This is a good thing, I suppose, since we should always question our most dearly held assumptions when striving for more education. But still, I feel extremely uncomfortable in thinking that I may not be as awesome a reader as I thought I was.
Namely, I don't visualize while reading. There is no movie playing in my head. We've been talking a lot in class about how to teach various "reading strategies"--stuff like predicting, making inferences, activating background knowledge, and visualizing. I am ready to accept that visualizing can indeed be a useful strategy while reading, but personally I don't find it terribly useful.
Now, this is strange, because in other areas I'm an extremely visual person. I like photography and art. I draw comics to help me make sense of hard concepts. My notes in class usually look something like this:
When I write in books it looks like this:
So, I have no idea why I don't visualize what I'm reading--it's not something I ever did, or considered necessary for understanding or enjoying a book. When I admitted this to a couple classmates, one of them asked, "Wait, so what IS going on in your head?" Well, other stuff. It's not that I'm not engaged with the text, it's just that the visual details aren't terribly important to me in the face of things like emotions, relationships between characters, and the craft of the words themselves.
It seems to be this very closely-held tenant of teaching literature that students MUST LEARN HOW TO VISUALIZE THE TEXT, and I'm rather questioning that. Am I just weird, or are there other people out there that find visualization not only unnecessary, but distracting?
Because seriously, having a movie playing in my head while reading sounds terribly distracting.
So, do you visualize? Is it really like a movie constantly playing in your head? I just can't even imagine that....
Explain this to me please, sister. o_0
Love, Dory
How odd! I've always been able to visualize what I'm reading, and I'm surprised that you don't! It's not really something I learned how to do, it's just sort have always happened. I'll sometimes look up from what I'm reading and realize I wasn't really "seeing" the page at all, but more like a movie playing (as you said), or even more immersive than that. I find it easy to "hear" the sounds described, or "feel" the surroundings, so to speak. It's not distracting at all, just... well, immersive!
ReplyDeleteI do find it hard, however, to pay attention to the writing itself as you do. I have to really concentrate, or to have read the book a few times before, before I start noticing those details without trying.
Perhaps these are just two different "cognitive styles," if you will, where if one comes naturally to an individual the other requires a greater effort. What do you think?
Possibly! I've been dwelling on this a bit more, and I feel that I should clarify--I do form pictures of characters and setting and such, just not constantly. If a character is being described, I'm picturing them. And when I think about a story after reading it, the visuals come in then. (This is why I'm still totally qualified in saying that the dude that plays Gale in the "Hunger Games" movie is WAY too attractive. :P)
ReplyDeleteI think your idea that it's just a thought process that comes naturally to some people and not to others is probably right, but it bothers me, I guess, that the idea that students MUST be visualizing is so pervasive, and that us pre-service teachers are designing lesson plans around teaching this particular concept. In reality, there are some students that should be visualizing but aren't, and they need to learn how to do it so that they can be engaged in what they're reading. How do I tell the difference between those students and the ones who are fine without it? gah.