Academic Reading

              I am taking a course with large amounts of academic reading involved. I find that there are times when the mind becomes agitated and distracted when I read. I am trying to understand the dynamics behind that. Is it due to the strain of reading complex clauses? Or is it simply that the interest in the reading is not always evident or apparent? Maybe all of these questions and alternatives apply, though I am trying to find a more spiritual understanding of what it means to be distracted by what one reads. Is it possible, for instance, that distraction is an unconscious form of resistance to what the text is implying or suggesting? At times, how I respond to a text is not so smooth as a linear model might suggest. Reading does not simply mean taking the letters of words, stringing sentences together, and then coming up with neat interpretations. Other processes are involved, many of which seem taken for granted. And resistance to the text often comes, for me, in the form of a kind of turning away from the words. It is a subconscious way for me to make personal space for what the text is telling me, without fully submerging myself in the meaning of the words. I have a feeling that there is never a full ‘immersion’ in words. A subject always lingers in the spaces between the words.

                To give an example of what I am talking about: I was recently reading a required article for a course about educational reforms, specifically related to cooperative learning. This article describes a program which is designed to empower schoolteachers to design their own lesson plans and develop confidence in their abilities to lead students toward cooperative learning strategies. I felt resistant about this article for perhaps a few reasons. One such reason was that the data took the form of teachers expressing their opinions on how confident they were to implement cooperative learning strategies on their own in a classroom setting.  I wondered: how confident should I feel in the teacher’s expressed confidence? And what does it really mean for a teacher to express confidence? Is confidence a step forward, or is it a concealment of what is not known or not report-able? So I think my resistance to the article was its silent demand for my own confidence in the study and its methodologies, which I either lacked or could not pretend I actually had. It also comes from my feeling that high confidence is not always an accurate perception of what is really happening in one’s inner or outer worlds.

                The point I want to make is that reading is similar to a meditative experience. The Venerable was remarking in the Buddhist class today that most people approach science from the angle of wanting to replicate a particular experiment using a kind of proven hypothesis or recipe based on past experiences or cultural preconceptions. But meditation is not like this at all. I may have all the ‘right’ postures, right views and right conditions to practice, only to find myself falling asleep or having any number of wandering thoughts. The same is true of reading. Both my cultural expectation and working hypothesis about the reading process is that it is a linear process, if not one of the most linear. In theory, yes:  one reads from left to right or from top to bottom, depending on one’s culture/language, and simply turns the words into meanings based on the surrounding sentence structures and contexts.  But the real practice of reading is tricky and problematic.  It stops, it restarts, it disconnects, it pans out to reflect, it grows weary, and it is subject to all sorts of external conditions of the reading environment. And it implicates the process of why we become distracted from our reading.

Distraction is not just about boredom. It can be an indication that something does not connect me to that particular reading. But because my reader self dislikes so much the notion of disconnection, I will tend to have wandering thoughts or be tempted to go to the internet to find more distractions. A deeper ‘reading’ would be to stop before I distract myself and wonder about the disconnection itself. It might be about observing what resistance is preventing me from getting the vital point of the article or understanding its main gist. But that non-reading or refusal to read may be the way to engage the reading itself, if only the meaning of the disconnection is fully absorbed and understood. Because I train my mind to choose distraction over disconnection, I may never find the rich insights that lie behind the disconnection itself.