by Terry Heick
We tend to teach reading in a very industrial way.
We focus on conducting “tools” and “strategies” for children to “give” a meaning to a text. To “dismantle the text”. Finding the “goal of the author” – to bounce between a main idea, and the details which “support” the main idea, as if reading was a kind of thing on which students occur by chance during a purely academic trip.
And we push the illusion of “otherness” of a text by promoting the lie they simply need to decode this, recognize this and analyze this and that, and they will be able to “read”.
While can Work well to underline the work whose real literacy requires, there is hardly to say why students are looking for more and more brighter, more visual, social and dynamic media. Because not only are these media forms entertaining effortlessly, but they rarely require a significant investment of themselves.
And it is this type of connection that makes reading – or any other consumption of media elsewhere – alive and vibrant and whole. When the readers are younger, there is a natural “giving” between the reader and the text, their imagination always raw and green and lively.
But as readers age, there is less to give – and more need that the texts are contextualized differently.
See also: 25 self-guided reading responses for fiction and non-fiction
The spirituality of literacy
There is a spirituality involved in reading (really) which is difficult to promote only in class. (In other words, not at home, during social or recreational events, but only at school, where it will always be a kind of bare.)
Cognizing, a student “has meaning” of a text through a perfectly personal scheme-that is to say through symbols and models and enthusiasm and suffering and meaning in their own life. Students cannot simply be encouraged to “bring” and their own experiences to a text; They must realize that any understanding of the text is almost immediately disintegrated if they do not do so.
Without this model of internal reflection where students recognize the madness of reading – where they are invited to merge two realities (the text and themselves) – then this process will always be industrial. Mechanical.
A question of literacy and “preparation for the career”.
Other.
It is interesting to note that we gave students mechanical tools which, even well used, can break the text beyond recognition, then we wonder why they do not appreciate Shakespeare or Berry or Faulkner or Dickinson.
We try to divorce the reader of the reading.
The nuance and complexity of literature are its magic. But students do not like reading raised in high -overthrows, image, in form, socialized and interaction, with selfless and terrifying interaction.
The real reflection of literacy requires is horrible! To examine closely who we are and what we believe to know by studying another parallel examination of another human being who put his reflection in the form of a novel, a new, a poem or an essay! You are not only “reading” the thoughts of another person, but you pour out in their marrow.
No wonder they fail.
Most readers are already working on a disadvantaged position, where they consider themselves not only as distinct from the text (false), but in a way more in time and priority, as if they were brought to a text to see if it is worth their time.
And so they only sit with him long enough to see if he be entertained them, Neglect the most fundamental principle of literacy: interdependence.
The irony of reading
In reading, you just discover something you have always been part. Instincts you have always had. The circumstances that you have been afraid of for a long time. Events, ideas and ideas that you had difficulty put in words but that you just found right on the page.
Your brain cannot understand it otherwise.
Compared to media experiences, most modern students easily revolve towards – Instagram, Facebook, Epic Fail YouTube Channels, video games – reading does not have the immediate show that can catalyze the experience. Something that lights them inside at an instinctive basic level, and will prevent them from having to go further.
Reading is not a show. (Not at the beginning in any case.) There is not to make them lol. (Although it may.) But they often turn the page hoping to be passively entertainment. Ironically, reading is not “built” for what we use in education. Reading is extremely personal but in education, we often focus on mechanics rather than people and strategies instead of the living and the breathing that occurs all around us.
Reading implies the process and tools and strategies, but it is not these things.
Reading ecology
It would be easy to blame the ecology of all this. To suggest that Huckleberry Finn was only interesting because Minecraft was not there to compare it. Or to blame social media for having to distract everyone.
And all of this is one of them. Their habits and access to complex texts and personal affinities are important. There is an ecology that schools, students and texts and literacy operate – an interdependence – this is where we choose to honor it or not. Much of this is much greater than you and me as teachers.
But that does not excuse us on our own failures in the way we teach reading in schools. We give students process for writing and tools For reading without stopping to humanize the whole effort. Mechanized literacy has all kinds of disturbing implications.
You and me – We teach students to overvalue their own opinions when they are still often baseless and uninformed, which is like teaching them to read without helping them really understand why they should read.
We do not help them navigate in blessed, intimidating and clumsy otherness of the reading that increases it.
And so we lose the reader – the real person – in the process.
