Re: How do YOU read
Judy (diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu)
Thu, 14 Dec 1995 15:49:06 -0500
I learned to read when my older sister started first grade and took up the
role of teacher, of a sort, with me, hitting me on the head whenever I
read WRONG. I remember reading competitively, as Michael Glassman mentioned,
traveling up and down a hill of isolated words on the blackboard as fast as
possible. I don't remember reading out of school until after my mother died
(I was 9) and I became then a voracious reader and authentic nerd, 'though
there were different labels then. I read fiction, until I became an
adolescent poet and read poetry, fiction, miscellaneous symbolists and
existentialists, literature from China (Lao Tze; the T'ang poets, some
elaborate, steamy, incestuous narratives of the Empirical [sp?] court),
Russian authors, Thomas Merton - I could, of course, go on. I didn't
read systematically until AFTER my BA and some out-of-school education.
I think I began to get that there was a way of reading other than my
own when I took a summer Language and Education class from Susan Philips
who branded me (as it seemed at the time) a "creative thinker." Then
literature on literacy, literary theory, Feminist theory, Soviet psychology,
bits of cognitive science, lots of ethnographies, research studies, again,
one could of course go on. But I have to discipline myself to read
systematically.
Judy Diamondstone
Rutgers University
Graduate School of Education