By continuing to read.
Apparently, reading a book to the end is a getting to be a novel thing. Yikes, the norms around reading are dire if
the National Council of Teachers of English in 2022 announced its support for the idea to “decenter book reading” in English language arts education. Instead, it suggests “critically examining digital media and popular culture” as more worthwhile.
This was according to a September 2024 New York Times article by Tim Donahue. Seems like the baby got thrown with the bath water, if books are being cast aside for some punchy content from the mobile web. Even if it is at normal cadence and not presented at 1.5X or whatever settings the algo-corporations are allowing for. There’s reasons why I’m still ingesting journalism and literature in the written word format rather than listening to a video or podcast.
I find it incomprehensible that 86% of students do not read for fun every day. When I first read that data point, I [mistakenly] read that the 14% who read everyday was for people of all ages, not students alone. I imagine that the supermajority of all students are K-12 students and people in undergraduate or graduate programs, and a fraction of students are non-traditional students. So, I’d guess that the vast majority of students are under 26 years old.
I’ve been recognizing how inappropriate our cell phone usage is as it is actually a social and chemical dependency. Cell phones are the cigarettes of the 21st Century.
Over the last 20 years, the internet has introduced me to countless books and authors such that my reading has grown and stays nourished by the plentiful books published. As I’ve read author interviews, book reviews, commentary, reflection, excerpts from new releases, and blogs resuscitating out of print works, I have become a better reader because of the internet, not worse. Some evenings and days I have longer stretches on a computer or cell phone rather than picking up a book or tending to some other activity in life. When the bookmarking sit del.icio.us still functioned, my best tag clusters were of authors and books and hotlinks to what else I learned about stories, plot lines, characters, settings, and writers. I was bummed when del.icio.us shuttered so suddenly, and my cursory glances at online archives do not seem to include those bookmarks. That loss of the servers for that freemium account is some of what compels me to write more on this blog, since the WordPress servers are my domain, and not a freemium.
When I was first taking a toddler to storytime, Walter, the children’s librarian, said that reading picture books to babies and young children cultivates an unconscious fascination for reading. 9 years later, that innate hunger is still voracious in them. After spotting turkeys by the side of the road yesterday, we talked about the how-to-draw library books that I’ve borrowed in the past: horses and dinosaurs among them. In the coming seasons, I’d like to practice sketching and repeating how to illustrate turkeys, bison, and whales with some step-by-step workbooks borrowed from the local library system.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 