Why read?
I've been musing on how do you convince someone, a teenager perhaps, to read? I'm proceeding as if such a goal is obviously desired. I will think about that assumption later. . .
But, assuming that reading is beneficial, how do you get someone who hates the process or finds it difficult or tedious to do it?
I was thinking of a visual diagram of our brain. In the diagram would be some colored parts, the knowledge we are born with (our ability to learn language for example) but the rest of the brain is uncolored. Colors come through knowledge and knowledge can come from reading or discussion and can be fine tuned through writing and perhaps certain types of thinking, though not so much through memorization. My diagram needs further refinement, however, for different types of coloring in. Some knowledge is like muscle memory that overtime becomes quite dark and almost taken for granted while other is kind of ephemeral and fleeting easily becoming erased. Some colorings are partially filled in while others are fully so. Learning more fills in those rather incomplete colorings. You can choose to go around with this rather empty brain or you can start to color it in. I know the analogy is simplistic but might work for a teen.
Maybe a better analogy is like seeds that are planted and in order to get them to grow and to be healthy you have to tend them or they wither and die.
Interactions with a variety of others depends on having some shared plantings, so to speak. If you don't its hard to converse. Those plantings could be knowledge about sports or banking or literature, but to fully develop the plant you need rich fertilizer which comes through books. But is that so? What's happening on the brain when we read versus watch tv? Talk vs. read? If the connections get stronger when we write down what we read, wouldn't stronger connections also come through grappling with difficult material successfully?
But, assuming that reading is beneficial, how do you get someone who hates the process or finds it difficult or tedious to do it?
I was thinking of a visual diagram of our brain. In the diagram would be some colored parts, the knowledge we are born with (our ability to learn language for example) but the rest of the brain is uncolored. Colors come through knowledge and knowledge can come from reading or discussion and can be fine tuned through writing and perhaps certain types of thinking, though not so much through memorization. My diagram needs further refinement, however, for different types of coloring in. Some knowledge is like muscle memory that overtime becomes quite dark and almost taken for granted while other is kind of ephemeral and fleeting easily becoming erased. Some colorings are partially filled in while others are fully so. Learning more fills in those rather incomplete colorings. You can choose to go around with this rather empty brain or you can start to color it in. I know the analogy is simplistic but might work for a teen.
Maybe a better analogy is like seeds that are planted and in order to get them to grow and to be healthy you have to tend them or they wither and die.
Interactions with a variety of others depends on having some shared plantings, so to speak. If you don't its hard to converse. Those plantings could be knowledge about sports or banking or literature, but to fully develop the plant you need rich fertilizer which comes through books. But is that so? What's happening on the brain when we read versus watch tv? Talk vs. read? If the connections get stronger when we write down what we read, wouldn't stronger connections also come through grappling with difficult material successfully?
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