Learning, Reading, Meeting a Challenge: A Bit of Grumbling about Quantification

07 Jan, 2024

As I’ve been learning HTML bit by infuriatingly little bit, I’ve inevitably been thinking about impatience: about both the ways it takes hold in me and the concept itself. Talking over at Wordpress about my move onto this platform, I compared the process of mastering a bit of markup to the frustrating excitement of venturing into a new language: the day you learn how to conjugate the verb “to be,” endless and grand possibilities start popping up and leaving you thinking you now have access in your new language to all avenues of storytelling and explanation and justification and the know-how to be uniquely creative. Try to talk, though, about something you did yesterday, or habitually did in the past, or that you would have done if only circumstances had been otherwise, and you’ll find you’ve run up against a wall of stuff yet to be learned, and that’s only dealing with verb tenses. And as a classmate once observed,¹ it takes a hell of a lot of tedious slogging to master a language or any other complex subject; in his words, no one ever thinks about the unglamourous fact that to be able to be convincing in multiple languages, James Bond had to spend uncountable hours sitting there eating his taco and reviewing vocab flashcards.

Where my present remedial understanding of formatting and simultaneous desire to produce virtual artistry is concerned, when transferring old posts, I’m rushing up against the longing to include all the images they originally used, in spite of the fact that I don’t yet have the skills to align or resize those images. Hence, until (apparently) I get into CSS, it’ll be all text for now, and I’m just going to have to be patient, trying as well not to give in to mini-fits when I can’t understand why something’s not working.

When this sort of thing happens, it’s a pretty good bet I’ll feel better if I just step away for a while and tuck into a book. But impatience creeps in there as well; I’ve always got multiple volumes going at the same time, and when I look at my never-diminishing to-be-read pile, or even think about the list of books I want to get my hands on, I experience the temporary paralysis of desperately wanting to, and yet being unable to, read everything all at once. Whether that’s a sign of hankering to be reading or to have read it all, I’m not sure, though I suspect it’s the former. Either way, though, I’m wondering if I’m more susceptible to that impossible sense of being shoved along at this particular time of year, when’s everyone’s setting goals—and as is the case on Goodreads, publicly challenging themselves to finish a certain number of books within the year.

Racking Up the Numbers

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for encouraging people to read more, and libraries have been doing this for as long as I can remember. Even though I never turned in any of the paperwork I’d take home from the library during the summer, meant to record everything I read over break and to be returned in August or September for a chance to be the reading champion, I still kept devouring books, just because that’s what I always did. But if a sort of contest in that vein will get schoolkids, or anyone else, to read more or to get excited about books and to make connections with others who feel the same way, fantastic.

All the same, I’ll admit to a bit of cynicism about the social media variety of this old library challenge. Goodreads is, after all, owned by Amazon, and the more you buy from them and read, the better off they are. But there’s also the old problem of determining the value of a given endeavor by using only one criterion—in this case, number of books read. Were they long or short, brain-breakingly difficult or so fluffy you could watch TV and have a conversation while skimming through the pages? Undiminished as my love of those old Edward Packard choose-your-own-adventure books still is,² I can’t honestly say that the hour of glee involved in reading one of those took the same amount of time or (emotional or mental) commitment or work or fortitude entailed in getting through the nearly 1,300 pages of Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School.³ Each type of book is doing something different and providing a distinct sort of enjoyment or spur to thinking about the world and self in new ways, and neither is “better” in any general way than the other. But when quantity is the only factor in summarizing an experience like book reading, all other components that contribute to it might just be discounted.

I suspect I’ll be accused of stretching here, but I can’t help but see this numbers-based challenge as connected to what feels like the US national view of education in general: not as a valuable experience in and of itself, as something that’ll enrich your life—but as a necessary, often unpleasant, means to a concrete end, i.e., a job that pays you enough to do something other than scrape by. Of course, that end goal is not insignificant,⁴ and everyone should have access to the sort of education that will allow for pursuit of a career that interests them and pays a living wage.⁵ But the sense I get from this set-up is that education is viewed as only a means; that there’s nothing to be gained or loved about the process itself. And the ways in which a good education should help us grow into something like mature adults, learning to be with and interact with other people as we do all that useful learning, to find what we enjoy doing for its own sake—the things that are hardly insignificant to shaping a meaningful life—feel as if they’re treated at best as “soft skills” or some other sort of mechanism to attain a well-paying end.⁶

It’s not as if this attitude is exactly new; the US as a whole has hardly ever gone in for intellectual activity for its own sake (see Richard Hofstadter’s work from the mid-twentieth century, especially Anti-Intellectualism in American Life). And with the weird tendencies we’re now seeing in a sizable portion of the population to disbelieve (the very notion of) fact or lash out against the very concept of expertise, the view of education or learning in general as merely instrumental at best should come as no surprise. So shouldn’t I be cheering on, then, a simple old reading challenge that would seem to work against that tendency to disdain using your brain just because?⁷

Again, hooray for encouraging reading; I’m guessing even in spite of the goal being the attempt to hit a number, pleasant surprises and insights occur along the way. But I may also feel uneasy about this endeavor because, in valuing number of books read over any other factor (indeed, not even mentioning any other factor), it feels like what’s really being reinforced here is an encouragement of greater efficiency or productivity or accumulation (or for Amazon, profit), as opposed to sitting with something and really trying to understand it or how it affects you or just simply lingering in enjoyment. And in attempting to meet your year-end KPI,⁸ you might just end up racing through a bunch of pages to hit that target, impatient to get it all done with and finally winding up sort of dizzy and unsure what just happened. Glad it’s over.

Apologies to everyone who does take up book-reading challenges, and who gets real enjoyment and value out of them; I by no means want to dismiss them as worthless or damaging, and do see how they can contribute to establishing a habit that in turn becomes a source of true enjoyment and insight and connection and all the other good things.

Apologies as well for leaping into what may have seemed like a tangential and weird little reactionary spree; after all, wasn’t I originally talking about trying to learn markup? And doesn’t my own impatience signal the very problem I was railing against, namely, getting past the training phase and getting on with serving the world up with mind-blowingly formatted blog posts? I’ll accept guilt on all fronts, while also admitting to experiencing stupidly intense moments of exhilaration when I do manage to make a new bit of code work, or realize I can make something I’d never even considered happen—so there is joy in the process, held in simultaneous tension with the desire to do more, right now. Does it matter that I’m doing all of this simply for my own satisfaction, and not as a stab at so-called upskilling? I’m pretty sure a career in coding isn’t in the offing for me. While I sort all of that out, though, or at least continue to wonder about motivation and end games and ultimate value, I’ll leave you with a mostly unformatted placeholder image to finish this all out:⁹ a little visual reminder that I’ve made a small gain, but that there’s so much more to learn—and that the learning, at this point at least, is pretty ridiculously exciting.

Subscribe to Off-Modern Onions!

^{2. Although the Choose Your Own Adventures trademark got bought by a company called Chooseco, which runs its own site and issues new work under it, Packard's titles, old, revised, and new, are published with Simon & Schuster under the series title U-Ventures.↩}

^{3. Edoardo Albinati, The Catholic School, translated by Anthony Shugaar (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).↩}

^{4. We could get caught up here in an infinite regression (or progression) to find out what the ultimate good actually is here: a job, or a fat paycheck, or the things that paycheck will buy, or the status those things will grant you,...?↩}

^{5. There is, of course, a larger question of just what a living wage means in a society where you're essentially on your own, and it's fine and dandy and perfectly legal and even admirable to pay people as little as possible, even if that little won't get you anywhere near being able to scrape by.↩}

^{6. What's usually the first thing to get cut from K–12 education? Fine arts programs. From universities? Liberal arts; one of the most recently noticed slashes, at West Virginia University, was right in line with many a skeptical parent's challenge, "How're you gonna get a job studying that?" And in turn caused some to plea for the humanities' relevance not on their own, but, you guessed it, because you'll get a good job as a result of studying them, as in Peter Frank's piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4 November 2023. There's also a discussion to be had about arguments I remember from my own K–12 days—and if I'm remembering correctly, from some of Richard Hofstadter's writing—where education was held up as a developer of “good citizens,” an argument that itself could be problematic, but which seems at least a little broader than the argument for producing good worker bees.↩}

^{7. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Random House, 1963). For the argument about hostility to expertise, see Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).↩}

^{8. There may be no other businessy term I despise more than this abbreviation, which stands for "key performance indicator," an idea against which I probably hold too much hostility, reeking as it does of new ways to make performance reviews ridiculous and awful.↩}

^{9. Peachyeung316, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.↩}