One of the books I've been reading over the break is a computer software instruction guide. That probably sounds boring to most folks, but to me it's a pleasure read because most of what I read I read analytically and critically -- as a writer, I'm always analyzing an author's style, as a literary critic, I'm always analyzing the subtext. It's not that I don't enjoy those forms of reading, but the problem is that the work of the reading process is "always on" and it's hard to take any text at face value. So reading a "how-to" book about a mechanical process once in awhile allows me to relax my critical faculties for a short period and simply enjoy reading the way I used to: reading for the sake of reading.

But of course, I'm not. I'm not just absorbing technical information or simply allowing language to cascade over me. I'm teaching myself how to do something -- how to follow a process. And along the way, I'm also incidentally picking up structures of teaching.

Reading non-fiction can enhance teaching, even in ways we don't realize. Perhaps this is obvious, but sometimes the most obvious matters of everyday life go ignored. Instructional guides, self-help books, "how-to" pamphlets, technical manuals...these books (which, by the way, dominate the non-fiction market, ergo consumer culture), are all popular texts written in a particular rhetorical mode: process analysis. They outline a "process," usually following the steps in chronological order one must take to put something together, or to go from point A to point B, or to simply arrive at some understanding of an abstract idea. Obviously. But the strategies the writers take teach us along the way about teaching. Whether it's sharing a personal experience as an example, coaching us to do a little exercise in the margins, offering us insider secrets and tricky methods...it's all teaching strategy as much as it is information about, say, how to build a deck or cook with a crock pot.

I'm not talking about "how to teach" guides, though those certainly belong in this category. Even so, training manuals in instruction only go so far in actually teaching us how to teach, and often conscript the art of teaching to so much lifeless dogma. I've always believed that most of what I know about teaching, I picked up by natural absorption from the best teachers I've had the good fortune to encounter in my life -- and I don't just mean those whose vocation is teaching, but also family members and buddies and on-the-job trainers. Anyone who took the time to explain something to me, taught me not just that "something" but also exemplified and modeled what it is to teach. And the same can be said for these instructional books, which organize information, personalize it, and directly appeal to the reader in hopes they will acquire a skill or learn a concept.

In some ways, too, all books are models for teaching, if only because a book organizes ideas in what one assumes is the best for communicating an idea. Textbooks, especially, offer themselves as obvious models for outlining a course, but virtually any well-organized book offers a structure for learning because -- as a book -- it expects readers to concentrate for an extended period of time, and to perhaps also have the discipline to leave and come back between chapters. Many a course syllabus, after all, is like a table of contents for a book that is the class.

So reading books -- even (if not especially!) innocuous "how to" books -- have contributed a great deal to my teaching, and have passed along many lessons to me, even if not consciously so. Of course, writing -- the active organization of knowledge -- really does the work to make such knowledge about the teaching process conscious, and this partially explains why educators must write theses and dissertations. If you can write a book, you can probably teach a course (and not just in the subject of the book itself), though obviously there's more to teaching than just organizing ideas. But structure matters at the very foundation of a course and it's the best teachers who read often, in my opinion. When we read, we sit in the subject position of reader, which is analogous to student. This generates a degree of empathy and understanding about what we need to know when we're learning a process. So the better teachers are active readers...not simply because they're well-read -- but, to some degree, self-taught.

Likewise, teaching probably makes us better readers. But I've said enough for now...I've got some more pleasure reading to do.

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