Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Not So Worthless

When informed that I would be required to attend college orientation class every Monday, I figured that it would be silly and worthless. I guess there was no way to know that Mr. Coronado would be awesome! We're not learning just silly meaningless stuff- we've done stress tests (I racked up 386 points on mine...), learned about eye patterns, and yesterday, we learned about speed reading!

I always thought that I read slowly and that would always just be what it was, but speed reading is an acquired skill. In my first round, I read 330 words per minute. When following a pen with our eyes in the second round, I was able to read 363 wpm. Then we took a few times through where we scanned the page with increasing speed, not looking for actual reading or comprehension. And once we took a third stab at reading, I was able to knock out 638 wpm! Mr. Coronado told us if we practice this activity for 20 minutes everyday, we'll be reading 1,000's of words per minute in no time!

So, I climb on the train, determined to use the ride down as practice time; however, upon opening my book I remembered that I love my adjectives and adverbs too much to skip right over them. I want to know precisely what the situation looked like when Harry got caught in the trick stair in the middle of the night. I want to know just how silly Rita Skeeter looked while sneaking on the Hogwarts grounds. And thus I concluded that leisure reading and speed reading are simply going to have to be kept in separate spheres of my life. Maybe I'll practice with a text book- I'm just looking for the nouns and verbs there anyways...

2 comments:

The Cain family said...

I agree with you. I read relatively quickly but I love to read every word!

Tracy Jabbal said...

this is cute. i like that you've separated your academic reading and your leisure reading! i do that too!