As a child, I also read with my finger under the text because I felt that it was the only way I could keep focused. I would often find myself daydreaming in the middle of reading and forgetting what I read altogether. This habit eventually went away with more schooling because we were taught that reading quicker is better. In tests such as the ELA state test and the reading portion of the SAT, we study by learning how to read quickly so that we could finish on time. In these exams, we skim the reading and search for keywords to help us answer the questions. However, when we skim the texts, we don’t indulge in the text, and we honestly do not give the work the attention that it deserves. 

Jacqueline Woodson talks about this in her Ted talk and encourages her listeners to read slowly and respect the author’s work. I never thought of reading as something that deals with respect. But now that Woodson brought it up, I understand how skimming an author’s work is such a disservice to the author. While skimming, we weed out sentences and phrases that we deem as important and generally forget the rest of them because they’re irrelevant to the questions. By doing this, we dilute the author’s work by reading quickly until we think we find something important. This makes me question why education systems work so hard to teach their students how to get through a text quickly rather than reading slowly and fully understanding the text. I feel like so many more creative minds would come out of school if children were taught to comprehend and read at a slower pace. 

Personally, I know that I have a bad habit of skimming over poetry because I don’t grasp figurative language too well. Thus, when I reread Langston Hughes’ poem “Let America Be America Again,” I paid a lot more attention to it because Hughes told the stories of people whose narratives are generally unspoken of in literature. Another aspect of reading that Woodson told her listeners to start doing is to read so that they could understand people and their stories of the past, which she calls the “silenced people.” As much as we read to remember those who came before us and who lived through something harder, authors like Hughes write their stories for them.