This is the last chapter of the first two-thirds of Maryanne Wolf's book "Proust and the Squid...Science...Reading Brain." It is kind of a culmination of the normal reading brian (er...brain) before Ms. Wolf switches gears a little bit and focuses on what is obviously near to her heart: The reading brain of a dyslexic (her son has dyslexia, as she noted earlier in her book). A buddy of mine has dyslexia, he says it's minor and I never really gave it much thought other than the fact that it took him longer to learn stuff in high school and he had to work harder to learn it than anyone else in my circle of friends. THAT guy has perseverance...it will be interesting to find out more about how his brain works differently from others'.
But back to the current chapter, since I borrowed this book from UNM's library (I have it until freakin' December; gotta' love being a grad student...) I can't highlight passages in this book and I've been forced to take notes as I read - that must be one of my reading for comprehension strategies because I definitely feel like I've learned more from reading this book than from a lot of others I've read to date...Anyways, my notes say that on page 141 (it's part of chapter 6 in case anyone is curious) Ms. Wolf says that fluent readers feel-. On page 142 she says that an expert reader is efficient and on page 143, an expert reader has time to wonder...
This chapter is pretty much dedicated to the brain of the fluent comprehending and expert readers. First, as I stated just moments ago(we're talking literally fifty three words ago)I mentioned that my notes said fluent comprehending readers feel...well, duh, of course they do...but wait! According to Ms. Wolf, feeling is a key and may even be the most important key to reading comprehension "...the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling. Any images of the fluent, comprehending reader shows this clearly through the growing activation of the limbic system-the seat of our emotional life-and its connections to cognition...the limbic region also helps us to prioritize and give value to whatever we read. On the basis of [a book's ability to make us feel pleasure, disgust, horror, and elation etc..], our attention and comprehension processes become either stirred or inert." (pg. 141) Holy Honkin' Molly! Did you get that? If a book gets us to feel emotions when we read it, we comprehend what it is saying much more completely!!! Ok, we're all teachers here right? So that means if we want our students to comprehend what they are reading, we have to help them care about it, we have to help them feel passionate about what they are reading...I'd like to stop there. But there is so much to this chapter. I will touch on a few other points and then back to the emotions.
The brain is FA-AST (if I could use a cool zooming text there I would it's that fast). Everything that we do when we read happens from 0-500 milliseconds (assuming we are fluent comprehending readers by now). Everything. We're talking ten pages worth of information of everything. Everything we learned about de-coding words, making meaning of them connecting them to our emotions 144 pages of information before this point...Everything. 500 milliseconds is 0.5 seconds; just a hair slower than the blink of an eye. That is fast.
And because it is so fast and incredibly efficient at what it does, our brain gives us time to wonder when we read; not think...wonder. That's no small thing. And that is what changes a reader from fluent comprehension to expert (assuming I understand correctly of course). Wondering implies poetry, it's not just information gathering, wondering connects our past experiences to our present contemplations. Wondering lets us leave where we are and go someplace previously unimagined. Wondering and by extension being an expert reader, means that books affect us, they change us...literally; not just emotionally but biologically: "Ultimately, in the expert reader there is greater left-and right-hemisphere involvement [of the brain]...the expert reader's comprehending brain presents a beautiful change from novice reading: by using many parts of the brain, the expert reader is living testimony to our continuously intellectual evolution" (pg 162) Ms. Wolf contends that it is the exchange of ideas between the reader and the text that allows a person to become an expert reader; that and the reading a lot of quality text. She says that if we read the same book at 17, 37, 57 and 77 we will read it differently, we won't come away from it the same way as before. Well, of course...but, wow. Reading is so beautifully complex, yet our experience of it is so simple; strait forward. I love that.
To end, a few notes:
A fluent decoder is not a strategic reader (one step prior to fluent comprehender). In order to get kids from decoding to strategic reading they need to learn to self monitor their comprehension. Ms. Wolf gives some specifics to help people move kids beyond decoding. "Engaging in dialogue with their teachers helps students ask themselves critical questions that get to the essence of what they are reading. For example, in reciprocal teaching, a meathod introduced by Annemarie Palisncsar and Anne Brown, teachers explicitly help students learn to question what they don't understand..." they can:
-summarize the content
-identify key issues
-clarify
-predict and infer happens next
If students do the above successfully, "...this variation on the Socratic dialogue provides students with a lifelong approach to extracting meaning from more and more sophisticated text."
...I've gotta' start reading some Socrates (So-crAY-tes)...
Just in case we're all getting high and mighty about our brains:
and then...
Pretty crazy huh?!?
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