Namwali Serpell

And in the course evaluation, several of them said it was so wonderful to get to read so much of Morrison.

And I realized that there was something that were actually depriving students by, you know,

preventing them from reading whole books, for example.

The idea that you teach just excerpts in high school.

This, I think, has done a terrible disservice to young people.

Reading is, it's, I had this course that I taught recently that was on literary methods.

And at the end of the semester, we read some theories of reading.

What does reading feel like?

So phenomenal reading.

And I asked them in class to write down, you know, a two-paragraph metaphor for their own reading experience.

What was reading like for you?

What was learning like?

And one of the students said it was like throwing a stone into a lake and then catching the ripples.

And another student talked about learning how to read in the womb because her father would read stories to her mother when she was pregnant.

And how that then becomes a metaphor for what reading feels like.

And after we went around and read these out loud and discussed them, we then had a debate about chat GPT.

And I asked them to prove to me that chat GPT was in any way more interesting, more profound, more life-giving than what they had told me reading felt like.

And they couldn't do it.

And I think something clicked for them then, that to take that experience away from other people was in fact a disservice.

I actually think it's politically motivated.