Posted on 06/25/2016 5:55:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
Herewith, a simple way to understand the destructive failure of most reading instruction in the United States.
Consider our eyes. Their purpose is to grasp quickly what objects are: food or predator, useful or irrelevant? This is often a matter of life and death. How do eyes do their job?
Eyes twitch, jerk, and flick rapidly from detail to detail in order to identify an object. There are no built-in sequences, no shortcuts. The eyes must twitch – perhaps dozens of times – until a positive identification is made. The technical term for these twitches is a saccade (which rhymes with façade).
Many such eye movements occur every time you see a car, painting, building, celebrity, insect, etc. Your eyes flick top-to-bottom, side-to-side, point-to-point, finding more and more details until the brain is certain.
Scientists can track these eye movements. It's remarkable how much activity is required to identify a single face – that is, to be sure it's not a similar face. The eye might go to the ears, then nose, then lips, back up to the hairline, and around again. There might be 10, 20, or 30 saccades before you confidently decide, "This is Mary in accounting."
When the first symbol languages were introduced, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, nothing changed. A picture of a bird is the same as a real bird, from the point of view of the eyes making sense of it. Designs such as Chinese ideograms are again the same thing. Hieroglyphics were objects just like birds and flowers.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Thanks for the tip, just ordered it for my grandson.
Ping for later
It’s automatic, no conscious “twitching” on your part.
Here’s another neurological reality that you can try to “train” yourself out of (and you will fail):
The vestibular-ocular system allows you to keep your eyes trained on an object while you are in motion. So, for example, you can be running over terrain, with your head moving all over the place, and still keep your eyes on a ball or, to the original purpose, an animal you’re chasing.
This system uses fluid in canals in the the middle ear that moves around based on your motion. The motion is detected by hairs within the canals. Their motion provides signals to the brain that automatically send signals to the eye muscles to keep you on target.
So if you spin round and round and suddenly stop - you get dizzy and what you see looks like you’re still moving, even though you are not. If you look at someone in this state, you will see their eyes darting side to side.
This is because the fluid is still moving, even though they are not. As such, their eyes continue to move, completely beyond their control.
So since, as you claim, you have successfully trained your eye muscles to be independent of autonomous control, you should be able to quickly spin around 10 times and not see the room continue to move when you stop.
Alternatively, you can look at an object with one eye and use your finger to gently push on your eyeball side to side so your vision moves off the object. While doing this, try to move your head quickly enough to counteract the eye motion and keep your vision centered on the object.
Let me know how it works out for ya.
YEA!! Someone else isn’t lazy and is doing it right!
For others, they’ll find it to be the best investment they ever make in their lives, and not just the rewards of seeing the little ones read, but the very likely case of them going to well-paying jobs directly after college - they’ll never ask for a dime. In my case, my kids were through with college and off to well-paying jobs by age 20 (they skipped some grades).
Congrats on raising some fine kids!!
Nowadays many of the schools are not teaching cursive, either. Written communication not displayed in printed text (like Grandma’s old letters from Grandpa and the original written Constitution) will be “lost” to their comprehension. They’ll be at the mercy of their computers and iPhones (and the government) for information.
When I was taking the course, they said that two things slowed one down when reading. The first was the eyes’ tendency to flick back and forth over words already read. By forcing the eye to follow the pacing hand, that factor is eliminated. The second thing that slows one down is the ‘need’ to say the word to oneself as it is read. If you can break that habit, you are limited by how many words are on a page, since more time is spent turning the page than actually reading it. The best in our class was at 10,000 words per minute at something like 95% comprehension.
I know I was able to reread a whole quarter’s of assigned texts (four or five books) a half hour before the final.
And THAT’S why they can’t spell, either. I feel sorry for those whose parents wouldn’t read to them. They never had a chance...
If you're right, then explain how ice skaters can spin dozens of times very rapidly then execute extremely complex maneuvers immediately afterward. The same with a ballet dancer.
I believe that this author is attempting to excuse the entire teaching ‘community’.
I am 64 years old. I was reading the New York Times in SECOND GRADE!!!!
He just could not write them.
In a nutshell, because it is a continuous motion.
... and pretty much all of the Dr. Seuss books.
The colors, the pictures, the rhyming caught and held my attention at an early age and made reading my favorite pastime. I still put aside at least three hours per night to just sit and read. Luckily, my wife is the same ...
p.s., I didn’t say you can’t control your body, just not the eye.
The skater doesn’t have to be focused on an object as if they are chasing it. The just have to memorize and practice the choreography.
Each saccade motion is on the order of 200ms (1/5 of a second). While I believe you can speed read, I simply can’t believe you can control that autonomous motion.
IF you can, you should call Guinness and get yourself in the record books.
There’s nothing to explain.
The PC teachers suck, modern kids are taught to be stupid, and that’s the whole story.
Perhaps also why they can’t think - they don’t have that running inner narrative going. They’re being bombarded with sensations, and they’re becoming more and more insensate.
IMHO
Author and article are idiot(ic). The relationship between “phonics” and “whole word” is the same as “crawling” and “walking”.....you have to go through the first to get to the second. You CANNOT START OFF TRYING TO WALK. Moving from “whole word” to “whole paragraph” to “whole page” (speed reading) is just a matter of practice. If you read enough, you will get there....dedicated training can speed things up quite a bit.
We had a speed reading course like that back in 1961, Carlsbad NM high school. I got pretty fast as a reader, but sometimes I still slow way down for certain writing styles and tech manuals.
I’ve always struggled with “saying” the words in my head (it’s call subvocalization). I see the word and I automatically “speak” it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.