I'm an expert reader, or am I?

I used to put a small figurine of a wizard on my overhead projector in Reading class. I would announce, with as much drama as I could muster, that the wizard was there to remind us that reading is "magical." Cute, but I was pointing emerging readers in the wrong direction. 

Most people already believe that reading happens by magic. Some people read well - they have the magic. Some people have to struggle to understand what they read - they don't.  

By the time we're adults, we think we know if we have the magic. Most of us think it's decided in elementary school. By third grade, I thought my label was best reader of all. I finished the "silver" readings in the SRA box, beating two boys who were contenders.


Neither high school nor college challenged my impression that I was naturally talented at reading. I made enough sense of the texts to take exams and write papers. There were some challenges, as most of the books I read in college were in another language. I figured out (was it laziness? arrogance?) that I could skip most of the words I didn't know, using the context to find their meaning. 

Law school stopped me in my tracks. Each class required reading an encyclopedia-sized tome of legal decisions written by judges. The writing was abstract and obtuse, loaded with technical legal terms both in English and in Latin. 

Luckily, first year law professors taught us in class to read and analyze legal decisions, at the start of fall term. They gave us five key questions to answer in reading each case. They taught us on how to organize our notes to prepare for their Socratic questions in class. I succeeded in reading law because experts taught me how to read law.

Yet the amount we were responsible for comprehending in law school took more hours than we had in the day (even after we eliminated sleeping, exercising, former friends, and family). Following the model of the law students in the Paper Chase, my buddies and I formed a study group. Each of us took responsibility for doing a close reading of the assignments in one course and making outlines of the key information to share and teach the other members. By the time I studied for the bar exam I knew that I had to underline, annotate, take notes and organize my notes into study outlines if I wanted to understand and remember what I read. The experts we learned from may have been fictitious, but the method worked.

Twenty years later, when I returned to grad school to learn more about teaching, there was plenty of reading and new vocabulary. I already had teaching experience and I could adapt the reading strategies from law school. I was able to function as a "good" reader. 

It came as a bit of shock, then, this past winter, when I tried and failed to comprehend a book I wanted to read. The book, ironically, is about the process of reading inside the brain.

First, there were these diagrams, optimistically titled "Getting Oriented in the Brain." My brain balked. Every learning styles inventory I have ever completed confirms that my visual and spatial knowledge is weak. This diagram of a three-dimensional object makes my brain reel. It's labeled with scientific terms that are just as useful to me as their Chinese translations. What do I do with this diagram? Memorize it? Refer to it later? What have I done in the past when faced with a problem like this? I figured I could skip it.

I read on to see if the words could unlock the author's meaning. Here's an example from a section about what the eye does when you read. To make sense of this paragraph I would need to know at least a little something about the parts of my eye and their functions: the fovea, retina, thalamus and cortex. I know the iris and, uh, the eyeball. 

This was just one paragraph. Many more to go.

I did what my students do - I stopped trying. I wasn't succeeding in making meaning. I made the calculus my students make: Can I get by without this information? Sure.

The following term, though, I was teaching future K12 teachers to teach reading. It seemed only fair that I should share my struggles with the neuroscience book and attempt it again, when I assigned my students to read and share a professional teaching book. I needed to model the best practice of doing the assignments myself. As luck would have it, one of my students was interested in dyslexia, which is covered in one chapter. I promised my student I would figure out what the author had to say about dyslexia and share that with him.

Armed with a concrete reading purpose, and back in familiar study group mode, I made a new effort. It took several tries. I'm hopeful that I managed to make decent sense of the author's main ideas about dyslexia, and explain them. I still couldn't have explained the scientific basis for the author's conclusions. If you asked me about it today, I might be able to recall the general thesis. I attribute my success in this, such as it was, to this fact: unlike my students, I knew I could stop after one chapter if I wanted to.

How is it that a good reader like me struggled to read a book about science that was intended for the general public? 

Reading is not magic. It's a complex process that has everything to do with our skill in making sense of the text, which is based, in large measure, on our ability to bring our own knowledge and experience to the text. Give me a text in the field of law, education, humanities or social science, and I am on solid ground. I have little knowledge and experience in science. To read a science text, and really understand it, I'll need to apprentice myself to a master.