Slow Learning

I'm enjoying the opportunity to ponder Accelerated Learning theory and think about how I can incorporate it more into my classroom. I want to try using different colored cups during a writing class when students are composing at their computers. . .  green for "it's going well," yellow for "eh," and red for "come help me!" We could have a lot of fun with this. . . purple for "what's the meaning of life?", blue for "sentence structure's getting me down," and orange to signify "medium to high-level terrorist threat in this corner of the classroom!"

Even though I'm so busy with teaching, I do feel like this Ed Psych class I'm taking adds a nice extra layer to the semester, in the sense that it forces me to reflect on what I'm doing. I incorporated an Accelerated Learning-type activity in Intro to College Writing today without even intending to. . .  It's powerful to experience a synergy between teaching and my own learning.

http://susanwiggs.wordpress.com/2008/04/

Okay, so there's the Slow Food movement and even the Slow Poetry one. . .  thinking of learning as accelerated leads me to thinking of learning as slow, and the potential benefits of Slow Learning. How can learning be clean, fair, responsible, pleasurable and local? That's good learning, just like it's good food.

Just when I was feeling brilliant for coming up with the concept of Slow Learning, I found educator Sam Grumont's blog. He mentions a book by Maryanne Woolf called called Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, which I plan on reading as soon as possible. Quickly, slowly, somewhere in between.