d. m. arney, m.a.

So, I’ve always seen how a slant board helps with reading and doing book work, but I hadn’t really questioned why. One of those, it just does so why bother with science. However, I was working with my college student yesterday and we reviewed how the brain fixes the way a page is skewed due to perspective so that we still think of it as flat. But if your right brain is too heavily involved, it can’t help but notice this apparent perspective change. A slant board actually raises the book to be parallel to our plane of reading, and therefore eases up the tension between left side ignorance and right side insistence. It’s not the whole answer, but at least I have an answer when the question comes up again. (PS, in case you didn’t know, a slant board is just a wooden/plastic surface raised at about 30 degrees that sits atop a desk.)