written 12/28/03 — “this semester” is Fall ’03
Earlier this semester, in trying to explain myself and my goals to a professor, I wrote something about books being my friends and instantly knew it was a lie calculated to impress him. The truth is that books used to be my friends. Now I’m scared of them, even hate some of them, and have spent time over the past few years avoiding them.
There’s a lot of reasons, but conditioning is foremost. I almost want to say, How could anyone come from a high-pressure academic background and not hate books?, but I know a lot of people who don’t think that way. In my case I know it’s had a bad effect, though. I was the kid who routinely maxed out her library card in elementary school. When school started enforcing ways to read, what I read, and how I needed to respond to it, I lost the joy of reading. The books I read in school are neurotic bristles of underlining and marginal notes. No, that’s not true. Starting in high school, when a teacher told me I was a good writer, novels and poetry have joyous marginal notes, and were deconstructed with relish. I think the joy returned as I regained a sense that I would join these people and write books someday myself; reading was part of a community of developing meaning, and I loved that.
The real neurosis set in with analysis and memorization of facts. I learned to read to find what someone else wanted me to find in the text. I was never really sure I was doing it right when I was reading literature, though there was more room for me to develop my own meaning there.
History readings were a real problem. Whole pages of my old history books are highlighted or underlined solid. Classmates used to look with concern on my books, asking me what the hell I was trying to do. I think I was trying to underline the important parts. But unless I was writing research papers, and until I started having teachers who taught social history, the idea of what was important was completely external to me. I underlined what I thought I was supposed to memorize for tests, and I had a very hard time distinguishing which parts might be important to the teacher. None of it was important to me. I can’t even begin to identify all of the bad habits of thought and organization this fostered.
Different teachers had different suggestions and demands for how you organized knowledge. Some of them wanted you to keep journals; in junior high, the age when diaries were a popular phenomenon, the idea of what you might put in a journal was conflicted and tinged with a sense of invasion of privacy.
Dr. Feldmeth in high school wanted us to keep notes on our history readings and lectures, and then turn them in. Looking at this practice as a teacher, it sounds like great pedagogy it gives you a sense of how the kid is using distributed intelligence, is perhaps a more accurate “understanding performance” than a high-pressure test, and allows you room to correct areas where a student is misconceiving of the ideas presented.
As a student, though, understanding why this man wanted to see your notes was a matter of black-boxing. I’m not sure if he explained the educational goals of turning in notebooks. They seemed pretty arbitrary to me at the time; I think I resisted the activity. If he did explain it, I guess the explanation must not have made sense.
It was only this semester my first semester of graduate school, at the age of 26 — that I developed a method of reading which has started to make sense. I’ve thrown any sense of underlining for “what’s important” to the winds. A lot of the stuff I’ve been reading this semester has seemed obvious to me, and so what I underline ends up being ideas which are striking or new, instead. I’m still fine-tuning this strategy; I’m not even sure that it works. Dana was telling us that we should be keeping notes to what was it, defend our dissertation, or was it to help build a literature review? See, I don’t even know which questions I want to answer yet, so that’s likely to leave me with as few useful notes as my high school strategy man I’m going to get myself voted “Most Likely To Go ABD” any day now
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