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Dear Reader, Pllllease Sllllow Doooown
NH Professor Pushes for Return to Slow Reading
Slow readers of the world, uuuuuuuu...niiiiite!
Patti Flynn, an assistant principal in Nashua, N.H., helps her 10-year-old-daughter Lily sound out words as Lily reads from one of her books, at home in Nashua, N.H., Wednesday, June 16, 2010. (AP Photo/Cheryl Senter)
At
a time when people spend much of their time skimming websites, text
messages and e-mails, an English professor at the University of New
Hampshire is making the case for slowing down as a way to gain more
meaning and pleasure out of the written word.
Thomas Newkirk isn't the first or most prominent proponent of the so-called "slow reading" movement, but he argues it's becoming all the more important in a culture and educational system that often treats reading as fast food to be gobbled up as quickly as possible.
"You see schools where reading is turned into a race, you see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute," he said. "That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good."
Newkirk is encouraging schools from elementary through college to return to old strategies such as reading aloud and memorization as a way to help students truly "taste" the words. He uses those techniques in his own classroom, where students have told him that they've become so accustomed from flitting from page to page online that they have trouble concentrating while reading printed books.
"One student told me even when he was reading a regular book, he'd come to a word and it would almost act like a hyper link. It would just send his mind off to some other thing," Newkirk said. "I think they recognize they're missing out on something."
The idea is not to read everything as slowly as possible, however. As with the slow food movement, the goal is a closer connection between readers and their information, said John Miedema, whose 2009 book "Slow Reading" explores the movement.
"It's not just about students reading as slowly as possible," he said. "To me, slow reading is about bringing more of the person to bear on the book."
Miedema, a technology specialist at IBM in Ottawa, Ontario, said little formal research has been done on slow reading, other than studies on physical conditions such as dyslexia. But he said the movement is gaining ground: the 2004 book "In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Changing the Cult of Speed" sprang from author Carl Honore's realization that his "rushaholism" had gotten out of hand when he considered buying a collection of "one-minute bedtime stories" for his children.
In a 2007 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the executive humanities editor at Harvard University Press describes a worldwide reading crisis and calls for a "revolution in reading."
"Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don't even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words," Lindsay Waters wrote.
Though slow, or close reading, always has been emphasized at the college-level in literary criticism and other areas, it's also popping up in elementary schools, Miedema said.
Mary Ellen Webb, a third-grade teacher at Mast Way Elementary School in Durham, N.H., has her students memorize poems upward of 40 lines long and then perform them for their peers and parents. She does it more for the sense of pride her students feel but said the technique does transfer to other kinds of reading _ the children remember how re-reading and memorizing their poems helped them understand tricky text.
"Memorization is one of those lost things, it hasn't been the 'in' thing for a while," she said. "There's a big focus on fluency. Some people think because you can read quickly ... that's a judge of what a great reader they are. I think fluency is important, but I think we can err too much on that side."
It's all about balance, said Patti Flynn, an assistant principal in Nashua, N.H., and mother of a 10-year-old girl.
Her school has offered, and her daughter has participated in, numerous reading challenges that reward students for reaching certain milestones _ a pizza party for a class that reads 100 books, for example. Though such contests may appear to emphasize speed rather than reading for pleasure or comprehension, they also are good incentives for children who weren't motivated to read, she said. The challenges have encouraged parents to make reading a priority at home, Flynn said.
"The goal shouldn't be to be whipping through a certain number of pages, the goal should be to make sure kids are gaining some conceptual understanding," she said.
Her daughter, Lily, said she considers herself a "medium-speed" reader and had to increase her speed to finish about 10 books for her classroom's 100-book challenge. But she said she enjoyed the process and feels like she understood and remembers what she read.
"It was fun," she said.
21 Comments so far
Show AllWhile correctly emphasizing the quality of reading over quantity, the article does not discuss how the slow-reading strategy can be accommodated by a test-crazed education system.
Many of us may agree with the author's point (I do) but, unless someone can demonstrate to state school boards how slow reading (or any other effective learning technique) can improve standardized test scores, its proponents will be ignored.
I don't mean to stray from the topic but I need to vent a little. I worry when parents try to encourage their children to learn to read too early. Children will read when they're ready and forcing them to do so too soon can frustrate them and make them hate reading. My granddaughter couldn't read a word before she entered first grade. She just finished the third grade and was the best reader in her class.
q
I have always been a voracious reader, but the pressure to read faster and faster didn't ever dissuade me from the enjoyment I received from reading. Still, sometimes, I read out loud to hear the ring of the words in my ears. I love words and the rhythm created by stringing them together into sentences, and into paragraphs.
Quite frankly, I have have some friends who were pressured to read faster and faster, and when they couldn't keep up, they quit reading. And, this is the shame that is heaped upon so many people in this country. Do the fastest readers really grasp what they are reading, do they retain what they read? I don't know the answer to that question.
Whenever I tackle a new subject, something about which I don't know much, I know it's going to be an even slower process, as I learn the language that is used in a specific field, such as finance. I always tell people to go as slow as you need to go in order to absorb the terminology. I still don't consider myself a fast reader, but I don't care. I keep reading.
I just skimmed this. It's about reading.
I missed that.
Reading slow is fine but too slow or too fast isn't a good idea. My mama used to get worried about my inability to comprehend well despite my being great in math and spelling. She would worry about my slow reading skills and later worry about my skipping details when I later got into speed reading. I could get an 800 on the Math section of SAT but pulled a 490 on the verbal. 8 years later when I learned to comprehend somewhat better, I improved my verbal score to 590. It isn't how fast you read that counts. What counts is what you actually get from what you actually read. I would also want to bring up what I learned from American literature vs English literature. I had a hard time writing good essays when I struggled through American literature trying to understand the message of what I was reading in 11th grade. When I was subjected to English literature in 12th grade, I was amazed that I could get what the authors were trying to convey to the readers. I used to hate literature but after British literature, I eased up on my hatred of literature. I even went back and read my parents' Indian literature. I hope more kids don't end up being illiterate or too late on comprehension skills like me. They can't afford it.
There is something else that happens when you speed through something; perforce, you ARE skimming and, hence, are incapable of considering anything critically. The necessary tools for critical thinking, making sure you understand what the person is actually saying and pausing to consider what this actually means, are gutted. In this age of twittering and sound bites, which prevent the development of any kind of in-depth, coherent thinking, slow reading is an obvious antidote to our political absurdities.
I noticed the skimming phenomenon BIG TIME in the discussions surrounding the last election ...
The electronic two-way media, culminating in cell-phone text message and the god-awful "twitter" seems to have created an odd psychological need for brevity and concision. This has resulted in a lot of people developing an intolerance for length and thoroughness in writing everywhere else, and an enormous decline in reading books.
I've seen it in myself. Some if it is getting old and a certain intolerance for reading glasses, which allow me to read but cause eye strain and a aching neck (should I stop using drug-store readers?), But something else is going on as well. Books, and even monthly journals or magazines I used to voraciously consume stack up on my coffee table unread. Maybe it is just a symptom of depression. It is troubling.
It is a symptom of depression; I've had the same experience. Take a break for a while and then try reading when you're comfortable and not tired. Also, make sure that you have the best possible lighting.
q
I read this article slowly enough to catch a grammatical error. I can usually catch at least one in every article I read. Sometimes the entire article is riddled with them. Even in books by well-known authors published by respected houses, I find errors. Does anyone take the time to proofread? Do editors even exist anymore?
This error is "accustomed from" rather than "accustomed to". Big deal, I know.
However, if they're reading slowly, but the information is garbage, what's the point?
Hey, wait a minute, i thought you said you had to go? just kidding.
"Accustomed from" was more likely an editing mistake -- nobody says that. When you cut and paste, and you re-read it straightaway you can easily miss errors -- you see what you intended to do, not what you did. What we need to do is go away until we have forgotten we edited it, and then re-read it. But we don't, do we?
But with regard to reading garbage slowly, I agree, what is the point? For myself, if I find what I am reading is garbage, I stop.
Another point about reading slowly is that in literature, as opposed to The Daily Blog, the words have a beauty and subtlety of their own that is not possible to appreciate at a thousand words a minute. If the author is not making you think, or firing your imagination, it's just pulp fiction (or fact): Maccas for the brain.
I read "The Price of Loyalty" by Ron Susskind a few months ago. It was rife with errors. Because of the errors I had to slow down even more than I normally have to just to make sense of the sentence -- or non-sentence, as the case may be. I had been reading older books that I have, so I don't know if this is a new phenomenon. It was quite a strange experience.
The quest for speed seems to be the goal for everything in this culture. I rarely drive anywhere at the posted speed limit that there isn't someone right on my bumper or passing me like I'm sitting still. Every checkout line is crammed with impatient people tapping their feet, rolling their eyes and generally grumbling about slow checkers.
This speed obsession has even become the norm when speaking. I have from time to time been totally baffled by the rapid-fire speech of the younger generation and find myself asking them to slow down and start over because it's not that they speak too fast but rather I listen too slowly.
Perhaps someday I will figure out what the rush is and where everyone is going in such a hurry but probably by the time I get there the whole reason will have moved on.
I have always been a medium to fast reader. I retained that until I my experience with Paxil. During withdrawal I could barely comprehend an easy book and sometimes had to read a paragraph two or three times to understand it. Four years off of Paxil I can read quite a bit better, sometimes close to being my old self. I read a lot online and I do comprehend quite a bit, even difficult material. But I am person who was reading "War and Peace" and "Les Miserables" in my early high school years -- for pleasure.
This has been very difficult and frustrating, but I keep at it because in the end I don't want that brain damage that Paxil caused to win. Drugs like these do a great job of killing off neurotransmitters, as do strokes. You can heal and develop other neurotransmitters, but it takes time.
Hang in there. It isn't the destination, it's the journey. It sounds like you know where you are and where you are going. Most of us can't say that.
see
Dick
jump
Jane
How to make a reader:
Have books around and get your child a library card. Take them to the library regularly.
Child punishment Number One: No TV, no texting, no computer, no video games.
Child Punishment Number Two: More of Child Punishment Number One.
"The medium is the message."
Dear Professor:
I am typing this message real slow as I understand you do not read so fast. It took a very long time to read your information because it was totally useless. Don't quit your day job.... well, maybe you ought to, come to think of it.