Dora over at Having Coffee With Peppy, wrote about reading and writing, and learning the fundamentals of the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic - apparently spelling was not in the basic skills list.) And that got me to thinking about how learning those basic skills, 60+ years ago, has shaped my life.
I had difficulty learning to read, my brain is one of those that recognizes a word if the first and last letters are in the right place and more or less the correct letters are in between in any random order. Once my I made the leap to reading without being worried about spelling (yes my brain works that way) reading was easy.
The first winter my family spent in Florida, the Spring Hill community center offered a class in speed reading. My father wanted to take it, and talked me into going along. He struggled with it, I took to it like a duckling to water. It was short adult education class (I was just a teenager) that changed my life. I still read 30 to 60 pages an hour.
Spell check was life changing for me. First it highlighted my spelling mistakes. Second by working through the corrections, my spelling has vastly improved over the past 30 years. Third I write faster than I did when I was checking the spelling in every sentence against a copy of 30,000 words.
Dr. Dee McGraw (she was amazing) at Rollins taught a seminar in advanced writing. The format of the class was to read a set of source materials, write an essay on based on those materials. Then reread the source materials, and add some new source materials, and rewrite the essay, we did this four of five times over the course of the semester. That class taught me to research and write. Not by burying myself in endless research before putting pen to paper, but by starting, reading, and editing as an ongoing process.
Serving on the Journal of Family Law in law school taught me the value of good editors. Good editors make writing clearer, without changing the meaning. There is only one editor change that to this day I regret not fighting against.
I still read lots and lots, I still write, I still explore the world, I still practice. There is an old saying that as long as you are green you are growing, as soon as you are ripe you start to rot. I am still green, still growing, still leaning.
Life is for learning. If we stop learning, then were in trouble.
ReplyDeleteOr a candidate for the white house.
DeleteThe psychology that underpins reading and spelling skills is complicated. To me it all came very easily but my brother Robin is dyslexic and at the age of 74, he still struggles with writing. As a former English teacher, my working life was always concerned with lifting language skills and I came to understand the struggles that many youngsters had. It is a very sensitive area because historically good word skills were invariably connected with suppositions about intelligence and worthiness.
ReplyDeleteOur brains are very complex.
DeleteMy spelling was much better before the advent of spell-check. I became lazy. Now I find myself having to think about words I used to know without thinking.
ReplyDeleteWith spell check, I just have to get close and the computer will usually help me find it.
DeleteI, too, can easily read words that are jumbled, as long as the first and last are in the right spots. And I am a very good speller, though I am horrible at typing on a keyboard because my brain works faster than the fingers, so I grateful for SpellCheck!
ReplyDeleteI never took a speed reading class, though, and I wonder how that might change me.
I never took a typing class, I have no idea how my fingers find their way around the keyboard.
DeleteI took to reading and writing very quickly and easily. Arithmetic was a bit more of a mystifying puzzle. I never really understood the basic premises of it. But man, could I memorize! Even today, faced with a trickier math situation, I solve it more by logical thought than by any real understanding of mathematic principles. I think I would have understood math much better if someone had ever told me it is just another form of language and communication, except with numbers instead of words. But of course, teachers don't tell six year olds that, even if they knew it themselves which was doubtful. I was always good with languages.
ReplyDeleteI had one teacher, geometry in Florida, who could really make it understandable. The rest were hopeless.
DeleteI like to think that I am still green and growing too but I don't do at the same speed as you do. I'm a much slower reader. I think I might have benefited from one or two of those classes you took.
ReplyDeleteI had some real outstanding classes, I should have become a farmer (a man who is outstanding in his fields.)
DeleteI took a speed reading class when I was in high school and it helped me skim through pages faster but when I am reading for fun, I don't always want to just skim quickly through so it depends on what I am reading.
ReplyDeleteI think that spelling or grammar errors in blogs are usually the result of fast typing or maybe spell check putting in the words you really didn't want. I can always figure out what the writer meant so I usually don't even mention it ;)
The auto complete, and auto correct functions catch me from time to time.
DeleteYes, keep on learning. Whatever mistakes people make when writing, unless it is their profession, don't matter to me. Just keep on writing.
ReplyDeleteGreen looks good on you!
ReplyDelete