What The Skinny on Evelyn?

The Inside Skinny About How Evelyn Wood…

Evelyn Wood was a school teacher in Utah, and not surprisingly

was a devout Mormon. One of the tenets of the Mormon religion

is they evolved from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

Brief History

The two secrets of survival of the various sects and religions in America

is that verbal conflict is ruled off-limits. It is not merely impolite, but

a breach of the social fabric to create an adversarial position that mine-is-better-

than-yours..

Secondly, we do not apply pragmatic logic, nor require scientific

evidence to justify religious belief. Faith rules in all religions, not strict reason.

The Mormon religion, a partner in Christianity, is unique because it has

a history of revelation, persecution, exodus and triumph, all within the United States.

Joseph Smith, 1830

Mormanism did not start in 1830, in Palmyra, New York, that was the year Joseph Smith

published them to the world, after seven years of study.

The genesis was 600 B.C. by a prophet named, Nephi, who received a revelation to leave

Jerusalem and travel over the oceans to America with his people. Mormon, a second prophet, was instructed by God to write a summary of the writings of the American prophets. His son, Maroni, carved this religious testament on Gold Tablets, and buried them in sacred ground in America. They remained unseen for a millennium.

In 1823 Joseph Smith, a farmer in New York state, received a vision from the prophet Maroni, with instructions to search for the Golden Plates and reveal them to the world. Smith unearthed the Plates and spent the next seven years in study, while training his own family in the principles revealed.

For a history of the Church of the Later Day Saints, and the admission of Utah to the Union, Google: the name – Mormons. Their trek to full acceptance as Americans and

Christians makes for a fascinating adventure. Many of their founding fathers were

murdered for their beliefs before reaching Utah. Today we take for granted that the

Book of Morman is read as a companion to the Bible. It did not come easily or without controversy.

Evelyn Wood

Her church required the congregation visit other churches and temples. On one such visit

to a Jewish temple, Evelyn attended a Talmudic Bible class. The Talmud is a study of the religious law in the early books of the Old Testament. The word is derived from the Hebrew word, to learn.

The ancient tradition is that someone is called upon from the congregation to discuss the meaning of a particular passage. He has the sacred words in front of him, similar to the

Torah, which contains the Five Books of the Holy Hebrew Scriptures. The Torah is also called the Pentateuch.

Many of those called to lead the discussions were neither experts nor masters of their subject. They lost their place on the page causing them acute shame and embarrassment, as they struggled to recover by regressing to the proper place in their reading.

So?

This situation was remedied by the Reader being given a tool to maintain his place on the page, and focus his eye movements. It is referred to as a Pointer, and is handheld and made of brass.

This is the true genesis of speed reading because using the pointer produces accelerated

reading of the scrolls. Evelyn immediately saw the link and association between the Pointer and improved reading in English. She remembered the brass pointer when she created her speed reading program.

Evelyn Wood used the hand as a pacer after her research indicated that it was based on a human instinct – our-eyes-follow-a-moving-object.

It’s Scientific

Vestibulo Ocular Reflex, also called Smooth Pursuit Tracking, or Sensory Motor Integration, is the connection between our brain and the eye-movements necessary for reading.

There are three canals involved in our hearing system that permit sharp, acute vision

when they are in-sync and balanced. How we focus on the words of a sentence is based on our field-of-vision and our eye-pattern movements.

Reading involves our photoreceptors, the Rods and the Cones of our retina, specifically in the Fovea Centralis, These image symbols are transported by the Optic Nerve to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in our brain for decoding and interpretation as meaning.

Her History

She graduated from the University of Utah and taught remedial reading at Salt Lake City

high schools. Years later she returned for her Master’s degree, and spent her time on the specific steps of the reading process. Speed reading came from her research. She taught and improved her program by teaching students at the University of Utah.

In 1959 she launched speed reading as a commercial enterprise.

These aforementioned facts were told me by EW when the undersigned partnered with her in the marketing of speed reading. Everything else about the origins of speed reading were created by public relations practitioners.

ACT Reports

Reading is the key to college success, was the conclusion of a 2006 eighty-six page report by ACT, a non-profit organization that tested 1.2 million high school students.

About half the graduates could read complex material well enough for the freshman year

of college; the other half were confounded by college level reading comprehension.

ACT concludes that reading skills, strategies and techniques, end at elementary school.

Adults live out their lives with 3^rd grade reading skills including reading one-word-at-a-time, regressing twenty-times per page, and subvocalizing the words they read. Subvocalization alone causes a loss of up to 40% in reading speed because we cannot read any faster than we can speak – up to 200 words per minute.

The typical untrained college graduate also suffers from porous-comprehension, causing

a testing loss of up to a full grade. Many find that within fifteen minutes of studying text,

they have less than 50% recall of the major details. If we cannot remember the gist of what we read, did we in fact read the chapter, article or report?

Endpage

We suggest that speedlearners begin their training in first-grade, with the proper handheld tools, strategies and techniques. They will easily triple their reading speed, double their memory – guaranteed – for a lifetime of learning. It is our goal, mission and cause to

convince the Educational Establishment to save the children.

Based on the college, up to 50% of students do not graduate with a four-year degree.

This is not merely a problem for industry with personnel who are only marginally productive compared to our international competitors. We suggest the difference between

the fast-track and the side-track is adding an L to earning.

See ya,

copyright © 2006

H. Bernard Wechsler

www.speedlearning.org hbw@speedlearning.org