Education

In Praise of Slowness

By Anthony Rebora — May 22, 2008 1 min read
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Science teacher Andrea of Andrea’s Buzzing About worries that our results-now educational environment has made many teachers and students forget that learning can be difficult and that feeling “stupid” during the process is not necessarily something to be ashamed of:

We also need to help our students understand that learning is anything but a neat, tidy linear process. There’s frequently a lot of review, of practice, stopping to put stuff into context, more review, more practice, looking at the context again now that things make more sense, et cetera ad infinitum. In other words, it’s highly recursive, and for students with learning difficulties, even more so. When our difficulties mean that the performance is uneven because we can do something one day but not the next, it’s especially frustrating.

That’s when you know you’re really learning.

Hat tip: Nancy Flanagan.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Blogboard blog.