Unabridged

I was organizing the apps on my phone this morning when I found one I had forgotten I had. Trailers provides instant access to hundreds of movie previews for upcoming films. Of course I took a look at what was trending, and I amused myself for perhaps 10 minutes watching a bunch of trailers.

Tonight at dinner I confessed that guilty pleasure to Heidi and Josh, describing the trailers I had seen in detail, and we spent a lively 20 minutes discussing them.

It reminded me of when I was a kid and I had the reputation of being quite the opposite of Reader's Digest: instead of condensing to recap a movie or TV show, my version would often take waaaaay longer than the original.

What can I say? If a picture is worth a thousand words, well, then, you do the math. I only wanted to be thorough and to do justice to art that had moved me. Well, that, and I did have a bit of a sequencing problem. I was famous for pausing several times through any summary. "But, wait, before that... " and back I would go to that relevant bit of information I had forgotten to share. 

As an educator today, I know that what I was doing back then was using all the tools of comprehension and processing-- summarizing, analyzing, connecting, evaluating, and questioning.

I'm sure that didn't make me any less aggravating to my audience, though.