What about reading assignments?

[Hank Voss]

The Mentor's Manuel has some excellent comments on reading expectations and literacy issues. It is worth reviewing regularly. I also talk with my students about Adler's four levels of reading, and coach them on thinking about how much time they can spend on reading each week. Based on the amount of time they have budgeted, and the amount of reading assigned, they can decide at what level they will be able to cover the assigned reading.

What other tools are you using to help students with their reading assignments? I know Nic Nelson has been teaching his students the "Ransack Reading" method developed by Bobby Clinton. Hopefully we will hear from him and others soon?

[Nic Nelson]

This past summer (08) I developed a one-page handout for TUMI students and mentors, adapted from something I use with my tutoring clients. It has proven very helpful with other students, especially those who get huge reading lists dumped on them.

The basic idea is that the common understanding of how to read a book-- start at page 1 and read every sentence all the way through to the end-- is appropriate for elementary school and middle school curriculum, but adults are capable of a more varied approach to reading. In fact, we need one!

There are two central purposes to practicing Robert Clinton's continuum of reading:
1. it offers a reasonable and strategic way to tackle any big stack of books that comes our way, whether it is assigned reading for a new job or a reading list for a class we are taking.
2. there is no better way to gain a scholar's perspective on a particular subject than to be familiar with a huge number of books and articles on that subject. Either you devote twenty years of your life to an ivory-tower library and read them all, word by word, front to back... and find you've forgotten most of what you read, when you're done... or you give up the idea of "read every word = done with that book" kind of reading.

Whether you are learning a trade or earning a grade or yearning to be made wise, some of what you are given will simply not be super helpful... much of it you'll be glad you read, but it won't be worth memorizing... and some of it you ought to MASTER. Continuum reading helps you quickly figure out which books and articles should go in which category, and then gives you a framework to remember what you've breezed past as well as dive deep into what you have decided to master.

There is a lot more to be said about this sort of thing. Robert Clinton did write a book about it, after all. Others have their own approaches to the same challenge. Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren wrote a much thicker and more difficult book on it, for folks whose lives or livelihood depend on their reading ability (How to Read a Book). Gordon Fee & Douglas Stuart wrote two similar how-to books just about the Bible alone (How to Read the Bible..."for all its worth" and "book by book"). The name "Continuum Reading" might be newly coined by Robert Clinton, but the idea is very old. The famous philosopher, scientist, lawyer and author Francis Bacon (1561-1626) once said "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

That's continuum reading in a nutshell. For a one-page handout suitable for mentors to use with their students, see the Word file I'll try to upload here. I also created a helpful database layout for the most superficial (but in some ways most important) level of reading, the Scan, which I'm happy to share with anyone interested in it.

Feel free to edit any of my materials to suit your needs. I am happy to come and talk to a class or do a fun seminar on reading, writing, and study skills, or to help you develop your own if you are too far away for me to come in person.

Grace and wisdom!
-- Nic

[Nic Nelson]

Silly me, I posted my two cents without noticing or reading Hank's attached file! It is a very good one-page summary of Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book". If you have not downloaded it yet, go do that.

Okay, now click on and download the file attached to my post about continuum reading.

Open or print out both of them-- you should only need two sheets of paper (mine goes front + back of one sheet).

You are surprisingly obedient. Good for you. (that, or you are humoring me, which is fine since I can't see you sitting there)

Setting the two concepts side by side, here are some important contrasts:
1. Clinton adds more stages or modes of reading than Adler.
2. Clinton's stages are more "purpose-based", Adler's more "results-based" (I'm looking for better words to describe this distinction)
3. Adler does not have a counterpart for Scan; his idea of Skimming is closer to Clinton's Pre-Reading than to a simple Scan, which really should take no more than five minutes even if you are typing the information into a database field. Many seasoned continuum readers can Scan a book while standing at a book table or chatting with the friend who is showing the book to them, and be done in less than a minute. But the real value of Scanning is in saving the info somewhere to refer to it later.
4. Clinton does not have a counterpart for Synoptic Reading. His continuum focuses on what to do with the one book in your hands right now. (although Ransack and Mastery both strongly imply putting that book in context with others on the same topic.)
5. Adler assumes you already have strong study skills & an academic background, Clinton aims to help his students develop those things from scratch.

If anyone notices other similarities/contrasts between Adler's modes of reading and Clinton's stages along the reading continuum, please Reply them right here. I'd love to see what others think about these two different perspectives, how each one has been helpful. (or not!)