Reading In The Schools

“Thus my efforts throughout this book to dissociate reading from academic life, not just because teachers and professors make reading so much more dutiful and good-for-you than it ought to be but also because the whole environment of school is simply alien to what longer form reading has been for almost all of its history.”

— Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction,, 109

In the first class of the day I became anxious that management might look in the door and wonder what the hell I was doing.

The students sat, some on the heater, one on the floor, a few at desks. Each was reading a book for the most part. Occasionally one checked a phone but got back to reading pretty well given that I teach at-risk kids who have been bounced from their regular schools and most of whom come to me admitting that they hate to read.

I wasn't anxious the about the students. I worried management would take me to task.

I was sitting at a student desk, one leg crossed over the other, a book in hand, and had been reading for fifteen minutes, ever since I had helped Frank understand the word agape which had come up in his book. I had read ten pages of Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction, looking up after each paragraph to scan for kids having or making trouble. There was none of that, so I had kept reading until anxiety interrupted me.

I haven't had the best relationship with management during my tenure. Imagining some manager looking in, I could hear them asking why wasn't I moving about the room checking in with kids. How could I know what they were doing if I wasn't teaching?

I almost wasn't teaching, but that was because I had set the structure of the class and was allowing them to learn. I got them into books today and over the last three months. Once they start reading, my job is to just keep things going. The only teaching left to do was to be a reader too.

It's a safe bet that management would see things in another way. That's the way it goes in schools. Management is paying me to do something and there I was looking like I was doing nothing much at all. Observing a class for a few minutes is no way to understand what is really going on. It takes understanding all that we have been doing in that classroom since September. The room full of silent readers doesn't just happen. Kids aren't wired for that. None of us are. It's a learned behavior, one that I've worked to help them learn, and from this they learn more than I could ever teach.

I tamped down the anxiety by remembering that I would hear the beeper on the outside door should any managers come by. Then I could get up and act like I was doing something management would appreciate. Or maybe I would stick to what I know is true and let the kids read. I scanned the room again, saw that everyone was still reading, and went back to my book. We all have so much left to learn and so little time to read.

Reading List

Alan Jacobs, in The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction makes a case against reading goals, speed-reading, and the rush to have read. I nodded reading all that but also thinking about my reading list and why I keep and post it publicly.

I keep a reading list in part because my memory is all too fallible. I've read books twice because seeing the book again I've found it terribly interesting I dig in, dogged by a feeling of familiarity, but not giving into it for a few hundred pages in. This doesn't happen often, but more than once is enough.

Often, I half recall some idea, character, scene, or some such and want to revisit it. This happened this summer when I remembered a cogent argument about unions but couldn't remember where it was from. Going over my list, I found Richard Russo's The Identity Thief and remembered him discussing summer work alongside his father. I found the book, reread that section, and felt all kinds of better.

Beyond memory, I like knowing how many books I've read in a year though I have no goal. The number simply pushes me toward a habit of mind, a habit of reading. I'm on my fifty-ninth book of the year, a number meaningless on any scale, but useful to me. It's not objective since two of those books were single essays packaged as books, two were graphic novels, and seven or eight were young-adult books. Someone else's fifty-nine books would be more or fewer pages and that couldn't matter less.

But why publish the list on the web?

As a kid I was hooked on end-of-the-year TV shows that rewound the news, songs, movies, and deaths of the year. I didn't care about the ball drop but I was all over the year in review. There aren't enough of those kinds of shows any more. There are, however, plenty of reading lists marking the turn of the calendar. Major news outlets and magazines come out with best-of-the-year lists, but I'm more into the blogs on which individuals list their favorite books, the ones they are still thinking about. I eat those lists up and so I wanted one of my own. I hope that it proves interesting to someone.

My list is nothing spectacular save for one thing: it is my reading list and a peak inside my brain. This is where I'm back to Alan Jacobs's "commitment to one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim" (Pleasures, 15). I read what interests me and one thing leads to another. There's a lot of nonfiction on my list because that's what I tend to favor. There is nocourse of study there because I don't read to elevate myself though I like to read things from which I will learn. Luckily, I can learn from just about any book.

I'm a better man when I'm reading and keeping a reading list. It's the act of reading that does it. Reading helps me reflect, consider others, and find solitude. I've been known to take the solitude too far, withdrawing from family and work in favor of some written world, but more often than not reading makes me a better person.

What have you been reading? Leave a comment below with your reading list, top five, or current book. Other than a book, I can't think of anything I would rather read.

Nightly To Walden

I have never been to Walden Pond.

That confession is an easy admission. I've admitted maybe too many things on this blog but few bother me. This next one though leaves me feeling uneasy and I worry about people finding out. I may have kind of led people to believe otherwise. And so I pause a moment before telling you this:

I have never read Henry David Thoreau's Walden.

It's one of those books I should have already read, that I should know, and that should be a foundation for me. Yet, I haven't read it. I've started it several times and I've read sections of it for a class way back in college, enough so that I wrote a good paper about it. I've read of it many times, admiring the book, the writer, and the writers writing about it. All of which is to say that I know Walden by proxy but have never read the damn thing and every time I start reading it (with nothing but the best intentions), I get distracted and intimidated by the task. I quit. I quit. I quit every single time because it feels like too much.

So I'm reading it now one page per night.

Each night before turning out the light, I open Walden and read one page. I follow the last sentence onto the next page but stop as soon as I can. The next night I re-read from the top of the page (or the bottom of the previous page) and end when I have finished that one page.

It is slow going but what else should a trip to Walden Pond be but slow and deliberate?

At this rate I don't expect to finish Walden until 2019. I hope I make it all the way to the end and maybe turn back to page one and begin again. If nothing else, I hope to enjoy the journey taken slowly as if on foot from Concord to Fitchburg. Going slow, I want to remember that I've long wanted to make my home in a tiny shack near water. For one page a night that's just what I'll be doing. If you need me, I'll be at Walden Pond. Stop by any time.

Choose The World You're In

Austin Kleon wrote a piece today worth reading entitled The World's More Interesting With You In It. The gist is that we are too eager to delete/unfollow people and all too willing to take ourselves out of the world. It got me thinking about having left social media.

I left Facebook and Twitter in August and have not gone back. Kleon writes, "Don’t disappear on us. Don’t cancel your own subscription. Stick around. Keep going. The world is more interesting with you in it." He's not necessarily encouraging me to return to social media, but I've been told that there are people who miss me some on those platforms. Should I try to make Facebook and Twitter better places? Is there value in me doing that?

The problems with Facebook and Twitter are that I don't respect their corporate values and they don't provide me sufficient value for my investment. I don't "connect" with "friends" and "followers" as much having left those networks but I'm working on that finding ways to connect with friends and make new friends. I've only made the slightest headway but it's a work in progress.

Withdrawing from the world might be a mistake though I've read a couple good books that say otherwise. Thoreau, who famously moved away from the world but also stayed in contact with it is a model of how to move in a direction that goes against or perpendicular to that which most everyone is following seems to me a very good idea. We have to choose our worlds carefully.

I'm happy to have deleted myself from Twitter and Facebook. I'm happy to no longer be in that world because it was a source of more unhappiness than contentment. Here in the real world I withdraw often in order to create something that I then bring back to the world, to others and, I hope, make this world a little bit more interesting.