Has reading complicated
stuff every made you feel like you're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic? The
constant stopping and starting as you search desperately for comprehension can
be paralyzing in its own right - forgetting for the moment that the material
you're being subjected to qualifies as rocket science. What many don't realize
is that, nine times out of ten, the stop-and-start instinct masks itself as the
solution when it is really an obstacle - and a large one at that.
Perfectionistic comprehension is dangerous and actually pulls us away from
fluid understanding.
The rush hour traffic
analogy may seem silly. But let me explain. When you’re stuck on the
interstate, the worse thing you could possibly do is to try to get unstuck. And
if you’re like me, you creep and pause, creep and pause, and that only
exacerbates your feeling of helplessness. Similarly, in the panic for
sentence-by-sentence microscopic answers, we only become more fused with the
challenge of the material. We FEEL worse off because the pausing draws implicit
attention to our struggle. This unproductive fusion expends energy and pulls us
away from the process of learning. Don’t get me wrong: often times stopping and
starting frequently can be helpful, especially when your assignment is short
and thick. But if you find yourself in a vicious cycle of self-frustration and
bitterness towards your reading material, chances are you need to step on the
gas and move steadily – albeit slowly – for the good of your coherent picture.
There's another reason
why keeping moving is the way to go. A TON of learning potential lies in not
knowing completely, and that's true even if you've got the test tomorrow. Trust
me - you're going to fare a lot better knowing more grey at the expense of a
little stark black and white. Yes, by chugging along, you sit with the
uncertainty that what you missed is crucial to the next sentence. But you also
gain the strength not to be so reliant on it. Fluency implies flexibility.
Think of it this way: you can always go back after the first run-through (a
run-through is measurable and finite, and you can do it again), but a sentence
by sentence "time-suck" could go on forever.
Finally, frequent pauses
are harmful in their own right as they can be a potential precursor to full-blown
doubting disease. In its nastiest case, reassuring ourselves of understanding
at every turn is an obsessive compulsion, and its purpose can shift dangerously
away from wanting to figure out the content to needing to feel like we can do
it. A natural part of the learning process is genuinely feeling stuck -- like
we don't know and shouldn't waste our time - but the way out is not to wallow
in it. Frequent stopping and starting actually pulls us away from getting the
most out of just about anything we’re reading about. Cross-header connections
actually become HARDER to make because you're in your head more than you’re on
the page. True embrace of an academic
challenge is not how eager you are to absorb everything, but rather how willing
you are to take the risk that you might miss something crucial.
So how do you change your reading habits if you, like me,
suffer from obsessive-compulsive reading disorder?
- Step #1: Recognize that it’s okay to feel stuck. The tricky thing about stopping and starting is that you need to accept that it’s a part of your automatic response to difficulty before you can change it.
- Step #2: Start taking bold risks. Intentionally skip sentences that look crucial to the integrity of your understanding. Ask yourself what you just read about and then re-shift to the next sentence without giving yourself the chance to answer.
- Step #3: Free yourself to look before and after without pausing. Do it WHILE you keep going. Ironically, the present sentence exists everywhere the present sentence is not.
- Step #4: Take stock of how you’re doing. The goal is that,
over time, your relationship with uncertainty and confusion changes and becomes
more opportunistically framed.