Bamboo

During my first year of high school, way back in the mid-1980s, I wrote the following short poem in our 9th grade English class. Mrs. Cox, our English teacher was raving and oohing/aahing about it in our class to the point of getting my classmates to call me a teacher's pet. For a whole week, she kept reading it out loud in our class as well as in the other English classes which she was assigned to teach that year. I was puzzled and dumbfounded of why Mrs. Cox liked it so much.

Bamboo

Tenuous and Green

The Tallest Grass in the World.

Bamboo

In the first semester of our Sophomores year of high school I noticed that there were a lot more reading materials and assignments issued in most of our courses, not just the English. Our backpacks were full of textbooks and workbooks.

I thought to myself "How can I read these books fast and understand the materials faster as well?"

So, I took an after-school course at a local mall. It was an intensive speed reading course. It paid off, and I was able to read up to 4,000 words per minute, consistently! I utilized this skill throughout the rest of my high school years and into my first year of college. Then ... something happened. I saw the third episode of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myths with Bill Moyers: "The First Storytellers." When I finished watching this episode, it triggered a realization in my mind. Right there and then, I stopped utilizing my speed reading skill, and have not use it ever since.

The speed reading method I had been using requires that I omit the sound I hear in my head while reading. A person would just take snapshots of the group of words on the page and translate their aggregate meanings into mental images (still and moving), the mind's eyes. It made great sense to me at the time, and I seriously took to it with hours of intense practice.

You can try it. Look around the room where you're sitting in. The objects that you see as you turn your head and pan your eyes, do you say their names in your head as they come into your field of sight, or do you just accept them and understood them as such objects that they are? Therefore, when you see words like table and chairs, desk, fan, television, box, etc...on a page, picture their shapes in your head instead of saying their names.

The second part of this method is to practice expanding your peripheral vision through series of drills.

Just google it, if you're interested in learning more about speed reading.

After listening to the conversation between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, the experience helped restore the sound back into my head while reading. I realized that language is best understood and much more enjoyable with sound, especially when reading poems.

Bamboo

Tenuous and Green

The Tallest Grass in the World.

Bamboo

To this day, I can still hear Mrs. Cox's voice in my head when I see the word: Bamboo.