On Reading
Probably the most traditional of all the traditional focuses in an English classroom is learning how to read. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a grade-abated makerspace or listening to a lecture on 13th-century poetry; it all starts with how well you can decode text and understanding its meaning.
This course forces you to practice reading as a slow and deliberate act. That’s why you have posts telling you what to do, instead of a traditional 42-minute lesson. It’s why those posts are much more complicated than a handout or embedded video. It’s why we don’t review directions and other materials at the front of the room1.
You must dedicate yourself to reading in here, and it has to happen well before you’re studying novels and poetry and all the other expected stuff of an English course. It’s about the skill of reading. You learn by doing — “We learn what we do,” Dewey said — and you only get better at a skill through practice.
What I also know after a few years of doing this — first through traditional, performative lessons, then through student-centered lessons, and now through makerspace work — is that you will seek out shortcuts when it comes to more difficult reading. It’s how we’re all wired: If everything else is equal, we look for the fastest route to the goal. So if you’re asked to read a poem or novel closely, you just might hop onto the Internet and ask it to help you.
In here, there is no summary of the instructional posts. You have to read them, and you have to read them carefully, or you will not know what to do. You won’t improve the skill of reading, either, and the deficit will spiral. The same is true of guides and handouts. They are the teaching, which means they can’t be treated as checklists or overviews. The Pareto Project guide, for instance, is written to teach you slowly and deliberately about many things related to the project itself.
If this is tough at first, it’s because you need to get stronger. It gets easier as you gain strength. You have to develop more than a habit of mind; you also need some sinew and muscle to move you through the work.
On Habits of Mind
Now, the tone of that first section is mostly matter-of-fact. There’s no judgment or disappointment, just encouragement to tough it out until you get better at the all-important skill of close reading.
The tone in this section will shift slightly to be more critical, both as an explicit model of how to use tone and because you need something more critical2. These instructional posts exist to help you strengthen your reading skills, yes, but they also exist to fight a particularly dangerous reflex: learned helplessness.
Learned helplessness isn’t unique to you, your age group, the year 2017, etc. It’s human nature to want things to be easier than they are, and it’s human nature to adapt to what we’re given. The educational system was built to spoon-feed students information, and it will take many more decades of reform to undo that ethos. Students are used to the spoon.
There’s no spoon here3. You need to be resilient and tough. You need to be okay with the feeling of being a little lost. Everything has been built for you so that hard work and focus will teach you what you need — from how to read more carefully to how to get organized to how to write essays.
Learned helplessness makes confusion and uncertainty much worse. But if you feel lost in this room, you can trust that there’s a route forward. There’s a map. There are even people who will read the map with you. They will help you figure things out.
But they won’t read for you. They won’t do the work for you. You have to help yourself first.
In old maps of the uncharted world, cartographers would sometimes use the phrase terra incognita to indicate the unknown. There’s a bit of a myth that this sometimes took the form of “Here be dragons,” which is, even if it’s untrue, still much more interesting:
It meant that there were dangers in those unknown waters. In here, the sections you haven’t charted yet have no monsters in them. Or if there are monsters — I probably shouldn’t assume; they say that makes monster food out of you and me — you’ll know how to fight them. You’ll have allies.
The point: If it’s true that some of you have learned helplessness, you can also unlearn it. You just have to be willing to struggle.
While you think about that, here’s a video remix of the Reading Rainbow theme song from PBS:
Well, that and the fact that we don’t have a front of the room. ↩
It’s also important to show you that “critical” doesn’t mean “insulting.” Pointing out flaws can be ameliorative, which means to make something better. ↩
I’d rather this not be an allusion to The Matrix and, instead, an allusion to the allegory of the long spoons. Either one works, though. ↩