Hi readers. I hope you read books. Reading books has a multitude of benefits you can’t get any other way. Today, I’m sending you a link to an outstanding and inspiring Atlantic magazine article that shows the decline of assigned book reading in college and how one professor changed the situation which changed students’ lives. That’s what prompted this post.
Maybe it will spur us on to encourage ourselves and others to do more reading. My bookshelves full of books here at home and my trips to the library are what keep me thinking, learning, and expanding my horizons. How about you?
“Stop Meeting Students Where They Are: What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again.” By Walt Hunter
From the article:
Books teach you empathy because you imagine other lives. Poems refresh our conventional words—what Wallace Stevens derided as the “rotted names”—by investing language with power and nuance. I’m partial to the way the poet Adrienne Rich put it while teaching in the tuition-free City College of New York system: “What interests me in teaching is less the emergence of the occasional genius than the overall finding of language by those who did not have it and by those who have been used and abused to the extent that they lacked it.” Literature helps you express your own thoughts in vivid language, partly by imitating the writers who do it well. If you’re not inclined toward the ethical view, or Rich’s vision of social transformation, books might provide escape routes instead, invitations to leisure or to what my colleague Adam Kirsch has called “vice.”
Stop Meeting Students Where They Are – The Atlantic
Thanks for reading! (no pun intended)
Your writer on the wing,
Charlene
