Beware of the red pen!

During the first couple of years at school, I remember we had moments where the teacher would read us a short text and we'd have to write it down to practise writing and spelling. I did pretty good back then. I barely made mistakes. I still have images in my mind of my writing being free from corrections and only at the end of it there would be a “Prima, Sarah!” (Great, Sarah!) For having no mistakes.

For my first two and a half years of school I lived up in Northern Germany. We had a text that had a sentence where I made a minor mistake about books on a shelf. During the Christmas break of my third year at school, we moved and I changed schools. In my new school we'd still write those texts the teacher was reading to us. Guess what? One time the teacher in my new school read the text about the books and I again I made the same mistake, that bit about the books on the shelf. That was in fact the only mistake I made that second time! My mother pointed out that I had made the same mistake the first time. I have no recollection of writing it the first time and how that went. But that's why I remember that sentence to this day actually: Not for writing it the first time, but for the mistake. The mistake I made twice, according to my mother.

I forgot where I read it. It's been a while. Part of the problem in the current school system and teaching system is that teachers focus on marking out what's wrong. Red pen marking out everything wrong. “Attention! Wrong!” If you're a good student making no or few mistakes, you're only left with a short, nice comment. If anything at all.

There seem to be teachers more recently, that let children write as they like and not correct them. That's what at least one co-worker once told me. Maybe some teachers don't want to discourage the children from writing by pointing out all the mistakes. But where would those end up that are in higher classes and still write the way they want to? There are certain set rules about how to spell and grammar and all that. You can't just ignore that. Sometimes you write different for certain effects and it's purposeful writing. Children need to learn the correct way first though. Or maybe the teachers are lazy? I've seen adults with bad writing, too. Also at a certain age hardly anybody points out mistakes. I don't know about the motivation of those teachers though. I hope there's more to this than... laziness?

How about instead encouraging the good students more and only focus on them? That way they'd feel pleased and confident to keep on doing what they do well. And the bad students might take interest in checking out how the good students do what they do well. Instead of the bad students feeling bad for their mistakes and the good students being only left with short comments? Just an idea.

I don't like rain - yes, I do like it

There are sayings around the topic that not circumstances or situations are bad, but what's important is how we deal with them and perceive them. That sounds good and nice. Sometimes it's easier said than done. It's true though.

Last Wednesday it was hot and the postman complained. I told him that now everyone complains that it's too hot, but next time it's cold and wet again, everyone will complain again. This time that it's too cold and wet. I told him that I'd like it to be cooler, but don't like wet much. He said, he likes wet.

Thursday the cooling came and I had to go to work in the rain. I do not like umbrellas, because you've got 1) something in your hand and don't have it free and 2) what do I do with a wet umbrella? I prefer a wet jacket and hands free from umbrellas, dry or wet. Accordingly my jacket got wet on the way from my place to the train station. I had pulled my hood over the head. On the train I pulled the hood back off my head.

When I arrived at the stop at work, the rain hadn't stopped yet. Out of a somewhat strange feeling I didn't pull the hood back over my head. My hair got wet and suddenly I didn't care. No, it wasn't that I didn't care. It was good. I had been wrong on Wednesday. The rain got my hair wet. Inconvenient, since my hair curls up with a bit of natural curls I've got. It looks messy. Also no opportunity to dry the hair reasonably and fast either. At least I've got short hair.

I thought of someone in a movie, who over time has quite many scenes in which he gets more or less wet from rain. Sometimes he's got a hat. More than once he's got nothing to protect his head and hair. I thought of the actor and his character and the rain was suddenly perfectly fine and good. Strange how a simple mental connection can change the feelings for a situation.

No, I won't reveal which movie, actor or character I had in my head. That will stay my little secret. It's my connection anyway. If you don't like rain, you should find your own connection to make it likable. It can be liberating.

Faster reading

Dear reader,

some readers have been more or less waiting for this entry. I hope I can finally help you now. I think that there is no “the one” method, to read fast or faster. With this entry I'd like to share with you some thoughts and introduce you to different approaches.

Some claim that it takes longer to form words with the mouth than to just see them with the eyes. I don't necessarily mean reading out loud with this. Also the unconscious forming of words in your head take time.

Generally you should have in mind what you want with the text and what you want to read it for. I have my own method to read fast and created it out of different ideas and suggestions. I don't know certain scientific words or expressions for kinds of reading. I only want to share ideas that helped me.

At university we had a seminar about working scientifically, in which the teacher told us that we should first check the headlines of a text for a first broad overview. Of course with books the table of contents is naturally helping with that. (With scientific texts or non-fictional writing, I realised that a look at the last pages or respectively lines of the text helps as well. Most good non-fictional books and scientific books anyway, have a list of references, where you can see how up to date the used literature is now. Depending on the topic I also like to check if certain authors and their works have found their way in or not.) The next good advice was, that the text immediately at the pictures or graphs talk about them. So you could skip that text and just look at the pictures and graphs and work them out on your own.

How much do you trust your unconscious to help you with reading and being useful? Maybe you know the following study already:

(source: http://www.obandigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/globalmaxer1.jpg)

Depending on how well you are with reading, it's easier or harder to unrevel this “letter salad” of the study and reading it so it makes sense. Texts are generally not a letter salad like that and so it's easier to take those in then. At first it will be unfamiliar, but with experience you'll take in more and will be able to take in the words faster.

Maybe it was similar for you as it was at my primary school (“elementary school” for American readers). We were told to put our finger under the line respectively word we were just reading. For my method to read faster I use the bookmark turn it horizontally under the line I'm currently reading to go through it faster and not jump lines.

Some suggest to read a certain part of the beginning of a line and a part at the end of the line. Our brain would be able to sort of think up the middle part of it. Whether or not it's true, I don't know. My thought about this would be that with this method, I'd jump too much with my eyes. Namely from the beginning to the end to the beginning to the end of lines. My feeling tells me that a calmer movement of the eyes would be more comfortable for me.

The magician Derren Brown had a series years ago called “Trick or Treat”, in which he gave the applicants a blind choice between a positive experience (trick) or a darker one (treat). Glen Brighton is an ordinary man, who enjoys taking part in pub quizzes. Derren Brown signed him up for a certain one and wanted to prepare Brighton to make the first place. That means, he has to read a lot and take knowledge in at a very short and liminted time. For this Derren Brown lets him make a hand to a fist and then stretch out the index finger and pinky. Glen Brighton is only to concentrate on the area between the outstretched fingers. I personally favour that sort of eye movement down the middle part of a text, instead of concentrating on the beginning and end of a line. Also it's probably more text to sense and take in that way.

If you're interested in that episode: part 1, about 10 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycHhiv5g_8k and part 2, also about 10 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcVCrALes58.

I often use my bookmark in the way described above to stay in the line I'm reading and not explicitly reading every single word when going along that line with my eyes. It's not reading as such, more a visually taking in the words with the eyes. I guarantee you, that this method alone will make you take in faster. Trust that you don't need to read every single word exactly, to understand the content. You will notice individual important words anyway. Trust that you don't need every single detail, to understand the whole. Much like language teachers at school talk about not needing to understand every single word in a foreign language text or film. Start slow. Use the bookmark, like I do or to start with use your finger for individual words. Go through the line in a constant speed and take in the words without reading exactly.

If you need or want specific information from a text, be aware of the words. Have an image of the word in your head. And then it's like with those crosswords where there is seemingly letter salad in a square (German: Quadrat) and you are to find given words horizontally or vertically or whichever way. If you need to find the word “dog”, you don't need to go through every line looking for “dog... dog... dog...”, but look for “d” and if you've found a “d”, look around it for an “o”. If that's not the case, go to the next “d”. If it's got an “o”, look if it's followed by a “g”. That's quick, because it's just a square Quadrat with few letters.

For a longer text with sentences, it certainly makes more sense to search “bigger”. I'm quite certain that if you were to look for a capital letter “q” in the paragraph above, the word “Quadrat” will literally jump at you, even just roughly scanning the paragraph. Check that paragraph and trust your unconscious with that. The capital letter “Q” is an unusual enough word within a sentence, even in English where “q” is generally a more common letter than in German. But even if you're looking for a less unusual “c”, like for example in “crosswords”, you will find it within that paragraph. All you have to do is to have in mind what the “c” looks like. Have an image of the small letter “c” in your mind and do an image search. With a bit of exercise in this, you can also search unknown texts for information, even if it's not precisely in your head and irrelevant words vanish from your conscious perception. That happens quite automatically, just like when sometimes sometimes a word is written twice within a text, and when you read it unconsciously, you don't notice, only when someone points it out to you. Or did you notice that I wrote the word “sometimes” twice in the previous sentence? If you want, write that in the comments or also if those suggestions helped you.

Until next blog,

sarah