Before I entered junior high school, my parents sent me to reading camp. I do not know all of the diagnostic details explained to my parents, but I do remember regularly struggling to read “fast.” Years after junior and senior high, I find myself telling others, including my high school students, that I struggled to read fast enough to care about the fictional characters I encountered. Why read, if you cannot care about the people involved? That became the underlying dynamic of my high school reading–in literature, history and elsewhere.
This remembrance of things past surfaces today, while reading reviews of Gita Mehta’s novel, Raj. A friend just told me he is considering one of her other novels, A River Sutra, for his Humanities class’s India unit. While reading about this novel and her other books, I encountered the following excerpt:
Without having read her books, I cannot agree or disagree with this or any review, but the quoted sentence sparks a memory of my early reading experiences. The maroonballoon blog has become, especially this summer, a place to remember and recount the dynamics of my own reading and writing. Time–in the close sense of summer vacation, as well as the broader sense of my career–invites me to reflect on the basic dynamics and associations within my own composing and comprehending. Awareness of these personal phenomena equips me more robustly, as another colleague might put it, to understand and guide students’ reading and writing. A heightened awareness allows me to communicate more convincingly, “I’ve been there.” It also enables me to spot their struggles and deconstruct the confusion they might be experiencing.
Now, as an older person, I enjoy reading and writing, though still struggling to read “faster.” I look forward, for example, to reading A River Sutra. I also will be reading Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion in the recent Affordable Health Care Act decision. I just enjoy reading stuff–of various sorts.
Reading a variety is important for students; they need to be flexible readers. This wide exposure strengthens–i.e., makes more robust–their writing. In my case, for example, reading the first pages of Justice Roberts’ opinion helped me write my letter of protest to the GA Dept of Revenue. Writers write their reading. Seeing Roberts’ careful wording and conceptual coherence inspires me to greater precision. So it is with students younger than I .
Today’s title, by the way, is meant to echo the label some people use to identify the law officially passed as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (Public Law 111-148). I know this blog post title captures a primary principle in my reading experiences, and I believe it reflects the best instincts of most people, as they consider the long-term health of all Americans.
maroonballoon 