These days, I'm doing most of my reading while feeding my 7-week-old son Abraham. It requires quite a bit of skill really. One must be able to hold a 10-11 pound baby, keep him eating, balance a book/magazine/computer on the arm of the chair or lap, and keep focused on both baby and text at the same time. Hardest is reading on the computer. Today I was reading "What is Literacy?" by James Gee for one of my graduate courses (I'm a student in the University of Iowa's School of Library and Information Science), and I am proud to say that I've mastered the timing to keep the light going on my screen, scroll down, and scroll pages on a PDF file without disturbing Abe.
The essay was really pretty interesting, and his discussion of acquisition vs. learning was really interesting. It made me think about how I teach and how to get more out of it. We can't always "acquire" knowledge in school the way he suggests (because it's not a natural environment), but I can do better to admit the limitations of the environment and make better use of the teaching/learning situation that we do have.
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