I've been thinking a lot about reading. Two friends who are in danger of losing their sight, my days facing my laptop screen, and my evenings reading books have led me to these thoughts.
I can't remember when I didn't love reading. I still have some of my well-loved early childhood books, about Dutch babies and cabbages. I don't know why I had them; my family isn't Dutch in background, but maybe they came from the Dutch family up the street that I think of when I look at these very early readers. Comics helped too. I loved my Sunday School comics with Bible stories told visually as well as with words. I collected comics when I was in grades 2, 3, and 4. I had my favorites among the ten cent ones and the fifteen cent Classics were where I first learned about British novels. I now see my love of stories revealed by the combination of words and images as part of a cultural shift towards movies, tv, online multimedia, and graphic novels.
By the time I was in grade five I was a regular at the neighbourhood library, and a delighted recipient of "A Girl of the Limberlost" and "Anne" books from my grandmother, advised, I'm sure, by my mother. My mother has told me that on family vacations I was more likely to read than to play with others my age. I can remember my delight at trading comics, at borrowing books from my grandmother's friends on summer visits, and at keeping a book going at school for after homework was completed, and another going at home. My mother called me a "bookoholic" and I certainly was in constant and anxious need of reading material.
This paid off in school, as I used historical novels to help me understand and remember the history I studied. I loved English, both literature and composition, and that's what I studied in university. I was carefully discreet, while I was an undergrad, not to reveal my penchant for Harlequin Romances which I read to relieve stress; I could study till 9:00, then engage in two hours of undemanding reading with a guaranteed happy ending. It was less acceptable to my peers than excessive alcohol, but cheaper and more relaxing for me.
So I kept reading, and both indirectly and directy, learning about language, meaning, communication and audience needs. Teaching English as a Second Language to adult immigrants deepened my understanding and following the influence of my eventual husband led me to a broader reading path that added non-fiction and theory to my reading of high status fiction, poetry, romances and mysteries. I kept reading but I felt guilty because it was (made) clear to me that I often read when I should have been cooking, cleaning, or preparing more officiously detailed lesson plans. (My husband never denigrated my reading habits and kept feeding me book suggestions. He did, however, take over the cooking of meals, leaving me to reheating leftovers and cleaning up - a much more comfortable fit for me!)
I was lucky enough to get a job teaching in the Community College educational stream in Ontario when it was new and teachers were seen as the experts in educating and administrators as the servants of learning, there to support students and teachers. (Sadly that understanding is gone.) I got to teach students, who weren't there to study literature, poetry and fantasy short stories. My passionate belief in, and love of, the pleasure and learning that could be had from poetry and stories, plus freedom from the Canon, allowed me to teach individual student how to find what appealed to them, how to recognize and follow their own taste. We had a collection of Canadian poetry as a text, and half the poems looked at in class came from there, the other half were chosen by the students from any source including music lyrics, which we often played in class. I believed then and still believe, that people reading and thinking about poems that 'speak' to them is more important than knowing which poems they "should" like.
I also believe that studying the Canon and knowing about poetic forms and figures are essential for effective teaching. The way I avoided teaching "should" and "taste" was to teach forms and figures, with poems as examples. The students had to find poems, with, say, rhyme, and point out where the rhymen was and how it added to the meaning, or metaphor, or alliteration etc. I taught structure. With the fantasy short stories, I taught structure too, and figures, and Greek & Roman mythology and other reference sources. I believed I was passing on our literate culture and, by trying to help students understand the meaning and the sources of stories, that I was helping them learn to get pleasure and learning from stories.
I also taught business writing. And I loved trying to get information clearly presented in the right structure. The memo form held delight for me because of its clarity and formal structure; I could teach the form and even those who struggled with English could learn to use the form and present information clearly. The business report was an expanded version of the memo and teaching this pragmatic form of writing, the one more honoured in our culture and my institution, gave me a sense of usefulness and self-esteem.
It will come as no surprise, then, that after I started reading educational theory and pedagogical theories on how people learned to write, I began to focus on how people learn to read. I loved reading about the research and theories on learning writing, but I noticed that many other teachers of writing wanted the condensed version, or even the Coles Notes version; they didn't want to engage in a lot of reading. I could understand why. When someone writes, it's visible and there's a set of rules so you can point out what is wrong. (I'm not discussing how effective that is, or rather isn't, as a teaching approach. I'm just pointing out how accessible writing is.) teaching people to read, on the other hand, is much more complex for a variety of reasons.
When I read, it happens inside my head; nobody can see that activity. All they can see is that I'm looking at a page with text on it. I can be asked questions about what someone else thinks I should have got out of the text, but all that does is show whether I managed to read it the same way the tester did. Five minutes in any bookclub will make it clear that there is no identical replication of meaning in everybody's head, even though they are reading identically repicated text in identical books. We all read from our own context, and weave the words in front of us through our own mental and emotional landscapes, reaching our own unique understandings. This is true for factual material as well as fiction, as anyone who has ever read a textbook can attest.
I had already got this far when I went back to school to get my M.Ed. I ended up writing a QRP (Qualifying Research Paper - sort of a Masters thesis) on reading, my longest, deepest mental/emotional passion, hobby and professional skill. I called it, Seeking Signs of How to Live: a Woman's Web of Reading, and got both pleasure and learning from it. I discovered theories about reading that I had developed my own version of, and theories that broadened my understanding. I came to recognize that reading was a phenomenolgical as well as a mental/emotional experience. The size and smell of a book, the feel of the paper, the shape of the font, even the physical reading space and their personal reading history, all influenced the reader.
All the while, an almost invisible denial was about to push itself into my understanding. I had had students whom I was pretty sure were illiterate or close to illiterate. One of them never read the story we were studying before class, but was the fastest in the class at recognizing metaphors and references when the story was read aloud. He couldn't read visually, but he could read aurally. He could hear and understand. At Christmas he was gone, so I never learned any more about him, and his reading problem. I encountered many others, and came to believe that many of them were very bright, but there was some blockage when it came to recognizing letters and words on paper. I knew through my brother's experience, that it could be eyesight, but glasses, I believed, were the answer to that.
I had discovered, when I was a university student working one summer for an insurance company that used a numbering system for their files, that my eyes did weird things. The third time we had to pull the files to get back into a correct order, I went to see an optomatrist. My eyes sometimes reversed numbers, so I would 'see' "1 2 4 3 5" rather than what was actually there: "1 2 3 4 5". I took this as a minor problem that partially explained my struggles with spelling, and didn't worry about it. When my daughter was struggling in the early grades, we had her tested, and discovered she was dyslexic. I began to read about dyslexia (irony intended) and came to realize that the identically printed pages of books were being read by eyes that didn't see in identical manners.
We all see the text differently and we all read the text from different positions, different background knowledge and life experiences. And these differences have been exacerbated by the rapidly changing communication environment, which includes different surfaces and environments for reading, different purposes, different audiences, different expectations and different possibilities. Everybody, but especially teachers, need to look at what we know about how people read and what possibilities are available to us in this era where the computer-based environment has become dominant.
More soon.
