By Sandy Hingston
They don’t read. They can’t spell. They spend all their time playing computer games and texting and hanging out with one another on Facebook. But the problem is much worse than you think, because the way your kids live now is rewiring their brains
Two autumns ago, in my son Jake’s junior year of high school, he took an AP English course. Junior year was bad for him and me — we never seemed to have anything nice to say to one another. But Jake did like to read, and it occurred to me at some point that perhaps I could use his AP English course to connect with him. Surely I’d read the same books he was reading, since the high-school reading list was carved in stone sometime in the early 1950s. So I asked him: What are you reading in AP English?