Smith opens with an italicized scene—like stage directions—which is absolutely intriguing. Her proposition is that standardized test culture was superficial and now students read on electronic devices, and those two things clash in a loud, harmful way. The article also addresses “tl;dr” or “too long; didn’t read.” The studies concluded that students were not reading the material but still writing effective papers. Smith blames herself for this. If it is a teacher problem, it is because we give students too many tools. By telling them where to look, are we teaching them not to look around? Not in the way we would think. According to Smith, they are actually becoming more dependent on us; changing our discourse yearly to better assist them “perpetuates their belief that knowledge is something to be given, not earned” (425). So, yes, students invent the university; they take all the tools we give them and write what we have told them they are supposed to get out of a specific text. And, it is beneficial to embrace multiple mediums such as audiobooks and videos, as these still require critical thought to analyze. There will always be students who do genuinely complete the readings and not understand them—and it helps those students, too, to lessen the length of texts. 

Where I disagree with the article is that the problem is not a generational unwillingness to read. It is a generational change in capacity. I think of it like this: fifteen years ago, a student could fit a cup’s worth of water (knowledge) in one glass. Students now can still comprehend a cup’s worth of water, but they need to do so in many smaller glasses. And, the issue with technology is NOT that students are distracted as in switching between tabs, but that multiple things are existing at one time—like having plural radios on that are not in sync,  or the literal over-stimulation of having too many unused tabs open, or the situation with the pea under the mattress. They do not have to be actively distracted by their technology for their technology to be damaging their learning capacity. As a student, I experienced all of this, but it didn’t make my “head hurt” as the article suggests. I think this is the case for many students, especially now that it has been five polarizing years since this study. I did comprehend the readings when I did the readings, but sometimes I did not read because I did not have the mental capacity to spend hours with a book about the holocaust, such as the (although lighthearted) example in the article. This was not because of my own mental health, but because of my societal conditioning. It is not about the electronic devices, rather the psychological burden these people (not “these students” because this is not exclusively an academic issue) have because of them. Sometimes I feel like we exist simply to operate the machines. Things are obviously different, now. I love reading and writing. That’s why I am here. That’s why we are all here. I hope that this awareness continues to spread down the generational line.