Sunday, February 7, 2010

class entry

Closed reading. A thing that teaches you how to read and how to analyze reading and how to make the most of your reading and how to make your reading that much better! Providing a solid framework of how to read and how to digest the reading with the mere consequences of a few minutes per page, closed reading is written by some so-called experts. It is a shame that such wonderful instructions are not written for everything. Of course, there is an objective truth behind how to read. Simplistically, reading must be from left to right, or it is not reading at all. Similarly, if you don’t make a chart every time you read, your comprehension of the text is limited and you will probable fail the quiz tomorrow. In that sense, it is almost a repulsive thought to even think of other ways to succeed in reading.
We all know that this sameness is all great. Since sameness sound like symmetry and symmetry is symmetrical and symmetrical is good, obviously this one way of reading should be the universal way of reading. After reading this masterpiece of teaching reading, I realized that I was never actually reading my whole life. It dawned to me that my previous 17 years of existence and learning those silly strings of ABC that we call words all came down to nothing (according to this golden book of reading, I apparently do not understand my material). This is obviously true, because I have never thought that Doctor Seuss is a angry anti-western brain-washing maniac that writes books to teach children how to hate almost all the ideals of the western society. I have never equated the Wizard of Oz to some muckraking literature that portrays the corruption of corporate leaders. If I have just done those underlining, notes on the side thingy, self interrogation, and the little chart of themes and analyzation and quotations, I might have actually caught those great hidden meaning and truly read those books.
Don’t be modest and say that this Close Reading business is only an option to improve reading. We all know saying that is equivalent to saying “homework is recommended for improving your grade” or “practicing is just an option for improvement” or “you shouldn’t put cyanide in your food”. This great awesome instruction was, after all, written by some great awesome educator of some sort that obviously knows how to read better than us. To ignore his instruction is preposterous; it’s unheard of. Ignominy. Those who don’t follow these instructions should be shunned. They have neglected their reading. They should not have a voice in our scholarly world.
Now I understand that this great literature has been hidden from all of us. Now that we are exposed to it, let us use it so we can be distinguished from those infidels of sophism. We will go out and interpret our readings with the utmost details; with a chart, writing on the side thingies, notes, post-its, self-interrogations, word-interrogations, paragraphical analysis, word to word analysis, word to sentence analysis, sentence to sentence analysis, etc. Now that we understand what it is to truly read, open our eyes to reading! Meanwhile, I think I will apply this beautiful method on “Closed Reading”.

No comments:

Post a Comment