Slow down the lesson...

I’ve always been fascinated by the slow food movement. You know, where people sit down to a meal which takes several hours to complete. You’re meant to savour and enjoy each morsel instead of merely stuffing your mouth and swallowing the food in a couple of gulps. I’ve never been to such an event although on good days, I remind myself to chew more than a dozen times before swallowing. And when I see people rushing through their sun salutation during yoga, I am again reminded that we never get off the giant treadmill of life.

Slow teaching and learning is another interesting concept to explore in class. I have always been very suspicious of concepts like accelerated learning and speed reading although I am sure they have their own principles and followers. But is it always beneficial for pupils to be put on the express train of learning? I believe firmly that all pupils can learn, although some take longer than others and being on a fast train won’t help them.

It does not help too to have a fixed timetable that says you’ve only one hour for comprehension, essay writing and other fixed allotments of time for other subjects. Come, come. Can we always teach within these one-hour slots or do we just shut down when the time is near and ignore other possible topics that have arisen from the lesson? The latter cannot be a sound educational decision but often that is the case.

So it’s with great pleasure that I read Thomas Newkirk’s article on slowing down the reading. I always joke that children have only one speed for reading – fast! (Come to think of it, the same speed applies to many other facets in their lives!) In fact, one serious lesson young learners should learn is to vary their reading rate to fit the type of reading they are doing, and in school, slow reading is often essential to get details from a text. Newkirk’s article published in Reading to Learn, Vol 87, Number 6 is entitled “The Case for Slow Reading”. He suggests that slowing down our reading will allow us to reclaim the acoustical properties of written language- we can hear the way sentences unfold. Here are some of his suggestions, many of which should be familiar to those of us who went to school in the sixties.

1. Memorising – memorising helps us to own texts. We used to memorise poems, lines from Shakespeare and my friend S recently told me how well she still recalls the lines from the Shakespeare play she studied in school thirty some years ago -The Tempest. Well, if not anything else, it always impresses people no end if you can quote several lines from Shakespeare or a poem! My question for you is what can pupils be asked to memorise?

2. Reading aloud – Some texts are just meant to be read aloud and it’s true that hearing the words make much more of an impact than just reading them. I once listened to an audio version of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, where the characters and story came alive for me in a whole new way.

3. Attending to beginnings- Here Newkirk suggests reading carefully constructed introductions in books to understand the roadmap the writer has provided for us for the
rest of the book.

4. Annotating a page – I tell teachers to make students do this to stop them from rushing through the words. Annotating slows down the reading pace and forces students to attend to the writer’s words and phrases and think about their meanings. Newkirk also suggests having students copy down particularly meaningful and interesting lines and passages and reread them. I do this myself quite often.

5. Reading poetry – Poetry demands a slower pace of reading and reading a poem aloud is the best way to savour it. Poetry contains rhyme and rhythm. Poetry also contains images that help us see things in a new way. Listening to a poem is a good slow way to help students appreciate the many ways writers can communicate a message or an emotion.

Newkirk also asked for a rethinking of time limit on reading tests. I think we also need a rethink of the time limit on reading lessons. As it is, does it not feel like we are all trying to get through a text rather than really delighting in it and thinking about it?

Finally, do a slow rereading of Newkirk’s suggestions, now that you’ve skimmed through this text. Perhaps this will help you reconsider the usefulness of some of his suggestions.
And remember: smile, breathe, and go slowly.