In my reading for this week, I was struck by how Roadville residents valued reading but hardly did any actual reading. I often heard that people prefer having been read to a actual reading because it’s better to have ready use of knowledge rather than go through the process of acquiring it.
When I was an undergraduate student, I off-handedly remarked to one of my advising professors that someday we would be able to upload books to our brain. He paused to consider what I had said, and I was completely shocked that he took me seriously. After some recollection, he said that he would hate to lose the joy out of sitting down and reading. I remember that he described his job, in a manner of speaking, as a professional reader.
Someone last week in class asked why do we do what we do? Many of us were silent, and many of us were very outspoken about why we don’t like what we do. It’s an important question that many of us pursuing academic work should ask ourselves again and again. Some days, I’m more confident than others about knowing why I do what I do, but after reading the chapter about Heath, it dawned on me that I enjoy reading, especially primary texts.
What I really like doing though is reading a text and then talking about it with other people. Like the people from Trackton—although they owned very few books—they traded ideas and debated interpretations in a group setting. Of course, relaxing with a good book on my own time is well and fine, but what we do is approach texts as a group and grapple with what they might mean. I initially thought that what they did in Trackton was very strange and unusual, and then I started thinking about it more carefully. It's not that unusual at all.
Talking about texts is rewarding in of itself. Writing about texts is also rewarding in of itself. However, it’s also useful for our students. While we can debate what materials to teach—those dead white men get much grief—I think what we like about our work is the community’s ability to keep reinterpreting texts.
Todd -
ReplyDeleteI love the sentiment you've expressed here. Encouraging and well said.
I would add - reading, writing, and then talking about reading and writing create a sense of community that few other activities can mimic. As I reread Heath this weekend it struck me, once again, how much more literacy has to do with community than "cognition."
I'm curious about the contrast that might have been struck between Heath's study - of communities of people doing what they seem to naturally do with texts - and Brandt's more empirical approach to understanding language in use. I'm wondering how you (and our class in general) received those two seemingly disparate approaches to finding out more about our uses of language...?
I agree TA! As teachers/aspiring teachers, we need to constantly ask ourselves why we want to teach, what our goals are, and how we can love what we do despite the (possible) restrictions.
ReplyDeleteI too would be sad to have books uploaded directly into my brain. On one level, it'd make grad school a heck of a lot less time consuming, and would increase our ability to consume texts at a rapid rate. On the other hand, one of the nice things about a book is taking time over it. I feel something would be lost if reading became too easy. We would really have to re-think a lot of things. In the mean time, I still view Kindles and Nooks with suspicion, encouraged by the ability to carry around thousands of books so easily, but not willing to give up my physical books.
Todd, I thought it was an interesting study also. It seemed that although Roadville residents were obsessed with the "ideas" of literacy, they were actually hardly ever engaging in authentic examples of reading/writing. It seems that the residents of Trackton, with their seemingly backwards ways, had an ongoing discourse at all times about community information.
ReplyDeleteSCD - I agree... It's almost like Google. It's almost too easy to find information now. It breeds us to be lazy when this information is gotten too easily. For example, when I was a little girl, I would look up words in my old red copy of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. I would highlight the word I had to look up. If I ever had to look up the same word again, I would put a tally mark beside it. I loved looking back through the dictionary to see what words I had learned from it over the years. Now, I have become lazy and opt for dictionary.com for help with words. I no longer have my reference, and I have become lazy at what I once prided myself on.
ReplyDelete