This made things much worse. My instructor seemed to enjoy watching my panic. Why wasn’t it working? Why wouldn’t the plane fly? Diving toward the ground at an accelerating rate, my instructor calmly said, "Push forward." I knew he did not have a clue about our problem. While I tried to lift the plane up by the control yoke, he was telling me to dive deeper into the ground? Clearly he had lost his mind.

The plane entered a tail spin, and the earth became a spinning blur rushing toward us. Every part of me resisted his command as he insisted more firmly, "Push into the spin!"

Finally, my instructor broke my white-knuckled grip and pushed the control yoke forward. This push immediately smoothed out the wings and elevator section of the tail, which corrected the air flow over them and generated lift. The plane stabilized and slowly he pulled back the control yoke to regain altitude, leaving my heart in my throat. Wow.

What connection does this have to reading? Throughout my life I read only as fast as I could comprehend the words on the page. Every time I went too fast to comprehend, I grabbed control and pulled back as a fear reaction. I was afraid I would fail as a reader if I did not understand everything. My attempted strategies to read  better and faster only made things worse. I was caught in the spin, and reading felt like nose diving my airplane into the ground.

Have you ever wished for a mentor to come along and pull you out of a nose dive? I did. Unfortunately, I did not realize a larger, more powerful capacity of mind could solve my reading problem. Fortunately, miracles happen. Several events in the next few years shaped a new direction for me.

In the fall of 1984, I entered graduate school to study adult

 

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