I have a 5-year-old daughter and soon we will start teaching her to read. Should we even bother? I read a lot of books when I was younger but truth is I can\u2019t even recall what they were actually about, not to mention what they were even titled. What was the point? While those are silly questions how we answer them are important.<\/p>\n
In Pierre Bayard\u2019s How to Talk About Books You Haven\u2019t Read <\/em>he tells us, \u201cEven as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable.\u201d[1] Through all my years of reading in education, for my career, or free reading, I can only elicit a small fraction of what I have actually read. Bayard says, \u201cIt extends to the point where it\u2019s as though I haven\u2019t read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place.\u201d[2] You have to admit there is some truth to what Bayard writes, yet it is not reading we should aspire to but thinking and understanding.<\/p>\n Watching my daughter start school it has been amazing to me the emphasis we place on reading while we spend little time highlighting how to understand, how to think, and why it is so important. While I can hardly remember most of the books I have read, it is those very books that have taught me to think.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know what age it is appropriate but I\u2019d love to see us start teaching children not just how to read but how to think and understand. We should start teaching our kids that the goal isn\u2019t to complete a book, but to understand the point the author is making, and to formulate their own ideas.<\/p>\n This same principle becomes even more important in regards to reading the Bible. Here in the Midwest, Christian culture is extremely prevalent. Most people I come in contact with own a bible, state they are a Christian, even quote many memory verses yet they don\u2019t know how to articulate their faith. While it is the same point Bayard makes it plays out in the opposite. While many actually have read the bible they don\u2019t know how to prayerfully think through what it says, and they don\u2019t know how to talk about it.<\/p>\n As a pastor it is a good challenge for me to not just encourage people to find good bible reading plans but they need to be taught how to process what they are reading. The church should be a safe place for people to think. We need to create an atmosphere for people to ask questions, dialogue, and even feel comfortable talking about verses they have never read. For our faith to be active we need to not just read the bible, but also believe what we are reading.<\/p>\n The most influential things I have read are not things I memorized and can recite to you, but they are things that formed the way I think and live.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1] Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven\u2019t Read <\/em>(New York, NY: Bloomsbury), 47<\/p>\n [2] Ibid., 47-48<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a 5-year-old daughter and soon we will start teaching her to read. Should we even bother? I read a lot of books when I was younger but truth is I can\u2019t even recall what they were actually about, not to mention what they were even titled. What was the point? While those are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[479,2,475],"class_list":["post-2109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bayardrowntree","tag-dminlgp","tag-lgp5-2","cohort-lgp5"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2109"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2129,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2109\/revisions\/2129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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