January 2007

Jenny D is doing/has done her dissertation on the writing/reading correlation. What makes better readers of 4th graders?

I don’t teach 4th graders anymore, but “higher writing/medium reading” and “medium writing/higher reading” seem to be good ways to go. Of course, so is “lower writing/medium reading,” but you know that I as a writing teacher am not going there.

It looks like, according to my reading of what she says, that the reason higher writing/ higher reading doesn’t work is the teacher doesn’t have as much time to focus on each piece of work. The class is doing more things related to writing/reading, but in about the same amount of time as everyone else.

Does this say anything for my classes? What is the focus? What should the focus be?

I think that I ought to think about examining fewer samples in 1301, since we do so much writing there. A single excellent example or perhaps one excellent and one mediocre piece, with a discussion of the problems with the mediocre piece, might serve my students better.

I’ve rewritten my syllabus for 1301, but not for 1302 yet. What should I do with it? I like it just about where it is. We’re doing one novel, two plays, a bunch of short stories, and a lot of poems. And maybe one novella. But we’re only writing four papers.

Just a thought, since it was on a similar tangent.

From Reading in Bed ed. by Steven Gilbar

“Books” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“College education is the reading of certain books which the common-sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already accumulated.”

“As whole nations have derived their culture form a single book- as the Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large parts of Europe…. [P]erhaps, the human mind would be a gainer, if all the secondary writers were lost- say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon…”

“Reading at Walden” by Henry David Thoreau

“I believe that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature…”

“Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics. …to keep up and add to his English …. is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for this purpose.”

Ouch. And I appear to have lost all my other Thoreau quotes. I don’t know that I want to go back and redo them, so these may be all you see.

Turns out, I had my Thoreau quotes. But I didn’t become aware of that until I had gone back over his essay and recopied the ones I liked the best. Then, as I was going through and changing things to italics so that my comments were clearly differentiated from quotes, I found that my “Emerson” entry was really a Thoreau entry, but with the wrong title. DANG IT.

I’ll probably go fix it, since I went to fix Thoreau. Surely Emerson deserves equal time?

The NEA says, “The biggest decline is among people 18 to 24 years old — 28 percent.”

Is anyone surprised by that?

Kristin Kovacic, who teaches writing at the Creative and Performing Arts High School and Chatham College, said ….”My hunch is that people no longer have the habit of mind to be readers. Reading should be a passion. You can’t force anyone to be passionate. You have to build that habit.”

But one of the specific things the article mentions is that people are surfing the internet. I do on the internet what I used to do at the library. I look up information. I even read articles, magazines, newspapers, and books online.

I still buy books because I am a bibliophile, but I buy less at full price.

Do you think most people are reading more on the net? I certainly am. And I am a voracious reader.

Pew says that 77% of people in this age group (18-29) use the internet. Maybe they are getting their reading fixes, even their books read, online.

In a different article, Pew says, “…6% of the entire U.S. adult population (internet users and non-users alike) have created blogs. That’s one out of every 20 people. And 16% of all U.S. adults (or one in six people) are blog readers.”

So, if 77% of 18-29 year olds are on the internet, don’t you think a high percentage of them would read blogs? I read blogs for entertainment and relaxation, as well as for information and education.

Why didn’t NEA look at people reading on the net?

Elissa Minor Rust wrote about short fiction and why people don’t read it.

I think that people don’t read short stories for several reasons.

First, people may never have read a fun short story in their lives. What they get in school is literature and most literature, in my experience anyway, is depressing. Who wants to be depressed? So, if they’ve never enjoyed reading a short story, they won’t look for short stories to enjoy.

Second, short stories are much harder to write well. There is less room for error, less leeway in the importance of each word/line/paragraph.

Third, short stories are very dense. They’re not like a sitcom, where the embibee already knows the characters and the relationships of each person, with one or two new walk-ins permitted in the show. Instead, the embibee of a short story has to winnow out relationship information from tiny snippets like “my frog grandmother.” Okay, that lady didn’t like that grandmother. Or maybe she did and the grandmother taught her all about frogs… Short stories may be short, but they are not simple. And for entertainment, simple is better.

EMR’s article found during a Google search on “Americans read.” Random fortuitousness.