After Writing=Reading

Last post I talked about writing and if I considered myself a writer.  To give the short answer I would say no, not really.  The same is true about me being a reader.  Again, like writing I have found times when I have enjoyed reading but I am not one to just sit down and be enveloped by a novel for hours.  Whether it is that I don't have the attention span or that I don't like to sit still for that long the overarching statement is that I don't consider myself a reader.  I find myself super distracted by outside influences when I am reading.  Even if I am really enjoying the book that I am reading I can still get distracted and then I just don't read.  In my college experience the time I would say that I was the best reader was after last semester and before I started to do things for the summer.  I had finally decided that I wanted to read the Hunger Games Series and I ended up reading those pretty quickly by my own standards.  Now as a kid I would read all the time.  I would come home from elementary or even junior high and just get enveloped in the book that I was reading but then that kind of died.  My mom was a big push to get me to read.  We had this rule that we could only watch so much tv and then we had to do other things like reading, homework or practicing the piano.  Then I also remember every summer I would participate in the summer reading program at the county library that was right down the road.  I loved to ride my bike to the library and then back.  It just far enough away that it would take a little bit to get there and then a while to get back because I always came back slower.

So far I have limited myself to talking strictly about books.  But there is more reading that is done than just books.  I do read a couple blogs that my friends or family write.  In this way I am able to stay current with things that are happening with them and their children even though they live far away.  The other thing that I like about blogs is that there is so much versatility in them.  You can change text color, size, highlighting, and you can add pictures and video clips.  There are also probably a lot of other things that can be done that I just don't know about.  I have a friend who really likes to make lists and share these lists.  So he started a blog that was talking about movies and the evolution of movies.  His blog also includes a list of his top 200 movies of all time.  There are some current movies on this list but then there are also some really old ones.  I also tend to enjoy reading the school newspaper however I rarely read news article s from different news stations.  They just don't seem to interest me.

When I think about reading specifically in mathematics initially I think of how there are the dreaded story problems that everybody seems to despise.  Whereas there is not much that can be done about those other things can be done.  As a teacher I could encourage reading by taking problem ideas out of popular books that could possibly spark an interest in a book.  There is a craze about zombies so a problem that could be talked about is modelling how many people will survive a zombie attack.  It would all be theoretical but could give something else to apply things to.