Reading Hard Things (and Why We Still Ask Students to Do It)

I recently read a powerful essay in The Atlantic about something many of us in education have been feeling: students are reading less, and teachers are assigning less sustained reading than they once did. We live, as the author puts it, in the age of the clip, the excerpt, the sample. Whole books—and whole arguments—are increasingly rare experiences for students. 

The author, Walt Hunter, a college literature professor at Case Western Reserve, describes walking into a classroom full of students he feared might not read at all. Like many instructors today, he had absorbed the “wisdom” that students can’t handle long, challenging texts. And yet what happened over the semester surprised him: the students did read. They struggled, but they stayed with the books. And something important happened as a result. They reclaimed time, attention, and the experience of gradually coming to understand something difficult.

This resonated deeply with me because at CourseKata, we sometimes hear a familiar criticism: our interactive textbooks are “too reading heavy.”

It’s true that we ask students to read. Not endlessly, and not passively—we embed questions, simulations, and interactive tools throughout. But reading is one of the most powerful tools we have for helping students spend real time with ideas. It slows learning down in the right way. It gives students a chance to live inside a concept long enough for it to begin to make sense.

Statistics and modeling are not “light” subjects. They require students to sit with ideas that don’t immediately click: What is a model? Why do we use probability to represent uncertainty? How can data reshape what we believe? These are not concepts you master through quick exposure. They take time. They take persistence.

The most important passage in the Atlantic essay, for me, was the author’s reflection on his own adolescence, reading books that were far beyond him at first. He describes the slow development of something we rarely talk about explicitly: the ability to tolerate not understanding right away.

He writes:

“But by the time I reached the end of high school, I developed a tolerance for what I did not understand, and then I gradually understood it. Once I did begin to understand, I felt an extraordinary desire to repeat the experience.” 

That is exactly the experience we want for CourseKata students.

Students may not understand difficult ideas like distributions, sampling variation, or even what we mean by a model right away. And that’s not a problem—it’s the nature of these concepts. They aren’t the kind of things you grasp instantly from a quick explanation. You need to stay with them, encounter them in multiple contexts, and gradually build up an intuition for what they mean.

That’s why we ask students to slow down and spend time with ideas. Reading—especially when paired with interaction, simulation, and reflection—creates space for that kind of learning to happen. Interactive textbooks are not meant to remove the hard parts. They are meant to help students through the hard parts. 

And when that happens, something powerful follows. There is a deep satisfaction that comes from understanding something that once felt inaccessible. It’s not instant, but earned. And once students begin to understand, they often find themselves wanting more of the experience—wanting to return to the problem, to the idea, to the challenge, now with new eyes.

That is exactly the kind of learning we want CourseKata students to have.

‍