The Art of Slow Reading by Thomas Newkirk

As an avid reader, and a teacher of tween readers and writers, I spend a lot of reflection time trying to figure out how to inspire a passion for reading, writing, and writing about reading, in others. How to help students understand that reading can move their thinking. How reflection about carefully read text can change us as people. This year, more than any previous year, I feel successful in this quest. I have students who awe me with their written responses to reading. Their writing is causing in me the reaction that I am hoping for for them in their own reading. I stop mid-response, mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence and gasp. I reread to fully comprehend their brilliance, to suck out all the marrow. When I can hardly wait to write in response to their writing, I know have succeeded in communicating something essential, and that success makes me giddy.

Sadly, not everyone is there, and that eats at me.  But The Art of Slow Reading by Thomas Newkirk has provided me with new pathways, so that I have new ways to reach all of my readers.

First, a confession. For many of my students there is a conflict embedded in the very title: The Art of Slow Reading. By the time they reach me, my students have participated in Accelerated Reader (AR) for four years. Years ago, when I accepted a position at this school, I made peace with AR because there were bigger fish to fry. But I have to acknowledge that AR has warped the perception some of my students have of reading. For them, viewing books through a lens of level and points; surface-level, literal comprehension; and a get-through-it-and-take-the-quiz mentality is the damaging legacy of AR. The ideas inherent in Slow Reading run counter to that embedded culture.

However, when I come across text that rocks my world, as I have with The Art of Slow Reading, I am an evangelist. I re-read, I read aloud to students and colleagues alike, I write in response, I pull quotes, I memorize, I keep tape flag companies in business. I was Slow Reading before I had a name for it, because Newkirk advocates a focus on practices of reading that have stood the test of time: performance, memorization, centering, problem-finding, annotation, re-reading, reading like a writer, and elaboration. These Slow Reading practices, he says, are "...crucial to the deep pleasure we take in reading-for the way we savor texts-and for the power of reading to change us."

Chapter eight contained, for me, an experience we're all familiar with: when there is an idea skirting the edge of your consciousness, teasing you, staying just out of your reach. And suddenly there it is, in print! Dear God, what a relief! Someone put it into words. I fall a little in love with writers who can meet me at the edge of my thinking and take me a manageable distance along that same path. Tom Newkirk did this for me when he wrote about "the generative ways in which writers read... Fluency in writing, as in speech, comes from being responsive to what is happening. It involves a special conversational way of reading, of allowing writing to invite more writing--a process Don Murray called "listening to the text."...This was not reading to comprehend, but reading to create." (p.171) This is what I want for my students! I want them to be responsive in their reading, then to put pencil to paper, and be responsive in their writing, following the path of their own thinking. Listening to their own thinking. Questioning themselves. Asking, So what? What does it mean? What are the implications? What questions do I have? Where might I find the answers? How does that connect to what I already know and to what I'm beginning to know? What's next?!

"Part of this improvisational skill--which is what I take Murray to mean by 'listening to the text'--is a capacity for self prompting, building off what has been written. For experienced writers, these moves can be so automatic that it feels as though the text is 'informing" the writer...This generative, creative way of reading the evolving text accounts for the pleasure of writing--the sense of discovery, even learning, that comes in the process. It can also account for the pleasure of reading, the feeling of spontaneity, of being present with a mind and sensibility that is in motion..." (pp. 175-176)

I can't wait to see how The Art of Slow Reading will continue helping us all progress along this path!