A Quote
Reading is far more than getting information from printed records. It is the active encounter of one mind and one imagination with another.1
A Thought
The more I read this quote, the more profound it became. I had this instinctive understanding that it was, and was drawn to it over and over, and in that process layers of meaning revealed themselves. I began to pick on things:
‘get’ v ‘encounter’, with my mind thinking about how ‘get’ signalled a transaction, whereas ‘encounter’ had a sense of something more magical and unexpected
‘getting information’ contrasting with ‘encounter … imagination’
the assertion that ‘Reading is far more’
‘active’ being separated from ‘get information’ with the full stop
the deliberate use of the phrase ‘printed records’ to describe a book, and it being paired with ‘get information’.
I’m drawn to the second sentence. I believe it’s how readers are made, and it starts the moment a child sits in its parent’s lap and is read a story. I know this has been true for my kids, who love reading - it’s love that has done most of the ‘learning to read’ work for them.
I wonder if reading instruction often forgets about this relational magic, where active minds meet.2
At school, I think too much emphasis is placed on the first sentence.
An Action
What can you do to turn the ‘printed records’ in your classroom into ‘magical scripts’?
This week, for paid subscribers
Deep Dives
The first essay dropped, on collaboration.
“For education to be about care, for it to place relationships first, the answer lies in allowing opportunities for collaboration. We need to slow things down so that the urgent can be replaced by what’s important: people, and their connections to their past, present, and future.
For what has been to nourish what might be.”
Book Club
Book of the month is Lifelong Kindergarten by Mitchel Resnick. Read it? Join the discussion.
Margaret Meek, Learning to Read, 1982 (p, 10-11)
Or, as an ERO inspector said to me once: “Are you teaching reading, or developing readers? Because they’re not the same thing.” I was struck by the insight!
I’m also struck by the fact that in amping up the teaching of reading we are ending up with fewer and fewer readers. Short-term test scores aren’t leading to desired long-term outcomes. See: