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Sleep-Reader: Yes Mom, I Did My Homework

In the US our K-12 school system has developed habitual sleep-readers. A few of these young people have probably modified these habits while in college. Since most college graduates are enrolled in specializations requiring little reading comprehension the number who have become accomplished readers are few.

Webster says ‘read’ means “to receive or take in the sense of symbols by sight or touch”. A person is considered literate when this standard is met. Evidently a large percentage of our high school graduates are illiterate and thus they do not even meet this very low standard.

I claim that to be a good reader a person must be more than literate; one must be able to efficiently determine the meaning of sentences, paragraphs, and large groupings of paragraphs. I suspect that any adult who has not made a concerted effort to modify these bad reading habits does not read beyond the pulp-fiction level.

The current emphasis is some state educational systems is reading comprehension on the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. This is more then just simple comprehension of the text, but expanding the thinking process to inquire further beyond the printed words on the page. Alot of this can be linked to assisting students to perform better on standardized testing-but any good teacher does this all the time in their classroom.

To comprehend fiction and non fiction requires that the reader use two different reading methods. Fiction is creative writing and generally requires the reader to move page by page from beginning to end.

Non fiction reading is an entirely different animal. Generally a non fiction book has at most 15 % of its content to be new stuff. The reader who is completely new to that domain of knowledge might read from the first page to the last, but such is unusual. Most readers of non fiction are reading with a question and scan the contents looking for things that might help supply an answer to that question.

The good reader must learn to develop questions if s/he wishes to read efficiently. Our schools have not prepared us to be good readers and it is something that we must do for our self.

Let the question be your guide to good readership.