from Terry Haik
We tend to teach reading in a very industrial way in the United States.
We focus on providing children’s instruments and “strategies” to “make sense of text.” Separate the text at a distance. ” To look for the “purpose of the author” – to bounce back and forth between the basic idea and the details that “support” the main idea, as if reading is something that students happen to happen by accident while on some purely academic journey.
And we press the illusion of the “otherness” of one text, promoting the lie that they just have to decode this, recognize it and analyze it and that and that, and they will be able to “read”.
Although all this is good to emphasize the work that true literacy requires, there is no wonder why students are increasingly looking for more brifes, more visual, social and dynamic media. Because not only these media forms are effortlessly entertained, they rarely require significant investment for themselves.
And it is this kind of connection that makes reading – or any other consumption of media for this matter – they feel alive and vibrant and overall. When readers are younger, there is a natural “giving” between the reader and the text, their imaginations are still raw and green and alive.
But as readers are aging, there is less giving – and more need for texts to be contextualized differently.
See also: 25 responses to an independent guide to fiction and non -fiction
The spirituality of literacy
There is a spirituality involved in reading (really), which is challenging to promote only in the classroom. (That is not at home, social or entertainment events, but only at a school where it will always be naked.)
Cognitively, the student “makes sense” of text through a completely personal scheme – that is, through symbols and patterns and enthusiasm and suffering and meaning in his own life. Students cannot simply be encouraged to “wear” their own experience in text; They need to realize that any understanding of the text breaks down almost immediately if they do not.
Without the inward, reflecting model in which students acknowledge the pure madness of reading – where they are asked to unite two realities (text and themselves) – then this process will always be industrial. Mechanical.
A matter of literacy and “readiness for a career”.
Others.
Interestingly, we give students mechanical tools that have even used well can break the text beyond recognition, and then wonder why they do not appreciate Shakespeare or Berry or Folkner or Dickinson.
We are trying to divorce the reader from reading.
The woolness and complexity of literature are his magic. But students do not like reading, raised above, based on images full of shape, socialized and only important circumstances, are not used to this kind of selfless-and horrifying-ena.
The real literacy of self -reflection requires horrific! To look carefully who we are and what we think we know by studying another parallel review from another human being who put our thinking in the form of a novel, a short story, a poem or an essay! You don’t just “read” another person’s thoughts, but you pour yourself into their brains.
No wonder they skip you.
Most readers are already working from a disadvantaged position, where they view themselves as not only different from the text (false), but somehow in time and priority, as if they were put into some text to see if they were worth their time.
And so they sit with him only long enough to see if it entertain them, Ignoring the most fundamental principle of literacy: interdependence.
The irony of reading
In reading, you just reveal something you have always been a part of. Instincts you always had. Circumstances you have long been afraid of. The events and ideas and insights that you have struggled to put in words, but you have just found right there on the page.
Your brain cannot understand it otherwise.
Compared to media experiences, most modern students gravitate easily to – Instagram, Facebook, Epic Fail YouTube channels, video games – reading is also missing the immediate performance that can catalyze the experience. Something that ignites them inside the main knee level and will prevent them from having to go further.
Reading is not a show. (It’s not anyway.) It doesn’t exist to make them lol. (Although it can.) But they often turn the page hoping to have fun passively. Ironically, reading was not “built” for what we use it in education. Reading is extremely personal, but in education we often focus on mechanics instead of people and strategies instead of the living and breathing that happen all around us.
Reading includes process and tools and strategies, but it’s not the one of these.
The ecology of reading
It would be easy to blame the ecology of all this. Suppose Hucklbury Finn was just interesting because Minecraft was not around to compare it. Or blame social media for distracting everyone.
And all this is part of it. Their habits and access to complex texts and personal affinities matter. There is ecology that schools and students and texts and literacy act within interdependence – this is there, whether we decide to honor it or not. Many of this is much more bigger than you and as teachers.
But this does not apologize for our own failures in how we teach reading in schools. We give students processes for writing and instruments For reading, without stopping all the effort. Mechanized literacy has all sorts of alarming consequences.
You and I – we teach students to overestimate their own opinions when they are still often unfounded and uninformed, which it is like teaching them to read without helping them to realize why they should read.
We are unable to help them navigate the blessed, frightening, uncomfortable otherness of reading that causes him to rise.
And so we lose the reader – the real person – in the process.
Image Attribution Flickr User Blues and Oldshoewoman
