Monday Mood: Still Learning

 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.