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I was out having a great time with Jeanette Winterson last night. Ok, maybe not with her personally, but I was in the audience and had a great seat and she even looked directly at me once! Bookman came too and has never read any of her books. He didn’t even know what she looked like and when she walked out on stage he cracked me up when he leaned over and said, She has Margaret Atwood hair! Winterson’s hair is not gray like Atwood’s but both have the same kind of curls and wear their hair about the same length with a similar style. I love their hair and I sometimes wish my loose, corkscrew tending curls were more like theirs. But I digress!

Winterson was at the University of Minnesota to deliver the autumn Esther Freier Endowed Lecture in Literature. Freier was first a student and then a professor at the U but not in the literature department. Nope, she was a chemist. But she loved the arts and was well aware that funding was hard to come by so when she died she left an endowment to the literature department that allows them to have two lectures a year and make it open to the public. How awesome is that?

Winterson’s lecture was titled “Reading as an Act of Rebellion.” If you have read anything she has written you will know she is funny and smart. In person she is that too but add personable and engaging and you will understand why at the end Bookman and I both wanted to yell, please keep talking because an hour is not long enough!

She ranged far and wide from the historical to the personal. She declared reading an extreme sport because one pits oneself with and against the best in literature.

The act of reading has through much of history been rebellious. Who was and was not allowed to read was controlled. Women weren’t allowed to do it and slaves certainly weren’t allowed. The more people read, the more they could think for themselves and those in power did not want to give up their power. When a person reads, and reads widely and diversely, it makes them one of the most threatening things in the world. Books can change the way we think and feel. Books show us multiple points of view. And while someone can see you reading and what you are reading, they cannot know what is going on in your head while you are reading. This makes you and reading dangerous.

Just like we talk about valuing biodiversity in nature, we should value biodiversity in reading. And we need to not just give it lip service and say “yay for diverse books!” We have to read those books too. Books are not meant to comfort, though they can do that. Books should expand the world for us and yes, even make us feel uncomfortable. A book that makes you feel uncomfortable is giving you an opportunity to think and experience and learn something.

Truth and fact are not the same thing, Winterson remarked. Simplification is a lie. We have language to help us make sense of complexity. Reading is great training in both diversity and complexity. The more reading you do, the more language you have and language is power. Just ask Malala Yousafza, Salman Rushdie, and those who work at Charlie Hebdo.

For the most part, Winterson said, we don’t have to ban or burn books in the west these days because people are just too busy to read them. There is no reason to get worked up over what people are reading when no one is reading to begin with. Winterson is also not a fan of ebooks because if you can’t see the books, if they’re virtual, how do you know they exist? Give her the solid book on the bookshelf. That way nothing is hidden. Amazon can’t erase it from all the Kindles. Can you imagine, she asked, if Amazon came to your door and took your copy of 1984 instead of making it magically disappear from your ereader?

Creativity and imagination is the birthright of everybody. We don’t have to apologize for art and culture nor do we have to explain. The mind is not a luxury.

Such a fantastic lecture! I am so grateful I got to go. I left feeling buoyant and excited, ever so proud to be a reader and determined to be as rebellious as I possibly can.

By Lara Alcock

Two contrasting experiences stick in mind from my first year at university.

First, I spent a lot of time in lectures that I did not understand. I don’t mean lectures in which I got the general gist but didn’t quite follow the technical details. I mean lectures in which I understood not one thing from the beginning to the end. I still went to all the lectures and wrote everything down – I was a dutiful sort of student – but this was hardly the ideal learning experience.

Second, at the end of the year, I was awarded first class marks. The best thing about this was that later that evening, a friend came up to me in the bar and said, “Hey Lara, I hear you got a first!” and I was rapidly surrounded by other friends offering enthusiastic congratulations. This was a revelation. I had attended the kind of school at which students who did well were derided rather than congratulated. I was delighted to find myself in a place where success was celebrated.

Looking back, I think that the interesting thing about these two experiences is the relationship between the two. How could I have done so well when I understood so little of so many lectures?

I don’t think that there was a problem with me. I didn’t come out at the very top, but obviously I had the ability and dedication to get to grips with the mathematics. Nor do I think that there was a problem with the lecturers. Like the vast majority of the mathematicians I have met since, my lecturers cared about their courses and put considerable effort into giving a logically coherent presentation. Not all were natural entertainers, but there was nothing fundamentally wrong with their teaching.

I now think that the problems were more subtle, and related to two issues in particular.

First, there was a communication gap: the lecturers and I did not understand mathematics in the same way. Mathematicians understand mathematics as a network of axioms, definitions, examples, algorithms, theorems, proofs, and applications.  They present and explain these, hoping that students will appreciate the logic of the ideas and will think about the ways in which they can be combined. I didn’t really know how to learn effectively from lectures on abstract material, and research indicates that I was pretty typical in this respect.

Students arrive at university with a set of expectations about what it means to ‘do mathematics’ – about what kind of information teachers will provide and about what students are supposed to do with it. Some of these expectations work well at school but not at university. Many students need to learn, for instance, to treat definitions as stipulative rather than descriptive, to generate and check their own examples, to interpret logical language in a strict, mathematical way rather than a more flexible, context-influenced way, and to infer logical relationships within and across mathematical proofs. These things are expected, but often they are not explicitly taught.

My second problem was that I didn’t have very good study skills. I wasn’t terrible – I wasn’t lazy, or arrogant, or easily distracted, or unwilling to put in the hours. But I wasn’t very effective in deciding how to spend my study time. In fact, I don’t remember making many conscious decisions about it at all. I would try a question, find it difficult, stare out of the window, become worried, attempt to study some section of my lecture notes instead, fail at that too, and end up discouraged. Again, many students are like this. I have met a few who probably should have postponed university until they were ready to exercise some self-discipline, but most do want to learn.

What they lack is a set of strategies for managing their learning – for deciding how to distribute their time when no-one is checking what they’ve done from one class to the next, and for maintaining momentum when things get difficult. Many could improve their effectiveness by doing simple things like systematically prioritizing study tasks, and developing a routine in which they study particular subjects in particular gaps between lectures.  Again, the responsibility for learning these skills lies primarily with the student.

Personally, I never got to a point where I understood every lecture. But I learned how to make sense of abstract material, I developed strategies for studying effectively, and I maintained my first class marks. What I would now say to current students is this: take charge. Find out what lecturers and tutors are expecting, and take opportunities to learn about good study habits. Students who do that should find, like I did, that undergraduate mathematics is challenging, but a pleasure to learn.

Lara Alcock is a Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University. She has taught both mathematics and mathematics education to undergraduates and postgraduates in the UK and the US. She conducts research on the ways in which undergraduates and mathematicians learn and think about mathematics, and she was recently awarded the Selden Prize for Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. She is the author of How to Study for a Mathematics Degree (2012, UK) and How to Study as a Mathematics Major (2013, US).

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Image credit: Screenshot of Oxford English Dictionary definition of mathematics, n., via OED Online. All rights reserved.

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That’s me in the video, blinking my “I love you” eyelids at Nabokov. Except the girl in the clip isn’t me and she’s blinking at Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones so you have to use your imagination a little bit.

This time I blinked away through Nabokov’s lecture on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. There isn’t anything earth shatteringly revealing in the lecture, but it’s just so well done. Well, there is one thing I hadn’t heard before that I thought was an interesting viewpoint.

Nabokov says that Mansfield Park is a fairy tale and Fanny Price is Cinderella. He makes an interesting case for it and while I might not wholeheartedly agree, it made me look at the book just a bit differently and that’s what matters, yes?

What I enjoyed most in the lecture were some of his more general comments about literature. Comments like this one:

The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person, or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book. An original author always invents an original world, and if a character or an action fits into the pattern of the world, then we experience the pleasurable shock of artistic truth, no matter how unlikely the person or thing may seem if transferred into what book reviewers, poor hacks, call “real life.” There is no such thing as real life for an author of genius: he must create it himself and then create the consequences.

I agree with him. Not about the book reviewers though; some reviewers aren’t hacks.

So he says interesting things about readers and on structure and theme specific to Mansfield Park but also in general in regards to what they do in a novel. And then he’ll come out with something random, like that hack comment about reviewers. Or, as in the middle of his setting the historical context for the novel. In this instance he is talking about the year 1808 and Napolean and the U.S. Congress passing the Embargo Act prohibiting U.S. ships from going to ports covered by the British and French blockade. Then, suddenly, in parenthesis, is this:

If you read embargo backwards, you get ‘O grab me.’

I pulled up short. Huh? Did I just miss something? I read the paragraph again and the next to make sure I had covered all the surrounding text. No, I didn’t miss anything, Nabokov is just making a rather lame joke. And my eyes blinked even faster.

Years ago after I read Don Quixote I read Nabokov’s lectures on the book and while I found them erudite and useful to my understanding of Cervantes’ masterpiece, I was too uptight yet from having finished the tale of the noble knight errant to actually enjoy the lectures. And that is all the Nabokov I have read. Until now. Add another lecture, the one on Ulysses from Lectures on Literature. And this time I fell in love.

Nabokov is no looker, though I suppose in his younger days before the jowls appeared he had a certain attractive intensity. Nonetheless, after reading his lecture on Ulysses I so want to be that girl in the first Indiana Jones movie who sat in the front row of Indy’s class and had “I Love You” written on her eyelids except I’d be in Nabokov’s class though being in Indy’s class wouldn’t be bad either (don’t tell Bookman about this though, he might get jealous). The man, Nabokov that is, had a brilliant mind, a definite opinion, the ability to explain complex things simply, and he was hilarious.

I wish I had taken the book off the shelf before I started reading Ulysses because Nabokov very nicely breaks his lecture up according to the chapters of Joyce’s book. But then reading it all afterwards has worked out just fine too because discussion or mention of other parts of the book necessarily creep in to chapters in which they aren’t a main part but have some import. I read Ulysses with Gifford’s Notes for Joyce always at hand. I am glad I did this but after reading Nabokov, I feel my reading was very small and detail oriented. Dear Vladimir was a lovely antidote to that because he goes big picture in his lecture. He includes details, certainly, but his main concern is how the details he does mention feed into the whole book and he manages to show the wonderful way in which the various elements weave through the book.

Nabokov also has the self-assurance to be able to criticize Joyce. He says things like:

Joyce can turn all sorts of verbal tricks, to puns, transposition of words, verbal echoes, monstrous twinning of verbs, or the imitation of sounds. In these, as in the overweight of local allusions and foreign expressions, a needless obscurity can be produced by details not brought out with sufficient clarity but only suggested for the knowledgeable.

He calls certain parts of the chapter that take place at the newspaper office “corny,” gives permission to skim or completely skip certain parts of chapters, asserts that he can’t abide by Freud or any kind of psychoanalytic reading of the chapter that takes place in the whorehouse, and declares Finnegan’s Wake “one of the greatest failures in literature.” He also made me snort when he tossed out, “every new type of writer evolves a new type of reader; every genius produces a legion of young insomniacs.”

But he also says things like,

You will enjoy the wonderfully artistic pages, one of the greatest passages in all literature, when Bloom brings Molly her breakfast. How beautifully the man writes!

In that you hear the teacher talking to the student but also Nabokov the reader and Nabokov the writer expressing his joy and appreciation.

I could babble on and on and blink my “I love you” eyelids all night but I’ll leave it there. If you ever decide to read Ulysses you have to make Nabokov’s lecture part of the experience. And if you absolutely refuse to read Ulysses, read Nabokov’s lecture so you at least have an idea of what you are missing out on. And now I think you will be spared from any further Monday Ulysses babble. I can’t make any promises though.