Do you have any idea how many bags of Doritos are consumed by college students in a year? Millions upon millions! What if we could incorporate a book’s contents into the ingredients of a Doritos chip, or a Cheeto, or — in the case of elderly students — an extra-soft Pringle? It would be incredible! Students would be ‘reading’ every time they chewed. Hell, instructors would WANT their students to smoke weed constantly, so they would always have the munchies.
“The good news is that scientists at Purdue have found a way to link the tongue’s taste receptors to the part of the brain that processes language. Need to have your students read ‘Moby Dick’ without complaining? Three large bags of Ruffles Potato Chips (Whale Edition) should do the trick.
“We plan to introduce our first series of Edible Classics in the fall of 2025. It will include ‘Catcher in the Rye’, ‘Middlemarch’, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, ‘Beloved’, and ‘Little Women’.
“Are we concerned about students gaining weight in reading-intensive courses? Absolutely. What’s the point of digesting all of ‘War and Peace’ if you drop dead of a heart attack while discussing it in class? Moreover, books in some disciplines (e.g., Art History, Sociology) are much higher in saturated fat than the books in others (e.g., Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science). As you can imagine, this is a very delicate issue to deal with.
“The folks at Frito-Lay are working on these problems as we speak. Until they come up with a solution, we recommend that instructors assign no more than 500 pages of edible reading per semester.
“The end of reading as we have traditionally known it need not represent the end of higher education. It simply marks the beginning of a new, edible chapter in the history of the field. Enjoy.”