"I have seen Don Woodruff in action and he has mastered the art and science of learning. He is sharing his playbook for those who want to learn this vital skill. If you are going to back to school or know someone is, this should be the first book you pick up."
—Major Alvi Azad, Psychiatrist and Clinical Fellow at Yale University
The Kangaroo Method: Unlock Your Verbal Intelligence
Strategic Learning Wisdom For
Back-to-College & Career Adults
INTRODUCTION
One day I was surprised to discover there is another Kangaroo Method that serves to make people’s lives better. That method is a way to nurture and breastfeed a baby by placing a newborn, skin-to-skin, on its mother’s chest, just as kangaroo moms do. My Kangaroo Method is a way to read and learn better by becoming genuinely word smart and thereby jumping several levels toward what you really wish to achieve in life.
Most back-to-college adults are able to sail through boundless chapters by their favorite authors although they admit they are far less competent when reading more substantial information. In fact, I have met a surprising number of remarkably intelligent people who hate to read. When discussing work-related reports and other required reading, they use words and phrases such as “dry,” “boring,” “overly wordy,” and “time consuming” to express their feelings toward such material. Others find it difficult to maintain their concentration for any length of time no matter what they read.
Featured Classes
Unlock Your Verbal Intelligence
Master the 40 Words
The Last Vocabulary Class
Professional Vocabulary Institute
Las Vegas, NV Summer, 2012
Presented in co-operation with
UNLV
Unlock Your Verbal Intelligence Wednesday, May 16, 2012 6:15-9:30 p.m.
Many otherwise successful adults confess they never quite finish what they start. Their bookcases become filled with partially read books about business, personal growth, money and investing, science and technology, and religion and spirituality. Although willing to learn, they often don’t get beyond the first few chapters. They may tune out several times while reading down a page and forget what they read. Some may also wonder if they have undiagnosed adult ADD or ADHD.
With today’s extensive online information, we have instant access to far more facts and ideas than even Albert Einstein might have dreamt of. For those who have honed their research skills, the ability to hunt down information on the Internet is fast and focused. But statistics suggest that there may be as few as five percent of American adults who can efficiently skim a 300-page text to capture the answers they need to pass an exam or move forward on a project.
According to U.S. reading proficiency tests conducted over the last 20 years, the scores of 95% of young adults have been less than top notch, with almost 70% scoring below the national proficiency level. As a whole, adults have been consistently ill equipped to capture and retain key points from books and texts. In today’s competitive world, where knowledge in almost every field doubles every year, this can be an extreme disadvantage.
To stay competitive, Americans need to be highly proficient readers. Some who are actively seeking to upgrade their reading skills register for my strategic learning course offered at their local college. They come expecting to learn tricks and fancy techniques enabling them to focus better, read faster, and remember more. But underneath this surface anticipation, most suspect that their reading and vocabulary skills may not be solid enough to succeed. They come to my classes for memory tricks and speed-learning techniques while secretly suspecting that they may have missed the boat on the more fundamental skills that matter most. They are reaching out for solutions.
Past programs on speed-reading, vocabulary enhancement, and accelerated learning have helped but none of these methods focused on the real issue. No one program provided a single, dedicated technique to raise the verbal intelligence of back-to-college and career-minded adults. The vast majority of participants in these programs learned how to read faster but with less comprehension. They learned how to obtain a more impressive-sounding vocabulary but merely by rote. And they learned how to rely on their strongest learning style without being encouraged to also strengthen their weakest. Similar to Western medicine methods that aim at eliminating symptoms rather than addressing root causes, these programs failed by concentrating on superficial fixes.
My Kangaroo Method, in contrast, serves to immediately raise an individual’s ability to become genuinely more intelligent. It proves effective in strengthening overall reading fluency, concentration, comprehension, retention, and the ability to apply information to better one’s circumstances.
America’s problem is not illiteracy. It is that these times require Americans to become highly proficient readers. The solution is to significantly raise verbal intelligence. High verbal intelligence enables a person to cut through information quickly, comprehend in “high definition,” retain specific points needed for one’s purpose, and put newly acquired knowledge to work.
Although the title might sound like a program designed for school-age kids and teens, I confess I have never had much interest in teaching young people. I become interested when students—of any age—become serious about careers and activities that make a positive difference in their lives and the lives of others. This is the time when individuals recognize a need to upgrade their academic skills. Instead of merely parroting back facts, they start to question and seek answers as their experience and vision mature. And to truly succeed, they become willing to overcome an unseen learning disability that inadvertently took hold as a result of their American education. It is this in-grown disability that causes most people to think they cannot become expert readers.
Hidden Barrier
There exists a hidden barrier to learning, thwarting any sincere attempt to increase one’s verbal intelligence. This book explains how to remove this unseen obstacle. There are no required reading exercises, no lengthy vocabulary lists, and no fancy memory techniques.
In addition to the Kangaroo Method, I have included those learning techniques I wish I had known while in school, including a detailed procedure on how to effectively handle information from the written page and how to succeed in college while spending less time reading. It unpacks the art of skill building. And it attempts to communicate a great spiritual insight that may challenge your beliefs about yourself. I decided to include this insight because it is the underlying principle on which the Kangaroo Method is based. But more importantly, I believe this insight will help you pair your self-esteem with advancing degrees of reading proficiency. For this reason, I suggest you approach this book as you would one on Personal Growth. Just read along at your leisure and consider how each point relates to your own life.
In this time of scientific and technological advancement, no other skill supersedes the importance of one’s ability to fluently grasp and retain pertinent information from the written page. My Kangaroo Method is dedicated to this end.
Learn the Kangaroo Method At Your Local College Today!
