At Age 43, I Finally Learned How to Read

TL:DR: I JUST WROTE A 186-PAGE MANUSCRIPT ABOUT THE INTERSECTION OF TECHNOLOGY, EDUCATION, AND THE ECONOMY. THAT EXPERIENCE OF WRITING TAUGHT ME HOW TO READ IN A WHOLE NEW WAY.

I am a high school principal in New York City. Well, kind of. But that’s not the point. The point is that after fifteen years in Education, I have known about the link between reading and writing because some of the best ELA teachers in NYC worked for me and they taught me how the two are inextricably linked. I also learned from seminars offered by fellow principals, I remember one by principal Lucinda Mendez, in particular. I have attended countless seminars on the subject of how writing and reading interact in literacy instruction because the Common Core Learning Standards focus on integrating literacy across the curriculum and I was charged with making that happen in all our classrooms by five successive superintendents. The superintendents didn’t agree about much other than their focus on integrating literacy into all subject areas. And I didn’t disagree, per se. Despite all of this experience in teaching teachers about reading and writing, I was able to have a significant breakthrough in my own reading just last month. The key is experiential learning as opposed to descriptive learning. I had a hard time being engaged while at “professional development” as an educator because mostly they involved describing good instruction and rarely did they offer us an experience of it as learners.

Imagine someone who is passionate about food. Since they learned knife skills at age five they have loved spending time in the kitchen. They learn to farm their own food, kill their own meat. Everyone knows them for their amazing home cooking. And so they grow up and learn to make a living in the food industry. Fast forward twenty-some-odd years and they are working as a high paid consultant for some of the most posh urban eateries. The only catch is that to maximize their income they are designing farm-to-table menus. They review menus, discuss menus, even create some from scratch for each season. They have contact with paper, printers, glossy and matte finishes, Pantone color chips. They have no contact with the actual food that their menus depict. That was me as a principal in professional trainings. I was sick of looking at descriptions of food on menus. I wanted the experience of eating actual food. I know my fellow educators felt the same way. Describing something is simply not the same as experiencing it. The former makes no difference and the latter is at the heart of learning something new.

My own breakthrough as a reader is illustrative of this distinction between description and experience.I read this book on September 13, 2018 and I read it in one day. You should know that I don’t read books. I don’t read magazines. I just have trouble reading. It’s always been my barrier to learning. I can read. I just hated to do so. That’s why I got a degree in physics. That’s why I worked as a software engineer and why it took some courage to become an educator. Being in two masters degree programs and completing the NYC Leadership Academy and Teaching Fellows Programs required lots of reading as did my high school International Baccalaureate degree. I did all that reading. But it was painful. Since then I occasionally read a nonfiction book about some technology that interests me or some Medium articles if they are short enough. But otherwise I listen to books on Audible and listen to the radio to access information.

After I finished reading “World after Capital” last September, I started writing that same day. I just couldn’t help it. I wrote about my disagreements with Wenger and even more about agreements that got me excited. I kept writing until October 12, 2018 at which time I had 21 chapters, 186 pages in front of me in a handsome manuscript. The most remarkable aspect of this was not that I wrote a book draft in one month. As I wrote those 55,828 words over four weeks I also read more books than I have read in the past decade.

My insatiable appetite for information on the intersection of education, economics, and technology led me to a totally new way of digesting written material, specifically for books that have both Kindle and Audible versions. I listened at 1.75X speed on Audible while highlighting and typing comments on the Kindle version. Then I transferred all my comments into Excel, categorized each, added a few other helpful codes like their order of appearance in the text that triggered the comment, and I dumped these into my database of book-related thoughts. Those were then re-imported into MS Word where I used the invaluable Outline View to arrange these topic-sorted thoughts into appropriate chapters, rearranging large chunks of sorted comments by collapsing outline levels. This research process allowed me to read a book per day while also allowing at least two hours for original writing.

The key takeaway for me as a reader is that I cannot read unless I know what I’m looking for. The manuscript I was writing had a very focused thesis broken down into multiple syllogistic steps. Like a step-by-step proof in mathematics or formal logic. If some part of a book I was reading did not have to do with that logic, I could skim over it.

Previously I had read books by trying to retain every single word contained therein. If I spaced out in a section of the book, I went back and re-read. Usually multiple times. If the book was required reading I would keep reading that damn section until I felt I had absorbed this most boring content fully. If it was not required reading I would never make it past this part of the book.

Now I spend time reading and rereading the sections that interest me most, rather than doing so with the sections that interest me least. That’s the essential difference that revolutionized my experience as a reader. Ever since, I am able to read books even when I’m not writing one!

The only problem for you who are reading this is that this here is a description of my experience. Exactly what I believe makes no difference for you, and which made all the difference for me.

#PassionForLearning #AcademicCapital