This Book Needs a Backhoe

..or a front-loader snow shovel or something.

I am trying to get a head start on my reading for my first doctorate class, which starts next week. I am trying to be proactive and efficient. My plan was to finish the reading before the class started so I could dip in later and think profound thoughts and participate in profound and meaningful discussions, thereby increasing and enriching my comprehension. This would eventually lead to a pipe and a smoking jacket (in hunter green).

The book I chose to start with is The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Shoen. It is paperback and about as thick as most heavy-duty professional reading books. The print is very small, which must be the publisher's version of "neener neener neener" since nobody at the publisher's place is ever going to have to actually READ the tome once it is in print.

This Donald Shoen character was apparently well-regarded since he was an Ivy League professor of something or another having to do with business and his obituaries on
the internet nearly make him the 4th member of the Holy Trinity.

He wrote two books. This one and the follow-up. Both are considered classics and must-reads; among those titles that "your education is not complete if you haven't read it" kind of thing.

So, I dove in a couple weeks ago and had this immediate recollection of putting my rosy boa into the wading pool when the boys were younger. Rosie did not want to BE in the wading and pool and my normally docile and slow-moving snake whipped out of that water so fast you might have sworn it was electrified.

Well, THAT is how fast I put the book down and tried to read the other title. The other title is so bad that I can't even recall what it is right now, only that it is on my nightstand.

So I tried again and got through a few pages.

I posted on the ProfReading Board at Teachers.Net, my online reading group, and asked if anyone else had read it. Jan, a mentor and hero and Woman of Wisdom, who not only READS hefty titles but actually writes and publishes them, responded, as I hoped she would.

I was praying for some discussion so that the dense James Joyce/Feodor Dostoyevsky/Leo Tolstoy-like prose would make sense to me.

But alas... it is a title Jan attempted several times then "gave away," which I think is a euphemism for donating it to the Goodwill or Salvation Army. (I think it
is still there, marked down to 25 cents.)

So I dug in again. The last week or so it was all I could do to plow through two pages. (Not even that if a glass of wine was involved.)

Today, I made it through a dozen pages and believe that I can succinctly summarize what it is Shoen is trying to say. This perplexes me since I really don't understand why he has taken all these pages so far to posit a really simple thesis.

Proud of myself, I Googled the title thinking it might have a Cliff's Notes study guide. HA! I tried Spark Notes and could swear I heard "neener neener neener" when the query came up empty.

Desperate, I Googled again and found a book review for the follow-up title which says in a nutshell EXACTLY what my little succinct summary says in my head.

I am barely a quarter of the way through the book. My goal was to finish it tomorrow, according to the timeline I drew up for myself last week, when I had forgotten how dense and muddled this book is to actually read.

It is said that James Joyce wrote the greatest book in English ever written. The problem is that very few people have actually navigated Ulysses successfully. But I suspect the book is full of profound things - since it is said that Ulysses is the greatest book in English ever written.

John Dewey wrote like this and he had profound things to say. Paolo Freire wrote like this in TWO languages - and he had profound things to say. (He used the word "apprehend" a lot.)

So, I am going to hope against hope that Donald Shoen is worthy of his glowing obituaries and stellar book reviews and general pedestal-est qualities. I will again attempt to read and ponder.

Then I will attempt to "apprehend" what he means.

:-]Kim