Reading is not a passive act (unless it's for enjoymment or entertainment). I want to state that I am specifically talking about reading to learn. You cannot just sit back and let the author do all the work for you, you must tell the author that you will understand what's written. This doesn't have to be complicated, but in order to learn from material, you must interact with the material.
There are some people that I follow on social media that have started their "reading journeys" as they dive deep into their non-fiction books about various topics with their different colored highlighters, pens, sticky notes, and other accoutrements of research. I always thought that there was no way any of these things made any of the words on the page more true. Why even bother with going through all the effort? Was your coloring session in your book worth it?
During my school days when being prepped for standardized testing, we were taught these reading comprehension skills that were supposed to help us on tests, such as in my state the STAAR test, the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. We were taught to underline words we didn't know, summarize paragraphs in the margins, and to think about who the author's audience is, to understand the author's perspective, blah blah blah. These points were basically hammered into us every year, and every year we forgot and the cycle continued. As someone who never paid attention in my RELA classses (REading Language Arts) because I never found it challenging and always got a 96 or above on my reading STAAR tests without trying, none of these skills appied to me. I never used them since those tests were blowoff grades and never challenged me in anyway for me to need certain skills in order to ace them. The questions would always ask what I though was easily accessible information as long as you skimmed through the reading once. I never had to think twice about something because there was nothing truly thought provoking. And this isn't me trying to brag about my capabilities, this is me trying to highlight the failings of the education system, who not only let people falling behind slip through the cracks, but also the people who are ahead. I was so bored with the education system that instead of moving up into more difficult classes, I decided to move down so I wouldn't have to listen to the same points year after year, so I could turn my brain off and, literally no joke - play smash ultimate in the corner with my friend because the teacher didn't care, didn't teach, and let kids hit their vape right in front of her (and to top it all off, her name was MRS. BUSSY, pronounced bus-ee, not buss-e). I stopped wanting to try to learn and instead chose to coast on my knowledge that was never tested year after year.
THIS BLOG POST IS TO BE CONTINUED IN TOMORROWS BLOG SINCE I NEED TO GO TO SLEEP
love literature, and learning,