I've encountered those who insist on reading the end of a book first. I don't even listen to their rationale, because as someone who loves to read, studied literature in college, and written for publication, the thought of jumping to the conclusion before tackling the beginning is outright blasphemy. Or at the very least, just plain dumb.
So call me a dumb blasphemer, sort of.
I've been reading "The Art of Slow Reading" by Thomas Newkirk, a University of New Hampshire professor of English. He laments today's "speed curriculum," one in which reading tests are often timed, that students are no longer encouraged to slow down and develop the relationship between writer and reader.
I've read 132 of 197 pages, to be exact. But while looking something up in the index, I happened to flip to the epilogue entitled "Why Can't They Be Like We Were, Perfect in Every Way?" That line from "Bye, Bye Birdie" caught my attention, so I read the entire epilogue, 61 pages before I was supposed to.
It begins with a quotation from Mark Bauerlein's "The Dumbest Generation," a manifesto against video games, social media, and everything else high technology has wrought. In short, the wired-in generation is made up of supreme slackers who are too busy tweeting or "friending" people on Facebook to develop worthy intellectual interests like reading. I caught myself cheering out loud several times as I read it a few years ago.
But wait a minute, I thought, as I continued to read Newkirk's epilogue. He's bashing Bauerlein, not agreeing with him. "Adults ... dismiss out of hand the media interests and skills of this new generation ... view them as less cognitively demanding and antisocial. Invariably, these judgments are made by adults who have not engaged this media themselves."
Is this the same Thomas Newkirk who, on page two, states that, "to read slowly is to maintain an intimate relationship with a writer ... it means paying attention to the decisions a writer makes." How does Newkirk reconcile the instantly gratified, 140-characters-or-less crowd with those of us who savor words that are beautifully arranged on the page?
Newkirk goes on to explain in the epilogue that even as new story-telling technologies are developed, writers "must tell a story using detail, dialogue; she must create characters, conflict — skills as old as storytelling itself." In other words, high-tech storytellers still have to slow down and pay attention to what makes a great story.
By reading ahead in this book, even if by accident, I was forced to confront my place in this high-tech world. I refuse to text. I won't purchase an iPad, iPhone, or any gadget they've spawned. My cell phone's ring tone actually rings, it doesn't hum, chirp or chant. I have "notifications pending" on Facebook, and will for the foreseeable future. My "Call of Duty" is my sixth-grade classroom, not "the most anticipated (video) game of all time."
I need to stop my negative, knee-jerk reaction to the information age. I need to accept that technology is here to stay, and explore how to use it effectively in the classroom.
My students love to play with cell phones and other computerized gizmos they've grown up with. But when I've left them to their own devices, the products they produce with them leave much to be desired. I will take Thomas Newkirk's advice regarding reading instruction — "Take your time. Pay attention. Touch the words and tell me how they touch you" — and apply it to using technology in my classroom.
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John Edmondson is a teacher in Hampstead.
