...Irony

What is irony?  Webster would do himself a service if he defined irony as sitting in a room as a blind man teaches you to read. 

That was me a few days ago, taking reading lessons from a blind dude.  Obviously not in a “See Jane Run” kind of read.  Not in a “sound it out” kind of read.  And definitely not in a “feel the words” kind of read.  I’m talking about graduate-level reading.  When you’ve got a few hundred pages each week to read you’re willing to entertain just about anyone who says they can help you keep your head above water.  So you find yourself in a packed room with your fellow graduate students listening to a blind man teach you Graduate Level Reading Skills.  Six Steps:  Read the titles; paraphrase the conclusion; ingest the introduction; skim the topic sentences; re-read the conclusion.  Read and Destroy.  Focus on the logic.  What are they missing.  How is it flawed.  A 30-page article should be consumed in 20 minutes.  An entire book?  Maybe an hour.  You’re a graduate student now, you’re not reading for content, you’re reading for argument. 

FYI - This is a hard concept to grasp for someone who grew up reading for content.  Who loved content.  Who consumed content. 

At the beginning of his workshop he joked, “hey, you may have noticed I’m blind, so if you have a question don’t raise your hand, it won’t do you much good”.  A couple times during his workshop I closed my eyes, you know, just to see what it was like.  Anxiety, negative adrenaline, overwhelming nervousness.  I don’t like not seeing.  None of us like not seeing.

The amazing thing was not that this blind guy was teaching me to read.  I got over that by minute two when I recognized I could learn a lot from this dude.  The amazing thing was what he represented. Here was a scholar blind from age 14 who made himself a recognized expert in his field.  Here was a man stripped of his primary sense who made his way easily through life with nothing but a cane.  Not even a dog...a cane.  Here was a man who recognized the irony of the situation, joked about it, then readily passed on his knowledge to others.

Here was an extraordinary individual, extraordinary in every sense of the word, who has overcome more adversity than most of us could ever imagine.  Here was Professor Zach Shore, the blind man who taught me to read.