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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There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.
Eugene H. PetersonRead
Nothing is so well learned as that which is discovered.
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I know what I should love to do - to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing - one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.
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The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed. It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.
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In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.
Mortimer AdlerRead
These words reveal the child’s inner needs; ‘Help me to do it alone’.
Maria MontessoriRead