I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the value of reading and curiosity over traditional academic skills.
Zadie Smith reflects on her educational experience, highlighting that while she may struggle with mathematical and scientific concepts, her passion for reading has propelled her understanding and appreciation of the world. This suggests that intellectual curiosity and the ability to engage with texts can be as significant as mastering traditional subjects.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literacy programs, I could refer to Zadie Smith's quote to highlight the need for fostering a love for reading.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
Good teaching must be slow enough so that it is not confusing, and fast enough so that it is not boring.
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
You may speak but a word to a child, and in that child there may be slumbering a noble heart which shall stir the Christian Church in years to come.
Your task, O preacher, is to make sure that you are faithful to the text, that you are faithful to the proclamation of that gospel, that you are faithful to set forth the whole counsel of God, and then step back and let it happen.
Therefore, teaching, talk and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up; that is, self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.
We grow up thinking that the best answer is in someone else's brain. Much of our education is an elaborate game of 'guess what's in the teacher's head?' What the world really needs to know right now is what kind of dreams and ideas are in your head.
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