The Modern Fairy Tale

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In addition to “Little Red Riding Hood,” this week in Haley Hach’s The Modern Fairy Tale students are reading parts of Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a Book, which contains this remarkable admission from the author:

I did not discover I could not read until after I had left college. I found it out only after I tried to teach others how to read. Most parents have probably made a similar discovery by trying to teach their youngsters. Paradoxically, as a result, the parents usually learn more about reading than their children. The reason is simple. They have to be more active about the business. Anyone who teaches anything has to.

My sense is that this is a lesson many of the faculty take from their classes, that reading requires much more activity than it seems, and that teaching in the seminar style, where knowledge is co-created between teachers and students (to borrow from Lucas Corcoran’s faculty profile), often leads to more learning, for everyone, than any of us could have predicted.

One thought on “The Modern Fairy Tale

  1. This is a wonderful observation and acknowledgement of the relationship between the teacher, the student and their learning. It reminds me of Einstein’s “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

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