Reading With a Purpose

Get Ready

Your purpose is the question you carry as you read. It decides what you notice.

Today’s story

The Last Day of the Pool

A story about a swimming pool closing. About 230 words.

Words to know

purposeThe question you carry with you while you read.
weak teaTea made with very little tea, so it is a pale brown.
shallow endThe part of a pool where the water is not deep.

Read and Answer

Read one page. Then answer the question in the yellow box.

Page 1 of 3

The Corn Street Pool opened in 1908 and closed on a Tuesday in August. For the last hour, anybody could swim for free. There were more people in the water that afternoon than there had been on any day Idris could remember. He had been coming since he was four.

The tiles around the shallow end had turned the color of weak tea after a hundred and sixteen years of water. The corners nobody could reach with a brush were green. Long bars of light fell from the high windows across the water. The noise bounced off the roof the way it always had. Everybody sounded like they were shouting from farther away than they really were.

Why does a purpose change what you notice?

Page 2 of 3

At four o’clock, the lifeguard blew the whistle, and everybody got out. Nobody argued about it.

They opened the valve at 4:30. Idris sat on the edge, feet in, and watched the water drop past one tile, then another, until he could not feel it.

The deep end went last. It took almost an hour, and by the end, fourteen people were left, standing at the rail and not talking much.

Page 3 of 3

Underneath, where the water had been, there was a drain, a lost pair of goggles, and a penny.

Somebody said it was a shame. Somebody else said the roof had needed fixing for years.

Idris walked home the long way.

Read It All

Answer all the questions to open the whole story.

My Notebook

Finish the story first. Then write two things you noticed.

What You Learned

With no purpose, you notice whatever is loudest.
A purpose is a question you carry as you read.
A new purpose gives you a new reading.

For the grown-up

Close reading is widely taught as reading slowly, which produces slow readers rather than close ones. The active ingredient is the question the reader carries: it decides what is salient, and naming it before starting is what makes a second reading different from a repeat.

Before rereading anything, ask what you are reading it for this time.