Fifteen years of silence

Fifteen years ago there was a workshop, for which I made this blog. I had gone all the way to Arequipa, Peru, to help some beleaguered teachers deal with readers' malaise. The boss wanted me to teach readers' tricks, like using context clues, etc., as he had been taught when he was up in an American university, possibly ours. Arequipa was a stunningly beautiful time. Before I go farther, let me say it one more time: posts below this deal with that workshop, fifteen years ago.

Several things stuck with me from the workshop. One was that the teachers themselves were very clear that their main problem was one of motivation: how to get their students to want to read. They were like kids everywhere: once phones showed up, they mostly just wanted to play on their phones. How do you propose even making them want to try? Well, I was a little stumped, hadn't quite thought of it that way, but I gave it my best shot. You have to give them something they can use. Something like information about their classmates, or about their town, or about the land or the mountains around them. Something they will know by reading but would not otherwise be common knowledge to anyone else. And if it was something written by their classmate, so much the better. I call useful information currency - if they can use it, it's valuable to them. They can appear to their friends to know more than the average person. This would be the definition of well-read.

Today there's a national problem of readers' malaise. Quite briefly, a whole generation is flunking out of reading and civics classes because they can't or don't want to read. The pandemic didn't help. The schools are in crisis for a variety of other reasons, and we have a president who is not only hostile to education in general, but who eliminates the departments charged with keeping track and doing something about it. This is not ending any time soon. The kids, for their part, stay on their phones. There's not much on there to read.

Perhaps with this blog, from here on up, I can address this issue.

LET WHAT COMES BELOW STAY IN THE 2011 CONFERENCE IN WHICH IT WAS GENERATED.