1. I spent several hours today keeping Riley company over at Christy's house. Riley moved closer to me today, often lying on the floor near my feet. I'm not an animal psychologist, but I'll act like one for a second here. Riley seemed kind of stunned the first day or so of Christy's absence, but today he shook off the lethargy that came with being puzzled and moved around the house a bit more and approached me more willingly.
Dog sitting him has been easy.
2. For much of the day, both while dog sitting and back home, I continued to read The Mosquito by Timothy C. Winegard. Honestly, as he details the life of the mosquito and its impact upon human life going back really deep into antiquity, I have trouble grasping the huge amount of time, way before homo sapiens emerged, that not only the earth, but the mosquito has existed.
I began to feel like I was on somewhat more familiar ground as Winegard explored the impact of the mosquito on life and on military actions involving the ancient Greeks, Romans, Macedonians, Carthaginians, and others, but I had no idea that the devastating impact of the disease carrying mosquito shaped much of the history and development of these entities and of what we call the western world. It's mind boggling.
3. Debbie and I converse frequently about what we're reading. Debbie reads with a notebook at her side and writes out passages and other notes. (I did quite a bit of this today as I tried to keep timelines and other facts straight while reading The Mosquito.)
Our conversations got me thinking about my teaching life about thirty years ago.
For two academic years (1995-97) I assigned my students readings out of a book entitled Ways of Reading.
For an hour or so this evening, I couldn't remember that book's title, but I did some halfway creative search engine work and found the title. In the process of looking for it, I had memories I enjoyed a lot return to me of as I read other book titles of textbooks available back in my teaching days: A World of Ideas, Rereading America, The Bedford Reader, The Norton Reader, The Shape of Reason, and many others.
What I really wanted to find, though, was the introduction to Ways of Reading.
I found it online.
And I familiarized myself again with a concept I have had on my mind for over thirty years now.
Readers often read with a pencil and pen and mark what they are reading.
This introduction turns that around and posits that, at the same time, what we read marks us.
I began to think, yeah, what I read underlines me, puts notes in my margins, puts question marks, exclamation points, and asterisks on my inner life of memory, experience, ideas, and values and those marks invite me not just to read a text but to converse with it, question it, open myself up to ways it is impressing (or marking) me.
Looking back, I have no idea if this concept made any kind of mark on my students.
But as I taught from Ways of Reading, I became a student of its (back then) editors, David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, and this evening their introduction reminded me how they inspired me to work at becoming what they call a strong reader. An active reader. An attentive reader.
It invigorated me to revisit those two academic years, to remember the countless conversations I had with fellow instructors about Ways of Reading, and the stimulation I enjoyed thanks to the difficult and mind stretching readings Bartholomae and Petrosky included in their book.
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