By request, I suppose I am the first official contributor to the Repository of Knowledge in Hopes of Lessening Misery. What follows is the "reading lesson" I give my students either in a handout or by email, depending on the class. If the class is online, I include a bit more information about the importance of reading specific information in different course tools:
How to Read for College
Sometimes students tell me they have difficulty with the textbook, literary, and critical evaluation readings, whether it's understanding what they read or remembering it later for the quizzes. Therefore, I offer these hints to help you read academically:
1. The first time through, read a piece quickly. Look for the gist of the work. Note main ideas in the topic sentences. Get a feel for the author's style. Notice if any words/phrases are in bold, italicized, capitalized strangely, or otherwise standing out. If the piece has headings, take note of them as well. The author is trying to tell you these things are important.
2. After taking a break of at least a couple of hours, do a second reading. This time, read more slowly. Highlight or take brief notes on important points within the reading. Read for meaning so that you are closer to understanding the piece. Look up words or references you are not familiar with. Read footnotes or end notes. If you still don't understand it completely, that's OK.
3. Again after taking a break of at least a couple of hours, read the piece one more time. Read very slowly this time. At this point, you are engaging in a sort of conversation with the author. Annotate (create detailed notes) as you go. Find things that stand out to you as particularly memorable (meaningful, interesting, insightful, infuriating, arguable). Make notes of your reactions. Ask questions of the author as you read. Write down those questions as part of the process.
By doing this, you will have great material to draw from when writing your study question answers or discussion board posts. You will understand more of what you read. You'll also be able to ask questions of me or the class about parts you have difficulty with. And finally, you will be more likely to remember what you read, which will in turn help you with the quizzes.
This is how I was taught to read for college, and the method is very similar to what students are supposed to be learning in their "Intro to College" student success course which every student must take before having completed a semester's worth of credits. I'm sure it needs some modification for STEM reading, but the principles are sound generally.
This is helpful, thank you! I especially am encouraged by the visual I have of the students' heads exploding when they realize that the recommendation is to read something more than once. The blasphemy of that recommendation should provide me hours of amusement at their indignation.
ReplyDeleteThanks, but my students will whine that they don't know what "gist" means.
ReplyDelete(And geez louise, it's a one-syllable, four-letter word.)
Good advice, except students need to repeat step one several times.
ReplyDeleteA fundamental fact about reading is that if you read more slowly than 200-250 words per minute, you won't understand anything. It's all about how information gets transferred from short-term to long-term memory, but a simple thought experiment will do:
Imagine that a reading passage is transcribed, one word at a time, onto 3x5 index cards. Now imagine that someone slows your reading speed 'way down by showing you one. card. at. a. time. Just. one. card. every. second.
By the time you got to the end of a thousand-word-long passage, you'd have forgotten what came at the beginning, right? That's what happens to students when they think reading "carefully" means reading slowly.
I've been known to hand this oldie but goodie out, from René Descartes:
ReplyDelete"I should also have added a word of advice regarding the manner of reading this work, which is, that I should wish the reader at first go over the whole of it, as he would a romance, without greatly straining his attention, or tarrying at the difficulties he may perhaps meet with, and that afterwards, if they seem to him to merit a more careful examination, and he feels a desire to know their causes, he may read it a second time, in order to observe the connection of my reasonings; but that he must not then give it up in despair, although he may not everywhere sufficiently discover the connection of the proof, or understand all the reasonings – it being only necessary to mark with a pen the places where the difficulties occur, and continue reading without interruption to the end; then, if he does not grudge to take up the book a third time, I am confident that he will find in a fresh perusal the solution of most of the difficulties he will have marked before; and that, if any remain, their solution will in the end be found in another reading."
But as Frod says, they'd quit after the first few words. It's too hard!
He thought, therefore he was.
DeleteI was having this exact conversation with a student who did poorly on the midterm. I pretty much advocate the same process--except mine is 1) Read through the material trying to get a sense of the author's general point, 2) read through again, carefully, annotating and looking up words, and making notes and a summary, 3) read through again with notes in hand, clarifying and reinforcing existing knowledge.
ReplyDeleteWhat I tell them as well is that they need to be FREE FROM DISTRACTIONS. No reading while watching television, talking on the phone, surfing the internet, texting, etc. They must find a quite place with no noise where they can actually interact with the reading.
The problem is, reading like this is HARD. It is HARD. They do not want to do it. Because it is HARD. They want the right answers and the general meaning of life beamed into their brain without having to think about it. Everything I tell them, all the advice I give, they know already. They just willfully forget it. The CAN read. They just don't WANT to.
When I ask a student--any sudent--unhappy with their grades whether they are spending six hours outside of the classroom in a distraction-free environment doing work for my class, the inevitable answer is "no". The answer comes out first as evasions and excuses and lots of squirming and staring at the floor, accompanied far too often these days by tears. But in the end it is always, always "no".
No matter what I do, they won't stop crying and do their fucking work. Why can't people just stop crying and do their fucking work?
Oh, that's right...because they don't WANT to.
Fuckers.
A-freaking-men! Just shut the fuck up, stop crying and do the fucking work. It's that simple!!!
DeleteHALLELUJAH!! JESUS H. TAPDANCING CHRIST, I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!! Praise be the Stella, for she has NAILED IT to the fucking wall.
DeleteNick Carr's analogy in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" is that the internet has turned even careful readers into skimmers: from divers to jet-skiers.
What if they were jet-skiers to begin with? What are they now? Those guys who fly behind a boat with a parachute?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
While I appreciate the handout potential above, I provide and go over this kind of stuff with students at the beginning of every freaking freshman class. It's in every freaking textbook we use. There are freaking exercises for them to practice taking notes and underlining and shit. Do they do them? NO. Does reading this brief of a handout even work? Not so much. If it's longer than three bulleted words, and if those bulleted lists are longer than three, they do not read. They refuse to read. They simply won't do it. And then they flunk and wonder why they don't know shit. And I want to yell:
ReplyDeleteIT'S BECAUSE YOU DON'T FUCKING READ. HOW DO YOU EXPECT TO FUCKING PASS A CLASS IF YOU DON'T FUCKING READ THE HANDOUT ON HOW TO FUCKING READ?
Sorry for yelling. Maybe if I included the word "fucking" they'd actually read beyond the first three words.
Maybe if I included the word "fucking" they'd actually read beyond the first three words.
DeleteNo, they wouldn't. They'd just report you for creating a hostile classroom environment.
I steer them to Steve Zucker's excellent ideas on the difference between learning math in high school and learning math at university.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.math.jhu.edu/~sz/Education/OrPacket/Distribute/index.html
Performance is, of course, always the same. The one's who need the advice don't listen, the one's who don't were already university material.
There are a number of "How to read a science paper" articles out there for the STEM crowd, but they are pretty much the same as what EnglshDoc posts.
ReplyDeleteOne other metaphor I use is that reading an article is like looking at one piece of a jig-saw puzzle. Part of understanding it is to see how it fits into the rest of the field (ie, all the other articles/pieces of puzzle). So they have to read the intro and discussion to get a good handle on why the researchers, say, dunked the hamsters in colchicine and what that tells us about cellular functions of the rodentia.
No Hamsters were treated with colchicine in the creation of this blog comment.
DeleteWhat about Kahlua?
DeleteI just say reading is like sex with someone you know: the first time isn't usually the best.
ReplyDeleteThat would be a good thing for them to hear for several reasons.
DeleteThanks EnglishDoc! Your handout actually doesn't need much modification for STEM. The biggest difference is that the students aren't encouraged to engage with the author, they are to engage with the content. It's assumed that science books spring into the world fully formed and full of incontrovertible facts that for some reason but be revised every other year. Perhaps taking a more conversational approach with the Gigantic Book of Useless Facts(TM)might make it a little less impenetrable.
ReplyDeleteThey're revised every other year solely to make money for greedy publishers! Everyone knows that! (Actually, the problem with that statement is that it's at least partly true; textbooks are revised every other year in part to make money for greedy publishers. But if they were left alone for 5-10 years, they'd be seriously out of date. Helping students understand why that's true, and that the interval at which revision is truly required varies by discipline, and the current state of scholarship in that discipline, is part of the challenge).
DeleteStudents expect us the TEACH them the reading, to go over each paragraph, explaining and digesting it to them.
ReplyDeleteAs for STEM reading, at least in mathematics, one has to have a pencil and paper to work out some of the ideas, since there are always gaps.
Aaaargh!
ReplyDeleteTo keep it civil and withing the blog site protocols I shall not name any one individual, but posters should write above the level of elementary school students. I can overlook a typo, the Great Hamster knows I make plenty myself.
Apostrophes do not denote plurality. One's translates to educated brains as "one is" or "belonging to one."
Perhaps apostrophizing (sp?) a word that ends in a vowel is being taught at elementary levels. If so, we should find these teachers and make them write 500 times "Apostrophes do not denote plurality." And write it with pen and paper, not as a Word Document.
I once dated someone who swore that her teacher told them that "a lot" was one word. She was a respiratory therapist who thought my spelling of "vacuum", with two u's (In this instance, it's allowed) was incorrect.
I second that emotion.
DeleteThe Alot is better than you at everything:
Deletehttp://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
And on the general subject of repetition and work: when I took a foreign-language course at a local CC and the instructor told us that, on average, you have to hear/use a new word 60 times before you remember it, the looks of dismay were awesome to behold. There is this myth that you're either good at languages or you're not; the idea of, y'know, working at learning got lost somewhere.
The only place it seems to persist is in relation to sports (not even so much in relation to learning a musical instrument). Of course that leads us to over-use sports metaphors, which helps to cement the idea that sports are a central part of everyone's life, and so on. . . .
DeleteExcellent, though I second Allison's exploding-head/indignation prediction.
ReplyDeleteThey seem somewhat more inclined (but still resistant) to accepting the principle when it comes to movies. When we read a sample student research paper that proposes to analyze 12 films in 10 pages, I point out that, among other things, that student is committing him/herself to a minimum of 24 hours, and probably more like 48-72 hours, of movie-watching as part of his/her research for the paper. Some of them get it very quickly; others, it's clear, never even considered the possibility that you might have to re-watch a movie once, let alone multiple times, in order to write well about it. And that's before we get to the sort of strategies for reading secondary sources English Doc has outlined.
I sat down to write a conference paper about a book I know well (as in, it's the main focus of one chapter of my dissertation) today, and ended up re-reading major portions of the book instead -- and discovering lots and lots of new things. Admittedly I've been becoming more familiar with its context in the interim, but still, F&T is right, the umpteenth reading is often the best (at least until the next one). Or maybe it's just that the people who think that way become English professors.