Paul Horton: In Defense of Reading III -- Slow Down!
Guest post by Paul Horton.
We have all heard about the slow cooking movement. There is also a growing slow reading movement. Maybe slow reading is growing slowly because fast everything seems to be growing faster than kudzu everywhere.
David Mikics, a Professor of English at the University of Houston, has recently written a very good book on this issue, Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (2013).
As reading and English teachers grapple with teaching literacy to prepare students for PARCC tests across the country, they should read this book very slowly to attempt to maintain a semblance of sanity: Slow Reading in a Hurried Age describes what you know you should be doing and want to do in your classes: reading to open minds rather than prescribed literacy drills that closes them.
For Mikics, as for most dedicated readers and teachers, reading is under assault from a barrage of information and images that gadgets produce. We tend to scan information very quickly when we "read" on screens or phones.
He cites a Pew survey that found that 90 percent of teachers were concerned about how digital gadgets were creating "an easily distracted generation with short attention spans." (p. 10) Indeed constant Internet use retards a "young person's readiness for intense study habits that college Paul Horton: In Defense of Reading III -- Slow Down! - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher:
