"Becoming a Victorian Reader": The Serial Reading Process in the Modern Classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the biggest challenges facing any Victorianist who regularly teaches fiction is to keep students motivated when they are reading what appear to them to be endlessly long novels. Overwhelming as it is for students to face a semester syllabus that asks them to complete 2000-3000 pages of reading (the usual range in my upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses on Victorian fiction), it is particularly daunting when 800 of those pages are contained in a single novel such as Our Mutual Friend or Middlemarch. And when there are five or six novels on the syllabus, anything that helps students feel the task is broken down into more manageable quantities (i.e. smaller than the novels themselves) is not simply gratefully received but pedagogically sound as a means of keeping them invested in doing the reading required of them. I have found that students will freely admit, if one asks in the right way, that they cannot (or do not) always keep up with the reading, making choices such as skipping one novel in order to finish another, or skimming quickly over large amounts of text to pull out highlights that will enable them to have something to mention in class to make it look as though they are keeping up. Dismal as such admissions may be for the inveterate lover of Victorian prose, such honesty prompted me to consider how I might better introduce my students to the Victorian novel in a way that would enable them to see reading it as more than just a task to check off a list. Call me an idealist, but I wanted them to read the novels because they were interested in the novels rather than skimming for tidbits to impress me in class. In short, I wanted them to enjoy sustained reading a particularly difficult task at a university where the largely self-supporting student population has jobs, demanding schedules, and complex real-life responsibilities outside the classroom that make it difficult for them to devote large blocks of time to quiet contemplation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".