Cassandra Nelson, describing the high school learning experience of many of the students she encounters—what she terms “The Mysterious Thing That Resembles Learning but Is Not”:

In English classes, it might involve pushing your eyes across words in a way that looks outwardly like reading. But inwardly you are not reading — or at least not for plot, comprehension, pleasure, edification, or any other traditional aim of reading — and you’re also not doing what occasionally happens to even the most devoted reader, where you suddenly realize that your concentration has wandered off and you’d better go back a paragraph or two because you have no clue what you just read. Instead, you’re doing some weird third thing where your focus remains intact, but instead of making sense of every word or letting the images they construct play out as a kind of movie in your mind, you’re deliberately making sense of only some words, the ones that seem important, and more or less ignoring the rest. You’re mining for data, harvesting it in discrete and contextless chunks, which is all you need for multiple-choice tests or a mere regurgitation of keywords. Whatever task would fall just below skimming in the great chain of reading — you’re doing that.