If you can forgive the person you were, accept the person you are, and believe in the person you will become, you are headed for joy. So celebrate your life.
Barbara JohnsonRead
Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of deep reading and analysis in literature, contrasting it with superficial reading habits.
Barbara Johnson highlights that teaching literature goes beyond mere authorial intent; it involves guiding students to engage with the text on a deeper level. In a fast-paced world where quick reading is prevalent, she argues for the necessity of learning to recognize the nuances and complexities within a text, so that readers can appreciate the richness of language and the evidence it presents, rather than oversimplifying it or substituting it with their own interpretations.
Themes
LiteratureReadingEducationAnalysisLanguage
In practice
Example use cases
A teacher could use this quote to emphasize the importance of thorough reading in a literature class.
More from Barbara Johnson
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We read to find out what the world is like, to experience lots of lives, not just the one we live. If it is true that our lives are chaotic and we crave a shape, stories are the shapes that we put on experience, containing all the wisdom in the world. We can even choose what kind of wisdom suits us.
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I went to what can only be described as a slum school in Salford - rough and full of trainee punks - but I was very lucky in that I had one inspiring teacher, John Malone, who gave the whole class an interest in romantic poetry.
John Cooper ClarkeRead
How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)
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But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.
Peter ThielRead
My hope and wish is that one day, formal education will pay attention to what I call 'education of the heart'.
Dalai LamaRead
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
Virginia WoolfRead