Well, Why Read?

On Elision

New words tend to get stuck in my head. After reading Perdido Street Station, it was the word “desultory,” which appears several times in the novel¹. The first time I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, it was “tentacling,” which appears in the “Learning to Read” excerpt sometimes taught in schools. And I got “ineffable” from this strange short story by Ambrose Bierce, where it appears in the last moments of Peyton Farquhar’s surreal experience².

 

For two weeks in October of 2017, it was the word “elide” (and its noun form, “elision”), which I encountered in this Deadspin article about the NFL.  It means to omit, but it also implies a blurring of separate ideas into one. In that NFL article, it’s used to mean a little of both:

Lockhart went on to say the question of punishment was “a moot point” as it pertains to the Cowboys, since none of their players has protested during the anthem. But this elides the explicit threat Jones made to discipline any players who did. The threat is as pernicious as actively following through on any punishment—and in some cases, just as effective.

The author argues that the explicit threat and actual punishments have been elided. Most of us have encountered that sort of elision. It happens when someone wants to avoid or flatten complicated ideas, or when they are unaware of nuances. It’s a good word for that sliver of human nature.

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How To Get Your Mind to Read

When we talk about reading as part of learning, we elide the evolving complexity of the act. I’ve written a lot about it as part of the instructional posts that make up this website. That’s how I’ve worked through my own perspective on reading, since this is the first Humanities makerspace; it’s why this explanation of what we do, written for a wider audience than just students, talks as much about teaching literature as it does about how feedback should work. Under the section called “Rumor Mongering,” the overlap is explicit:

The rumor that I don’t assign/teach/like literature is easy to trace, though, which is important. I teach Paul Graham’s “Age of the Essay,” and I make no secret of how much I agree with his conclusions. I also agree with John Holt’s idea of what makes children hate reading. I don’t think their perspectives negate the teaching of literature, but they are complex and uncomfortable ideas that challenge long-held assumptions about English Language Arts. They force us to talk about resonance and efficacy and technology and neuroplasticity, among many other elements. It’s far simpler to build a straw man — or an English kind of Scotsman — than to grapple with, e.g., Graham’s logic, which forced me many years ago to realize that a syllabus in the Humanities might need to look different.

(It might also be worth a moment’s consideration that the straw man built from my desire to teach literature differently doesn’t really match up with, you know, the guy who was interviewed in Harper’s.)

Reading doesn’t just mean reading novels, just like writing doesn’t just mean writing essays. That elides the nuances of the most nuanced skills we have as human beings: how to communicate our experiences with each other. And while we can see, in Common Core and other systems approaches, the push toward that perspective, we still seem to talk most often about what books we read. When I say to people, inside and outside of the teaching profession, that I teach English, that’s the first question: “What books do you teach?” When a new administration arrives, that’s the first question: “What books do you teach?” At parent-teacher conferences, parents lead with their own memories of reading The Catcher in the Rye — or not reading it, actually, since that’s more often the case.

Here’s why the complexities matter:

That pieces, published in 2017 in The New York Times, argues that we might be neglecting an important element of reading in traditional education:

All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader. Consider “I promised not to play with it, but Mom still wouldn’t let me bring my Rubik’s Cube to the library.” The author has omitted three facts vital to comprehension: you must be quiet in a library; Rubik’s Cubes make noise; kids don’t resist tempting toys very well. If you don’t know these facts, you might understand the literal meaning of the sentence, but you’ll miss why Mom forbade the toy in the library.

Knowledge also provides context. For example, the literal meaning of last year’s celebrated fake-news headline, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President,” is unambiguous — no gap-filling is needed. But the sentence carries a different implication if you know anything about the public (and private) positions of the men involved, or you’re aware that no pope has ever endorsed a presidential candidate.

To learn to read, you need to read more than novels. You need to read widely and frequently on many different subjects, because that develops the contextual knowledge necessary for understanding. It’s a content-dependent skill. Decontextualizing the skill damages the skill, and I agree with the author that “the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design.” It’s not enough to study the skill of reading; you have to ask students to read a lot, too.

That’s why a post on this instructional site might ask you to read about Möbius strips and Thelonious Monk. It’s not random or arbitrary; it’s an attempt to expose you, while you read instruction and feedback, to a wide range of ideas and texts. More than that, it’s an attempt to send you off to read the Times, New York Magazine, and sites like Deadspin. That’s how you build the necessary framework to read at all — the “hooks” that Paul Graham talks about, the ones that help you gain knowledge at an exponential rate.

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Dilapidated Rooftops

You should, of course, read novels like 1984 and The Catcher in the Rye. I really cannot shout any more loudly from these dilapidated rooftops that literature is the best way to develop empathy, and that empathy is the most important skill. Sophomores almost always read Shakespeare and Bradbury. Juniors almost always read Orwell and Salinger. (We try to read some non-white, non-male literature, too, since we can’t just study dead white men. But dead white guys make up a lot of the canon.)

To be more precise about it, those books are almost always assigned. Whether you read them or not depends on such a wide range of factors that only by testing and quizzing could I hope to hold you accountable. Reading the novel to you might work, but that’s no longer about you reading; it’s now about you listening, and even then, how could I peer into your head and determine if you’re engaged? I’d still have to give you reading quizzes, homework checks, etc., until “reading” turns into a nightmare of forced compliance. That is why so few Americans leave high school wanting to read, as that Times article argues, but it’s more depressingly why teachers lie to themselves about what works.

“How to Get Your Mind to Read” is also an example of why you find so many hyperlinks in an instructional post like this. I built the idea of interstitial teaching around the Internet, which was never my first instinct as a teacher; it’s the way of the world, however, whatever my romanticized and outdated notions of the Humanities might have been. The Times uses hyperlinks, because hyperlinks have replaced the Works Cited page, the parenthetical citation, and, most importantly, this concept:

You might think, then, that authors should include all the information needed to understand what they write. Just tell us that libraries are quiet. But those details would make prose long and tedious for readers who already know the information. “Write for your audience” means, in part, gambling on what they know.

Ah, but Willingham provides hyperlinks because he can’t gamble anymore on what a reader knows. The audience is too broad, too diverse, and often too uninformed, even for a piece in the Times. He has to link, again and again, to what he’s referencing. There are six links in his short article. In an edition of the Times from 20 years ago, there would be none, and not just because the Internet was in its infancy. The audience would have been expected to know what the author meant, or to head off to a library to find out.

Hyperlinks break down that informational barrier, but using hyperlinks is a skill you have to be taught: how to organize open tabs, what to pay attention to, how many branches to follow in an increasingly ramiform essay or post. That’s why I put a dozen or more links in each post. It invites students to practice a critical and rarely taught kind of reading.

One important note: I’m not quizzing or testing you, so the expectation isn’t that you click every single link, read every single linked text, and somehow internalize all of it; it’s that you develop the habit of mind to follow the connections between ideas and to chase down the informational context you lack.

You can fill in those gaps, after all, whether the hyperlink is provided or not. I linked to “An Occurrence at Owl Street Bridge” at the start of this post, both to invite you to read it (it’s a seminal piece of American literature) and as the source of the word “ineffable” in my vocabulary. But I didn’t link to a definition of the word. You can do that yourself. It takes seconds to right-click a word, search Google, and find a workable definition. There are extensions in most browsers that speed up the process even more.

It takes slightly longer to find the context necessary for a concept that doesn’t have a simple definition — the concept of umwelt, for instance, which has sometimes made its way into the calendars for this course. Use Google, read Wikipedia, look at the word’s use on a popular webcomic. Now you have knowledge about psychology and programming and Internet humor that you lacked 20 minutes before.

It’s not just the Times that wants you to read this way. The world does, in the sense that discourse happens now interstitially and online. Global connectivity means that you need a lot of knowledge in order to understand what you read. Tony Wagner wrote about it as part of innovation — in a book called Creating Innovators, which is often assigned to educators — in a “Letter to a Young Innovator”:

Become an anthropologist to better understand the economic, social, and cultural influences that promote or inhibit the changes you are trying to make. Read history and good novels to understand culture and character. Ask lots of questions, and observe carefully.

That’s exactly it: Novels teach us history and culture and character, but you need to be an anthropologist to understand why all that stuff matters. You need knowledge. You need to be a polymath. And that means reading everything.

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Reading to Learn: Interstitial Instruction

In one of the opening-day letters I send to students and parents, there is a nested articulation of this idea. It is worth copying over some of that letter here to illustrate further why reading in this particular way matters so much.

The following quotation comes from the Head of School at Wooster:

[S]creens and the internet are causing us all to slowly lose the ability to do what is called “deep reading.” In the meantime, I’m going to keep asking you all to give me your attention in this way: Reading deeply, and then thinking deeply and reflecting. Questions are a part of the process too, and I am happy to answer them at any time. Even if you don’t agree with the content, or it makes you slightly uncomfortable, just the act of giving it your attention, and thinking deeply about it, is good for your brain. In this age of distraction and sound bites, it gives me great joy to help our community members retain and strengthen the gift of deeper reading.

This is the crux of why I go to such lengths to flip instruction in this particular fashion. We’ve known for a long time now that the Internet is shallowing our brains — Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is one of the best journalistic books on the subject — but I want to suggest that the problem is in how we use the Internet, not the Internet itself. I also believe we all need help “retain[ing] and strengthen[ing] the gift of deeper reading.” As Mr. Byrnes put it: “[J]ust the act of giving it your attention, and thinking deeply about it, is good for your brain.”

This is why I write to students. Put simply, it’s good for your brains to read this sort of thing, even if it makes you uncomfortable and takes some time. It’s the counterpart to the work we put into, say, Hamlet, or the work we’ll do peer-editing college essays. The mental muscles for each type of reading are connected, but they are distinct. They all need strengthening.

As Mr. Byrnes puts it, I hope to push back against “distraction and sound bites” — to force all of us to look more deliberately and carefully at student learning than the usual online gradebook invites us to. That’s why the district has invested so heavily in providing education through technology — not just to weather the pandemic, but because this is the way discourse now functions. We must try to elevate that discourse while strengthening our own focus.

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1. It appears to have been a favorite of China Miéville. His book of short stories, Looking for Jake, is in our classroom, if you find yourself interested in his work. There’s a reason they call it weird fiction, though; be prepared for some very strange ideas. ↩

2. The twist ending of this story is emulated fairly often in fiction of all kinds. There is also a movie version that won an Academy Award that we sometimes watch in this classroom. ↩