Topic: What texts have you or do you learn from? What do you learn?
Texts? What? Me read a textbook? Do research? The way I learn is the way I think. I don’t do just one thing at a time. I am ADHD, before it was identified and named, and I frequently don’t think about just one thing at time, so I don’t just start a book that I consider a text and read from start to finish. I save that for my escapism romance novels.
When I get a text to read, I will look through it: then I will skim and scan and choose a section to read. It may be just a paragraph that jumps off the page into my eyes. It was this way with the book Write for Insight. Last summer one of the groups used it for a book study. I was on another book, but when they talked about it, I had a copy to peruse for a few minutes and said I wanted that book. I learn from texts things that I had been exposed to in the past, but haven’t taken fully into my ‘bag of tricks.” I will see it and then somehow it fits into my schemata or diagram of learning. I have been reading through the Write for Insight and it just reinforces the knowledge from my past that we need to write to learn. So, now I’m throwing around the idea of learning logs for my classes. I don’t think about something and plan it out. I sort of read it, add it to that boiling cauldron of ideas in my head, and just wait. In a few days or few hours, it will start to bubble to the surface, and I’ll deal with it. Then it will go out of sight and out of mind for a while, and then come back. That’s the way I work it into the way I can use it in my classroom. Eventually those thoughts will have to be put down on paper—lots of time with a pencil, since they are still work in progress, and then let cool off for a while. I do this with texts also. Read a little; put it on a table and just look at it as I walk by, and maybe pick it up a few days/weeks later. That’s what I mean when I say I don’t read a book cover to cover. Now that I think about it, authors don’t write books cover to cover—so why should I read them that way.
