Learning to read, for the brain, is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then synchronise all the performances. It only happens after all the separate acts are learned and practised long and well.
Interpretation
Learning to read is a complex process that requires mastering individual components before achieving fluency.
This quote by Maryanne Wolf illustrates the intricate nature of learning to read, likening it to an amateur ringmaster coordinating various acts in a circus. Just as a ringmaster must first understand and practice each performance separately before bringing them all together in harmony, so too must a reader develop individual skills such as phonetics, vocabulary, and comprehension before they can fluently read a text. This highlights the necessity of practice and the gradual process of becoming proficient in reading.
In practice
This quote can be used to inspire teachers in a professional development workshop.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
The biggest mistake in student films is that they are usually cast so badly, with friends and people the directors know. Actually you can cover a lot of bad direction with good acting
It's not that our high school system was not designed well, but that it was designed in 1906 when the country was just out of the industrial era. There hasn't been a substantial systemic change the way we do high school since then.
Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.
Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.
Personally I do not resort to force - not even the force of law - to advance moral reforms. I prefer education, argument, persuasion, and above all the influence of example - of fashion.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
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