Mrs. Birkeland was my teacher in Grade 6 in Aberdeen Washington. She was a chain smoker, with a raspy smoker’s voice. I remember an afternoon, after hearing the kids on the playground call each other Homo, she explained to us what the word Homo meant. It was not a word we should be using without understanding what we really were saying. We had no clue what the word Homo meant, only that this was something the big kids would be call us when we got to Junior High. Instead of letting us run around blithely calling each other Homo, without ever knowing what we were saying, Mrs. B. took the time to tell us that some men liked other men, and some girls liked other girls, and that was ok. It was not something to make fun of, and we were never to use the word Homo as an insult.
Mrs. Birkeland was a proponent of speed reading, the course originally inspired by Evelyn Wood. Speed reading was the rage in the 60’s. It purported to increase the reader’s words per minute, without losing any comprehension. In fact, speed reading was supposed to increase comprehension. She told us that the late President John F. Kennedy was a speed reader. Supposedly his aides would lay out newspapers, which he would then speed read as he walked down the hallway to his office.
Evelyn Wood was a schoolteacher. In 1958, my year of birth, she was curious why some people were naturally faster at reading, so she tried to force herself to to read quickly. Once day, “while brushing off the pages of a book she had thrown, she noticed that the sweeping motion of her hand caught the attention of her eyes, and helped them move smoothly across the page. She then used her hand as a pacer.”
Did anyone ask the obvious question? Why had she thrown the book? What kind of person throws a book? To throw the book in a literal sense is a somewhat violent act. Books are soon followed by glasses, plates, and vases. Before you know it, it is full on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Figuratively speaking, “throwing the book” means to punish someone as severely as possible. The original meaning of the expression meant to sentence a convicted person to the maximum penalties allowed, to the full extent of the law.
So Evelyn throwing the book begs the question, is there a punitive element to her concept of speed reading? The only punishment I received was a short attention span, along with a selected retention of information. I still enjoyed to read, as a book can take you anywhere. In the words of the great Groucho Marx, “ From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
He also famously said, “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.
Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
The essence of speed reading is to skip reading left to right like most readers do, and to skim down the middle, quickly absorbing the writer’s intent, sort of like a paper towel mopping up a spill. This is how I became a speed reader. Did I retain anything? We would race down the middle of the page, skimming here, tracing there, with no regard for all those words on the edges. Was speed reading just another 1960’s convenience, like free love, canned pie filling, skim milk powder, margarine, or Birds Eye Frozen Foods?
In the early 1900’s, during his travels through Northern Canada, Clarence Birdseye witnessed the Inuit using ice, wind and temperature to instantly freeze freshly caught fish. Birdseye wondered if this method, which he called flash freezing, could be applied to other foods. As a child, young Clarence was obsessed with natural science and taxidermy. Did you ever seen one of these in the frozen food section of the grocery?
My Mother would buy Swanson Meat pies to feed her family of 7, and for dessert, we devoured frozen pies from Belair like Dutch Chocolate Cream Pie and Lemon Cream Pie. We would barely pause to defrost, eating them practically unfrozen. Everyone was always in a rush. Eating too fast, reading too fast, we were skimming the surface like a rock skipping on a pond. Why even make a pie, when you could eat one out of a can, sans crust? This superficiality was presumed to be an essential part of living in the future. The 60’s were all about the future. Warhol put the art in artificial; Superman put the super back in superficiality. I could tie a towel around my neck, and I was Superman. Everything was super. Even our balls were super. Remember superballs? How did they bounce 50 feet in the air?
The 60’s were a time when toys were dangerous, and the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. I remember John Lennon getting into trouble for that joke. In Grade 3, I brough shame upon our family, when I stole Miss May from my older brother’s desktop Playboy Calendar to show the kids on the playground. I was trying to top a kid named Randy, they were always named Randy, whose had brought a pen with a woman in a black bikini. When the pen was turned upside down, the bikini disappeared. Funny what brought me down was distribution of salacious materials, and not the actual theft from my bad influence of an older brother.
It was a wild time, what with boy/girl Beatle Birthday parties, where we would cover each other in florescent pink Silly String, talk about Randy’s Dad, who drove a hearse with swear words written on the side, all the while wondering how the three legged dog next door lost his 4th leg.
The dog belonged to our next door neighbor Stanley, who everyone thought was retarded, yes that is what we said then. Later we found out Stanley wasn’t retarded- Stanley was deaf. His parents had not discovered this crucial bit of information until poor Stanley was almost 6. I remember how he loved that three legged dog.
There is valid concern today about the effect of social media and cell phones on the minds of our young children. The Government of Ontario is suing Meta, Google, Snapchat, Tik Tok, presumably because parents and the kids themselves have no self control, or responsibility for engaging in these voluntary pursuits. And while it is said that sitting is the new smoking, as sedentary lifestyles contribute to heart disease just as much as smoking does, ask yourself, Why do we not see anyone suing the Big Chair companies? The office chair cartel. Herman Miller. Staples. Lazy Boy.
My Mother used to say, “Don’t sit so close to the TV, its not good for your eyes.” Yet you don’t see anyone suing the many companies workplaces that force us to sit in chairs and stare at computer screens for 8-10 hours a day.
I was always a voracious reader. I loved going to the library as a child by myself. I would wander there for hours. The card catalogue, the Dewey Decimal System. Finding love in the Stacks. Today, the young parents hand their babies a cell phone to suck on, or give them a tablet to play video games, as you are never too young to become a drone operator. We put child-locks on porn, but we also put little headphones on our tiny children when we have to bring them along to loud concerts. “We have to protect their little ears.”
Why are the kids even there? Did you think the experience of witnessing a show, without even being able to hear the show is crucial to the development of their little rebel minds? Couldn’t you find a babysitter? Speaking of babysitters, why is it that parents pay a kid who is a few years older than their child less than minimum wage to look after their child? We didn’t use babysitters much, unless you count the television and Disney videos as babysitters. When I came home from work and T was about 4, she said to me, “Hey Dad. Cinderella - now available on video”. I laughed at her talent for mimicking, but did I question why she spent so much time watching the same video over and over again? Was it on to entertain her or for my own convenience? How bad should I feel when she is over thirty and Uber has replaced horse drawn Pumpkins?
Do you see a link between the skimming we learned with speed reading and the endless scrolling of today? Sorry, were we talking about something? LOL. Emoji immersion has replaced French in Canada.
Today we have FOMO, (fear of missing out). All we had in the Good Old Days was HOMO and PERRY COMO. I forget what the connection was, because I was only skimming.
♥️
I’m sure this piece was a good one, but I only skimmed through it.