EducationNews.org

1. First of all, what exactly is your title and what exactly is it that you do at www.speedlearning.com?

Director of Education, writer of training texts, and brain researcher. It's my job to offer a schema for long-term memory development, cognitive skills and specifically, 3x learning skills.

After almost a half-century Speedlearning is either relevant or like teaching Latin, it becomes road-kill. My background is law.

2) What is or was your relationship with Evelyn Wood?

Evelyn Wood, a schoolteacher from Salt Lake City, was my partner in business. The Reading Dynamics program was wildly successful but never made a dent in the academic community. Change is hard and even harder for professionals.

3) What kinds of on-line or in person services do you offer?

We hold live classes for students (age 13 to graduate school) and for executives. Workshops are either 12 classroom hours, 6 or a 3 hour lecture.Do-It-Yourself with on-line help is also offered. A critical ingredient is 15minutes daily practice for 21 consecutive days, using Speedlearning strategies and our handheld laser pacer.

4) What is the basic premise behind speed learning?

Most teachers and administrators can accept skimming as a kind of useful tool. To us it means skipping words, which is not acceptable. Picture a lawyer skimming a million-dollar contract and missing a numbers comma. Our version of skimming uses peripheral vision to see and comprehend each and every word.

We require a RasterMaster (laser-pacer), a pen and your computer cursor, to train your eyes from 'foveal' (narrow) focusing to 'peripheral' (wide) vision. From 3^rd grade on, we reinforce unaided (Random Spacing) reading.

Our eyes fall where they may, and that causes reading only one-multi-syllable-word at a time, for life. We call it Snailing.

We train students (kids and adults) to use Specific Guidance (using a tool)

to enlarge our field-of-vision. Our graduates can absorb 3 to 6 words with each eye-fixation pause. For the rest of their lives they read three-books, articles and reports in the time it presently takes them to finish one.

Later you are weaned away to automatically change your eye movements without a mechanical aid.

5) Often, many verbose people write in long convoluted sentences , elaborating extensively instead of getting to the bottom line. Should writers be more sensitive to readers , or should readers to better prepared to "skim for the gist"?

Sometimes writers forget the goal in typing their golden sentences is comprehension (idea transfer), not admiration of their knowledge of grammar and personal style. Remember the delete key is at the fingertips of the reader.

WIIFM (What's-In-It-For-Me!) is the question in the mind of each reader of your brilliant phrases. If they cannot answer WIIFM in the positive, you are irrelevant and deleted. Call the reader attention span challenged, but communicate with him/her or die.

6) I have checked out your web site, and your results are impressive. What about children with special needs and exceptionalities?

We don't know a damn thing about Attention Deficit Disorder and dyslexia and leave it to the professionals. Our audience is gifted and talented (who read like a snail moves) kids. They want to ace the SAT, GRE, G-MAT and LSAT. They obtain a competitive advantage in acing school and their career.

We stick to what we have proven works for executive and students, 3x their reading skills and 2x their long term memory – both for life.

7) In thinking back over my reading instruction, it seems somewhat disjointed. What are the schools doing wrong in terms of reading instruction?

Teachers instruct students to read using strategies they learned in Teachers College. What else do they have? We are outsiders and were taught by Evelyn Wood, the Darwin of her specialty, to train the eyes and the mind in new schemas of knowledge.

Speedlearning is a psycho-motor skill; the mind and reading behaviors must be disrupted to become a speed reader. Standard reading is left-hemisphere dominant decoding; Speedlearning is a right-hemisphere dominant activity.

We need to integrate both. In school the training is exclusively left-brain reading. It causes Subvocalization, Regressions, Porous Comprehension and reading one-word at a time - snailing.

8) Are kids simply not being asked to read enough? I often hear about kids reading Harry Potter but little else. What do parents need to be doing to help kids on a daily basis?

Unrealistic expectations include trying to hold back relevant technology.

The educational community cannot avoid student knowledge acquisition through video, audio, or a combination, at the expense of reading.

Reading (decoding) is a lot harder than learning by watching (video) or auditory skills (downloading lectures). Suggestion: make reading more conversational (dialogue) to sustain interest, and train folks to create their 20 minute hour.

When you know (self-esteem) you can read-and-remember text in one-third of the time it used to take, you may give reading a try.

9) What are some of the tools that you have and secrets that you employ in your training?

a) You must begin to read with a pacer in your hand to underline the sentences you peruse. We help train in seven separate tactics to train your eyes and mind.

Don't get nervous, it's a temporary training device.

Ever see Dog Racing, where greyhounds chase a mechanical bunny?

The rabbit is a pacer. Our eyes must follow a moving object, is Evelyn's secret version of our visual instinct.

b) Students must be interactive in class. They must learn 7 key questions to ask of the text they read and lectures they attend. It is a schema and called 7 Smart-Questions. They must use the Three-Dominant senses to answer these questions.

c) Is memory the obverse of learning? We think so. We have the Einstein

Peg and Link systems to literally double your long-term memory. If you remember what you read and hear, you begin to think like a genius.

Your self-confidence soars. Imagine acing exams and courses and getting antsy because school and learning is too easy.

10) Where can our readers get more information?

We offer live speedlearning workshops in California, Oregon and the state of Washington; in N.Y. and N.J. on the East Coast. In fact, we need instructors for the Mid-West and the Southern states. Please check out www.speedlearning.org and hbw@speedlearning.org

11) What question have I neglected to ask?

We teach students to ace tests in school and entrance exams by a process called Skimming-Scanning-Screening. Speedlearners read their tests three times (questions and text) in the time their peers can barely finish reading the exam once. It makes all the difference.

We train Speedlearners to read NY Times and Wall Street Journal style newspapers in one-third of the time, and remember the gist of all the major stories.

We help students and executives discover reading and learning is a form of entertainment. In polling one thousand students and an additional one thousand executives, we discovered they uniformly (86-87.5%) admit to hate reading. Not because they are stupid, but because it is too slow.

The difference between the two groups in their distaste for reading was one and one-half percent. Executives hated it more and admitted reading only one book annually. This was confirmed by the Publishing Industry Association.

Speedlearning Institute
www.speedlearning.org hbw@speedlearning.org
917-441-9019

Published July 9, 2007