The San Francisco Earthquake
Yet I wrestle with my showstopper post titled Scaling the Depths, which compares the historical trajectory of learning to quantify the force of earthquakes at hypocenter and epicenter to ranking the intensity of reading comprehension from the surfaces of text to experiential knowledge and belief. Disruptions of varying magnitudes reshape worlds, the external physical space and the internal figured perspective.
In the physical world the Earth’s crust, the most buoyant layer of rock, the most stable and durable, floats on a thick, pressurized layer called the mantle, more loosely structured rocks and minerals amidst pockets of molten lava. Like an eggshell cracked in several places though holding its shape, seven plates float beneath the crust, tectonic plates meeting at the edges, stuck between the crust and churning inner layers of hot soupy rock.
A sudden release of energy deep in the Earth’s mantle, causing friction at a point on a seam called the hypocenter, creates seismic waves that break the crust along a fault line. The focus of the quake on the surface is called the epicenter. We have no knowledge beyond estimates of the magnitude of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Today we can reliably measure earthquakes up to 14.0 on the Richter scale. In 2024 we have global networks sensitive to tiny shivers accessible instantly anywhere on Earth.
In our figured world of reading comprehension, the surface of the text physically and metaphysically is analogous to crust in the abstract. What lies beneath or inside or around the text in the way of mantle or core, mountain or volcano, ocean or land, is not relevant to this inner frame of test reference, and as a result the academic cultural model of ‘text’ educators share implicates letters, words, sentences, diagrams, patterns of organization, titles, authors, message, etc. The writer creates the crust on which the reader lives. Reading comprehension is subsistence living.
The reader in this analogy is the human being ‘processing’ the ‘signs’ in the ‘text’ to ‘extract’ and ‘reconstruct’ the ‘material.’ There is more that we leave out. We do know things about the mantle and core, the depths comprehension can reach over decades of experience, like the inner workings of expert, long-term memory, the deep structure of language, the intensification of collaboration, and now access to AI.
But the mirrored figured world of reading comprehension is shallow, sticking to the surface of text, positioning readers as skilled technicians. There are no earthquakes in reading comprehension. Instead, slaves in a diamond mine, contract laborers, temps in classrooms that press restart every year, readers doing reading comprehension process their assignments in steady state, avoiding extremes.
But in the world as experienced, there are pressures pushing on tectonic plates of carefully curated content that build sometimes across years, across texts, across people and places—pressures that force moments along the edges of knowledge, beliefs, and understandings to slip, to jerk, to release pent-up insight and create an eruption that blows up misconceptions, lifts the veil, shifts the kaleidoscope, completely changes things.
We have yet to learn to measure reading comprehension any better than we knew how to measure the San Francisco earthquake.