What I mean by being a bad reader is that I don’t read linearly or diligently. I’m an associative thinker, so I’ll dip into one thing and it will send me scattering off to a thing in a whole other place. I read from the middle of a book outwards in both directions, but I do come back to it over years so that eventually I have the whole thing like a jigsaw puzzle. But this is a really inefficient way of reading, so I also then don’t read everything else that person wrote. I don’t achieve coverage — I’m not a housepainter so much as a disorganised collector.

But I think what Horton & Freire have in mind about making paths by walking, from the original poem, also includes the possibility of making where there is no path; rather than making your own copy of a book by forking a given thing as you read, and making what you do out of that. The poem that the title cites includes an image of the ocean where there are no paths, and because i live by the sea I think about this as a claim that’s perhaps countermanded by currents.

So then currents as a metaphor has me thinking about how we are all at the moment feeling the tug of a dangerous undertow that has some relation to education, and some to the idea of truth. What does it mean to give up the struggle to stay above the waves in these conditions?