It’s always good to feel the cognitive burn.
Today, I wanted to take reading notes as a model for my students. Not wanting to double up anything in the course, I decided to take first notes on a book I’m rereading, Augustine’s Confessions. The book has always given me problems. I’m fascinated by it, but there’s almost too much there to do anything but mark everything up: too much style, too many questions, too many scripture citations.
So I found myself in a very interesting situation this morning as I read Chapter 1. It wasn’t clicking for me. I felt confused. I felt lost. I knew that I would have to summarize the chapter when I was done, and it seemed like there were too many things that merited inclusion (or nothing that merited inclusion, I guess). But I knew I had to keep going.
And after 15 minutes or so, the reading began making more sense. I remembered passages I had forgotten about: the stuff about being a selfish baby, the criticism of The Aeneid, and his lamenting of how he used his rhetorical skills.
As the chapter ended, I didn’t have to wonder how to respond or make up my notes from scratch. I had three clear objectives: put the content in my own words, find two key quotations, then think about how the chapter connected to other things I had read or experienced. I could do that.
It was good to remember what it feels like to be confused, to know there was a simple task on the other side of my confusion that I could use to work towards understanding, and the awareness that this kind of response will be great for students to use on everything they read: from the Bible to their psychology textbook.