I am the
kind of reader that can sit down with a book and look up from it 5 hours later.
My friends are often driven nuts by the fact that they have to physically pry
the book from my hands before I realize that they are even in the room. In
Chapter 4 of Gallagher’s Deeper Readings
he discusses how the ability for students to focus on a book can be very
challenging and that if they are unable to focus they will not be able to grasp
the concept of their reading, or possibly not even be able to make it past the
first 5 words!
Focusing on
a book and tuning-out my surroundings has never been a challenge for me, but I
finally had a taste of what it’s like for some readers this past weekend. For
Thanksgiving my extended family all go up to our family cabin and spend the
weekend together. This year there were 16 people and three dogs up at the
cabin. Since the weather this year wasn’t exactly ideal we all spent the
majority of our time inside and practically on top of each other. As I was
sitting in front of the fireplace reading about ‘focusing the reader’ I
realized that I was a textbook case of a reader being in the wrong time and
place to adequately focus. I was in the middle of a 700-foot open floor plan
cabin with 18 other bodies loudly running around while counting down until
supper time. At that point I gave up trying to read and went to play football
with my cousins.
Later that
weekend while in the car on the way home I returned to Gallagher’s book and
actually read the chapter. While reading I reflected on the fact that had I
continued to try and ‘tune-out’ my surroundings before Thanksgiving supper I
probably wouldn’t have really taken in anything that Gallagher said. I would
have been reading on autopilot, looking at the words without actually being able
to focus on the meaning and implications of the chapter. Being completely
unable to concentrate gave me a better understanding of what difficulties some
of my future students will have with focusing.
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