changing my mind: crocodile hunter edition

"when we change from one form of literacy to another,

we change our minds, in both senses of these terms"

(Myers, p. 302)

I'm a new student. So let me be the first to admit that I had a hard time entering this text. I'd pick it up, get irritated, change my mind, put it down. Then I'd change my mind, pick it up again, try, try, again. All the while changing my mind, "in both senses of the term." It wasn't the ideas that threw me (most of it was familiar). It was the prose, I think. The lack of subheadings. The forbidding diagrams (see p. 135 - ouch!). The circuitous route to the point. The sensation of following Myers word by word, step by step along a meandering path through each chapter, trying desperately to put it all together and understand, and then - at last - here comes the clear statement of his argument in last sentences of the chapter. So my first order of business then, as a reader, was to get over all that. To do some "self-fashioning." And I did. Let's see how...

By way of coming back to our conversation in class: What makes us a better reader? Tolerating ambiguity, confronting difficulty. Blau (quoted in Myers, p. 144) says, "It is our willingness to confront such problems and our courage in working them out -- not our defenses against having them -- that define and exemplify our literacy..." Mike Rose (quoted in Myers, p. 145) describes an experience with a teacher who helped him read difficult texts while "gaining confidence that if [he] stayed with the material long enough and kept asking questions, [he] would get it. That assurance proved to be more valuable than any particular body of knowledge [he] learned that year." So there I was, too. Becoming more literate, talking to myself, asking questions, admitting difficulty, wrestling with my reading like the crocodile hunter takes down a croc, until my literate self felt victorious as I closed the book at long last on page 302. I'd changed my mind, refashioned my literate self from a passive, then frustrated reader, to a active meaning-maker. Crikey!