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.
Newspapers are the schoolmasters of the common people.
It is easier for a tutor to command than to teach.
Children love this idea that their brain is like a muscle that gets stronger as they use it.
Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you you have omitted every word that he can spare.
After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.
Think! Think and wonder. Wonder and think. How much water can 55 elephants drink?
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