Frita wrote:Yes, we can learn compassion, those empathetic skills of how others can live and think, from reading. Especially for Leave No Child Behind American kids who read little to no fiction in school, there is another layer of challenge. This time frame correlates with the increase in ADHD, Autism, and taking away recess.
Absolutely. The means by which school districts are funded and income segregated in the U.S. leaves many children stranded in literacy deserts. When I tutored reading under a private grant program in a neighborhood just south of 8 mile in Detroit, one of my 4th grade students who was barely reading at beginning second grade level told me that he was the best reader in his family, and I am certain this was true. Another 4th grade student who was still struggling with earliest skills was so vocabulary deprived in his primary/only language of English that he didn't know that "pot" could also mean a vessel for cooking. The area surrounding this school was so dangerous the children had no outside recess and many of the children only attended school intermittently. The overall level of anxiety was so high it was difficult for the children to focus on much beyond the likelihood of getting a beating for eating somebody else's Pop-Tart or getting run over by the vehicle driven by a parent who took her foot off the brake while screaming "Get your ass in this car!" at her children or being dragged into a stall in the boy's bathroom by a muscular 6th grader.
As fluently reading adults, we often consider reading, especially the reading of fiction, to be a passive consumptive activity. However, the word emphasized by a very capable master teacher of reading to students in kindergarten/first-grade in a very low income district full of recent immigrants was "stamina." She would praise her students as they increased their "stamina" for quiet reading (or just looking at pictures and imagining the story) from just a few minutes to a full half-hour by year's end. This free reading (child has selection of many books) practice is the standard in many schools, and it's interesting how it resembles the personal reading practice described by Nassim Taleb. He averages 30 hours/week of reading and does not hesitate to put one book aside for another if he is losing interest. In my attempts to mimic his practice, I have found that reading light fiction in addition to more dense books actually increases my stamina for the denser material more effectively than simply engaging in an entirely different activity. IOW, the activity seems to be passive consumptive only because we rarely test our own limited stamina in the manner of a first grade teacher, or in the manner we spreadsheet other activities such as our running ability.
Another active reading exercise that could be borrowed from elementary school practice is the 3 finger rule. If you pick up a book and open to a page at random, if there are 2 or 3 words or concepts, no more no less, found on the page that are not yet familiar to you, the book will be appropriately challenging. This is the material to be interspersed with lighter reading like performing intermittent burpees during an easy run. Most popular fiction and non-fiction will be too "light" for fluent adult readers, but the original works by the original thinkers in many fields will often serve. Literary fiction will generally be denser than popular or genre fiction, and titles that have won prestigious awards will often prove more challenging. For example, from page 28 of Rosalind Brown's "Practice" found on many filtered for quality 2024 lists:
Also the love triangle. The Young Man has slept with, is sleeping with, has fully stolen away, the poet's mistress. His and hers infidelities: but the Young Man's is worse. Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all. Subtext: yea take them all, thou greedy selfish shit: a perfect pentameter. And there is also a pleasedness there, no? He is pleased to say, Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye. So dry, so wounded, so haughty, enforcing his own nonsense-logic. For my sake, he repeats: I can perceive, as neither of you does, that this all refers back to me, you're just agitating the waters as I suck them irresistibly towards my plughole. Fuck each other if you like. I, structurally, am the winner.
I had to slow just a bit to consider or admire "pleasedness" , "nonsense-logic", and "structurally", so I mix in a lighter novel, "Love, Theoretically" of the new STEM Romance genre, and also a Dystopian Graphic Novel "Once Upon a Time at the End of the World" into my active stack along with "The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times" by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, and "Everything is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World" by science journalist Tom Chivers, although the last is a bit lazy of me since it is likely to confirm my anti-frequentist bias and is a bit of a distraction from actually pushing myself further along in the related mathematics which would require an alternate form of stamina. Now the stack is a bit heavy on books I lighted on myself, so I will add something recommended to me by human in my social or salon/forum circle, maybe "A True Story" by Lucian, or "Building the Cathedral" by Sadie Moon, or "Liberty from All Masters' by Barry Lynn. I also need something that is more "How To" with a possible project interface, so I grab "Alexa for Dummies" as starting point for my potential Senior Citizen Aiding Technology project, since my mother already owns two of these devices and they are getting little use.
Now I am happy with my stack, but will free to edit or amend it as I go, since white-knuckling through any book that proves less interesting than I hoped is anathema this practice. I have found Taleb's 30 hours/week reasonably easy to achieve during a week in which I am otherwise doing something like camping in an RV while it rains, and most difficult when I am generally stressed out. There have been, thankfully, brief periods in my life during which I have been so stressed out I haven't been able to read my way through an entire book. So, it may be the case that the study is reflective of correlation rather than causation: the least likely to be stressed out humans also being the most likely to spend quantity time engaged in reading. I would further posit that the variety of relaxed energy necessary to immerse one's self in reading is not entirely dissimilar to the relaxed energy necessary to enjoy receptive role in sexual context and/or spend the day just bumming around on a beach. Another study found that heterosexual women who are frequent readers of romance novels also report highest level of sexual drive/receptivity, and romance novels are the genre of fiction most frequently read by women. However, I would hesitate to extend this to the utilization of porn by men since the associated behavioral elements are quite dissimilar. For example, although romance novels are quick reads, women over the age of 13 rarely fast-forward to the racy bits, the mental immersion in some level of developed context prior to coming upon the racy bits is preferred. Also, a large proportion of romance novels are not even vaguely racy. Following the only very slightly unpredictable plot line is somehow relaxing; maybe as a minor mental exercise in social skills. Although, it is the case that as with porn, the "money-shot" of the plot line rarely varies much from the standard, whether/even if the female protagonist is polyamorous time-traveller obsessed with Scottish men from warring clans, blind Amish virgin, of an alien species with more than two sexes/genders, or a STEM PhD on the autism spectrum.
. There is a reason that zebras don't get ulcers as Salposky would say...stress is an underrated killer.