{"id":285,"date":"2007-08-21T11:11:39","date_gmt":"2007-08-21T11:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/?p=285"},"modified":"2011-07-29T16:01:59","modified_gmt":"2011-07-29T16:01:59","slug":"some-good-advice-for-the-first-day-of-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/?p=285","title":{"rendered":"Some good advice for the first day of school&#8230;."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/mleddy.blogspot.com\/\">Michael Leddy<\/a> has some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lifehack.org\/articles\/communication\/advice-for-students-slow-down-and-read.html\">great words of wisdom<\/a> today for students about how to read:\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<span style=\"color:#666633;\"><em>My advice: slow down. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what the poet Ezra Pound says about reading literature: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Or consider this exchange between Oprah Winfrey and the novelist Toni Morrison: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Do people tell you they have to keep going over the words sometimes?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153That, my dear, is called reading.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>[. . .] Taking the time to slow down \u00e2\u20ac\u201d marking a passage, pondering a detail, looking up a word, writing down a question, changing your mind, looking at the page in a way that allows you to begin to notice what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s there \u00e2\u20ac\u201d might change, for keeps, your idea of what it means to read literature. Slowing down will also help you begin to understand how it is that some people seem to see so much in what they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re reading. They know that reading well sometimes means taking your time.<\/em><\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI say much the same thing on the first day of class every year, but I don&#8217;t think one can reiterate this enough. I love the quote from Pound, and I think I&#8217;ll be using that one for years to come.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n(Here&#8217;s something interesting, too: when I looked at this article on lifehack.org, a google ad appeared saying &#8220;Take an English class: Learn about English and literature at the University of Vermont.&#8221; The link took me <a href=\"http:\/\/learn.uvm.edu\/courselistfall\/?Page=course_CE.php&amp;category=ENGS&amp;term=200709\">here<\/a> to Continuing Ed&#8217;s list of fall English courses.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Leddy has some great words of wisdom today for students about how to read: My advice: slow down. Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what the poet Ezra Pound says about reading literature: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Or consider this exchange between Oprah Winfrey and the novelist Toni Morrison: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Do people tell [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,21,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-practices","category-books","category-teachingadvising"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paulwmartin.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}