Forget me now ... er, forget me not

Back in graduate school, there were a couple of classes where the instructors packed way too much reading materials every week.  There wasn't enough time to read them all and--more importantly--for me to think through them and to then break them down.  Soon, I started skipping the readings.

Over the years of teaching, I have learnt to ease up on the quantity of learning materials in my classes.  Especially in these modern times when studies confirm over and over again that most students read very little.  Even when they read, their eyes jump over words and paragraphs.

My worry is that even when students do read and discuss, the new ideas and arguments might not be retained in their memories.  I tell them to be engaged readers.  But, unlike the classroom where I can control the environment by banning digital devices, in their dorms and apartments they are on their own and interrupted by distractions.  Every distraction sets them back.

Not only students.  All of us too.  We read a lot these days, yes.  But, it is almost as if we read to forget!

People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the average American encountered 100,000 words a day, even if they didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s decreased in the nine years since. In “Binge-Reading Disorder,” an article for The Morning News, Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the meaning of this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she writes, “but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”
Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as though you’ve learned something.”

Of course, in this age of access to information, one might wonder what the whole point of remembering is.  For one, this means that we are reduced to being drooling idiots when the access to Google is cut off, right?

Furthermore, as I remind students over and over again, information is not knowledge.  We make the mistake of equating them.  Googling to find something about Nabokov, for instance, is not the same as gaining an understanding of his work or about humanity that he writes about.  It is a false "feeling of fluency":

The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember.”

Yep.  Which is why I remind students to be actively engaged with the learning materials, and not to be passive readers or watchers.

I suspect that people always knew it.  Teachers, back when I was in school, told us to re-read the class materials.  Obviously they knew from experience that merely reading something once won't do it for most of us.  Nabokov himself noted this:

A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

Yep.

Now read this post all over again!