Reading has always been a huge part of my life. I can remember reading my first book in
kindergarten, and being proud that I could already read at that age. As I got older, I used reading to escape a
rather unhappy home life. I grew up with
an alcoholic father, and I read to escape from an unpleasant reality. I remember that in fifth grade, my home life
started to affect my success in school.
My teacher had me tested for learning disabilities, though at that point
in (ancient) history, we had a more unpleasant name for such problems. The testing brought out that I was reading
three grades above my level, but my math skills were two grades below. This was a revelation for me, because I
learned that there was nothing wrong with me; I just had certain strengths and
weaknesses, and if I wanted to be successful I had to take those into account.
My favorite genre as a kid was fantasy literature. Today, when I want to read something for
pleasure, I’ll still grab a good fantasy novel, the longer and more complex the
better. When I was in 7th
grade I read the Lord of the Rings, and it blew me away. I remember crying when Gandalf fell (what a
wonderful, caring father figure for a pre-teen with a lousy dad), and crying
again when he came back. I read every
kind of fiction I could get my hands on.
I remember once as a kid, my family had a Super Bowl party, and I sat
with the group and watched the game, but only intermittently as I looked up
from the book on my lap, which was much more interesting to me than the game.
So, I was always a strong reader, and all through high
school and college I took this for granted.
A few years after graduating from college I entered a graduate program
in linguistics and my confidence in my reading skills was suddenly severely
challenged. I was reading theoretical,
abstract and complex papers (which were written by great linguists but frankly
mediocre writers!), and for the first time I had difficulty reading. I had to read papers several times to even absorb
the main idea, and even then the minutiae of the theoretical reasoning would
often escape me. I started feeling
anxious and apprehensive when I had to read a paper. Because I was feeling apprehensive, I had a
hard time concentrating and would drift off; each time that I drifted off, I
would take that as evidence that I was not smart enough to be in the class, and
would feel more anxious and upset, which would then lead to a loss in
concentration, creating a downward spiral.
I did not want to reveal this weakness to anyone, especially my advisor
(as I had found that when I revealed such things, they ended up in my annual
academic review!), so I felt I had to deal with this alone. Today, looking back, I can really see the
difficulty created by negative emotions; it gives me a little more empathy when
I talk to students who are having reading difficulties. When a reader gets caught in that spiral,
each difficulty seems like a failure and a reason to blame oneself, when it
doesn’t have to be.
I was eventually able
to manage the anxiety and get the work done, but it took practice and
experience. As I read more and more, the
jargon, styles of writing and reasoning became more familiar, and I was able to
do the work that needed to be done. One
strategy I often used when reading difficult articles was to write notes in the
margins, one or two for each paragraph. This
helped me to break down the ideas and help me process each of them. That way I could concentrate on one paragraph
at a time, and if I lost concentration, I would not have to start the whole
article again. I could just refer to the
main idea notes for each paragraph and move on from there. Reading linguistics articles was also easier
when I started doing my own research.
One reason was because I was more invested in the learning process
(since I had chosen the topic), but also I could depend on past readings to
help me understand the new reading. The
schema had been built and I could access it; one of the hardest kinds of
readings was in survey courses and had only a couple of readings for each
topic. In that case the schema would get
half built, and then I would have to move on to the next topic. It felt like I would have to move on to the
next topic just as I was starting to understand this one.
Interestingly, I’m not having the same problems with concentration
in this class, and I think that is for a couple of
reasons. First, I am inherently
motivated to absorb this information. I
want the information to become a better teacher. Maybe even more importantly, because I am a
teacher now, I can imagine how I can use
and adapt the information to my own needs—or rather, my students’ needs. I have a rich and detailed schema to hang the
information on, so it is much easier to integrate.
The upshot of this, my “literary narrative,” is that I have
the experience of being both a person who is a strong reader who takes that
strength for granted, and a person who comes up against a reading challenge,
and feels like a weak reader who is ashamed of that weakness, but eventually
worked my way out of that problem.
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