A Strategy Helping Me Drastically Improve Reading Comprehension
Summarize, in your own words
Somehow, it failed to dawn on me that the reading comprehension techniques I teach my students would be useful for me too. We talk a lot about the unfair, racist, and biased implications of testing in America, but the fact is testing is not going away any time soon. As a teacher in public education, I am very cynical about the prospect of actual, non-band-aid educational reform. And the world certainly gets a lot easier knowing good test-taking strategies than not knowing good test-taking strategies.
If you’re anything like me, too, you just read. You don’t stop. You read for completion. You read everything like a novel and you read most things pretty naturally. It’s difficult to read everything like a dense academic text — as such, reading for enjoyment doesn’t mean you stop for everything you don’t understand or for every unfamiliar word. Reading is just reading. We do it to be entertained, informed, process information, and just get through life.
Reading for enjoyment is one goal. However, reading for comprehension is a whole different goal. Reading for comprehension is tedious and much slower. We all read differently, but what is certain is how I read the New York Times is often not a great way for reading passages on the LSAT. As much…
