Category: General

We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I’d say reading can’t be taught in a classroom any more than patriotism. (Classrooms are good at dissecting specimens. The bedroom and the dinner table, the bathtub – that’s the place for books!) but being a reader is a kind of culture that can be passed down. As far as I know, every child that has come through my mother’s house has come out with a stack of books under each arm. Reading is a kind of prejudice, and you have to be carefully carefully taught.

As for this article… this guy is all over the map! My jaw dropped when he mentioned the Dewey decimal system as the culmination of the effort to organize books. When he started talking about our need to skim in a modern world full of so many books, I started skimming. When he rambled on the the subject of filtering, I began to filter.

Book Rotation

I am trying a new campaign of reading (we’ll see how well it goes) where I cycle through the kinds of books I read. The problem is that there are so many books I think I ought to read, but they keep getting pushed out by books that are actually readable.

Non-fiction is the culprit. So many non-fiction writers seem to be operating under the misguided notion that, because what they have to say is true and important, people ought to read it out of a pure regard for the content of the book. They hold to this concept with a firm conviction that allows them to thereby insult the reader with a style that is so blindingly dull, the only way you can get through all that True and Important stuff is by a sheer act of will. And the more seriously the author takes his work, the more likely it is to be devoid of the kind of rhetorical sway that pulls you from one concept to the next. Nobody cares about the reader anymore.

The importance of non-fiction reading resembles nothing to me so much as the importance of bran in the diet. And I’m the kind of guy who likes to start his day with grape nuts.

The fact that there are voracious readers out there who never touch a page of fiction truly disturbs me. Tim Challies really disturbs me. Iain Murray, who may be one of the greatest Christian historians alive, wrote a book in 2009 called The Undercover Revolution, in which he argues that novels revolutionized the English speaking world in the 19th century (unfortunately, in his opinion, for the worse). In an interview with Mark Dever, when he was asked “how should we be thinking about novels today,” Murray responded, “I’m not sure we should be thinking about them all; we’ve got so much better things to do. And it amazes me that Christians who are called to redeem the time have got time to read novels.” Fiction changes the world, but we haven’t got time to read any. Astounding.

Maybe a better metaphor is those people whose diet consists of steak and protein shakes, as though they’ve never heard of fruit and bread and candy.

Anyway, I have to force myself to read non-fiction, especially the really important stuff that’s clogging up all the space on my shelves. So here’s the system: I read a fiction book, and then a non-fiction. Hopefully, the future joy of fiction will spur me on through the slough of brute facts. The jury’s still out.

So far, I finished up 9 Marks of a Healthy Church by M. Dever, and then tossed back (quickly quaffed?) a cheap paperback by R.A. Heinlein. Now I’m stuck in The Death of Socrates.”

Things that make me happy

  1. A regular routine.
    Getting up at the same time; going to bed at the same time; having the same sorts of events each day take up roughly the same portions of the day… Things I do repeatedly, I get better at. The better I am at something, the more mind space I have to improvise and work on other projects.
  2. Free time.
    Somebody a bit more snobbish might call this “quiet time.” Either way, it’s not incongruous with the above point. It’s the purpose for it. I want a regular schedule so I can block big open spaces to sit and think. The key is the biggest blocks possible. A two hour block is twice as good as two 1-hour blocks, which would be still better than 4 ½-hour blocks. Every chaotic experience requires a certain margin of time before I’m able to operate smoothly again. This cuts into the free time that I have available on paper.
  3. Plenty of time to read, reflect, and write.
    As before, this is the whole purpose of the point above. I can always squeeze a little reading into the crevices in my schedule, but reflection and writing require nice big blocks. And it’s only when I’m ready to write that I first begin to notice that I’m becoming happy. It’s the foundational joy of an ordered mind.
  4. Prayer. Continue reading “Things that make me happy”

Reassurances

I’m not sure if this is a Christian thing, a communication thing, or just a Kyle thing, but I’m starting to notice a trend, where I will either point something out, or ask a question, and the person hearing me will respond by attempting to reassure me. Except I wasn’t looking for reassurances.

For instance, Sunday was the first time in over three years that I was given the opportunity to play guitar as a part of the normal worship service. About half the way through the set, I looked down and saw that the little light was out that says my guitar is plugged into the sound system. I’m up here strumming and it’s not doing anything. Fortunately our music leader is perfectly capable of carrying the whole thing by himself, so there was no real loss. But after the service, I was asking people, “could you hear me play?” Every one of them gave me the same response: “Don’t worry. It sounded fine.” But I wasn’t worried about how it sounded. I just wanted to know if my guitar was broken!

Last week was field training for the class I’m taking. Four days camping, with guns. My job was to coordinate with some brand-new soldiers in their first combat scenario with a real lieutenant. They’re in school; I’m in school. So I get to practice leading, and they get to practice following. Much fun is had all around. But as I started to prepare, I realized we had 4-5 different scenarios listed in our packet and I couldn’t tell which one were were going to do. A lot of good it would do to brief my soldiers on one mission and something completely different happens. So I’m frantically asking people, “wait, which one is it?” and everyone’s telling me, “don’t worry; you’ll do fine.” Not if I’ve got the wrong mission, I won’t!
Continue reading “Reassurances”