i dream of the forest and the sea

For purposes of this post, I'm defining "shoe" as "footwear you'd wear outside the house", and "actually used" as "something you've worn within the past month, and/or that you expect to wear again within a year".

Reblog with how many pairs of shoes you have that are actually used, and what they are.

And after the movie, or every few episodes, I'd ask her, you know, what her favorite part was, or what did she think would happen next? Total glass eyes. Okay, okay, favorite is a bit much. Was there a part she liked? A character? ..... Any character's name?

I told my sister I was concerned of course. I got blown off. And then she started school and started getting notes about her reading comprehension and my sister was like but she knows how to read, I know she knows what words mean! And I was like no no no this is what I was talking about and like. Obviously I read the four year old picture books too but the example that came to mind was being disappointed we couldn't finish Carmen Sandiego and either not knowing or not wanting to tell me the main character's name.

And she's like, well that isn't reading.

Okay! So! The skill isn't named correctly but that's what it is!! That's what it is for a 4 year old, they should at least be on that level!

The one that I know that I learned in college because I remember having problems with it, and then it finally clicking, was warm and cool colors. Golden hour, or how to indicate cool or warm in art. It’s one of my very favorite ways to play with color, NOW, but, it took me most of a semester in a color focused art class, in my early twenties to SEE it.

Ugh. So many assignments where the teacher was like, “nope, bot there yet.” So many!! (So long ago, too. We were doing slide photography and showing the slides in class, every class meeting)

It was useful, to me, to encounter something that took so much work for me to actually see it. Before that, I had mostly just done what was easiest, what people told me I had a “talent” for.

No. The skill of learning new mental skills? The frustration tolerance to get through and get it to click? THAT was the most valuable thing I encountered in college because it applies to everything all the time everywhere.

And it’s good to understand that it is ALL SKILLS! All of it. The easy and the hard stuff. You CAN learn it. Figuring out how to get yourself to actually grasp it is harder, though. Different people learn in different ways.

I think one of the ways that a lot of people get frustrated by how reading is taught in school is that some teachers will focus heavily on very specific details in books, and so you will end up being tested on reading retention rather than reading comprehension. I had a teacher in high school whose reading quizzes were all about random details in whatever passage we had been assigned for homework (e.g., how many minutes did it take for the floodwaters to get from Town A to Town B) rather than on the actual comprehension of the passage. This can make you feel like you can't do reading comprehension or are bad at it, because it's what you've been tested on (especially if you never took a literature class post-high school).

Here are some skills that I think are important for reading comprehension, whether you're approaching fiction, non-fiction, persuasive writing, or anything else:

Understanding the meaning of a sentence in isolation, a paragraph, a section, and the entire piece. That is to say, having the ability to both parse the meaning of a sentence on its own but also understand how a set of thoughts fit together. A great way to practice this is to try to explain what something means to someone else (can be a real person, a pet, a stuffed animal, whatever). When I'm working with the people who report to me to edit their writing, one of the things I will often ask them is to explain what they're saying in a very simple non-business way. This also works with someone else's writing--can you take what was written in explain or describe it in plain terminology? Can you summarize a chapter or even a book in a few sentences?

Fitting the writing within the context in which it was written or published. If you see an essay talking about women's safety, for example, that phrasing will mean something different depending on who is writing it. It is often clear from the rest of the essay what they mean by it, but it is key to comprehending the writing as a whole to understand the context in which it was written or published (for example, to know whether it is being used as a transphobic dogwhistle). Can you identify biases in the writing, either through how it's written or what you know about the author or place where it was published? We know some of the biases that will be present in a piece put out by the Heritage Foundation versus Planned Parenthood, even without knowing the author.

Identifying themes or messages in the writing. Some authors and some writing focuses much more heavily on themes or messages than others (for example, a persuasive essay will have a much greater focus on a persuasive message than an encyclopedia entry), but no writing is truly neutral, and themes, messages, or goals (intentional or not) are present in virtually every piece of writing. You don't need to write a five paragraph essay about everything you read, but it can be good practice to spend a little bit of time thinking about how the piece of writing presents certain information or people. If someone is described as "stubborn" versus "obstinate" or "brave" versus "foolhardy", it gives a sense of the message being presented about this person. if all characters of a certain race, gender, religion, etc. are presented a certain way, you can start to identify the message that the story is sending about that group--whether or not the author intended it.

Every single person on this planet thinks about dark and taboo things. It's literally the most normal thing in the world.