Are you one of those people who thinks that somehow they’re a bit deficient because others read quicker than they do? I’m one of life’s slow readers. If Wendy and I ever read the same thing she goes at twice the pace I do. I’m normally trying to make sense of everything I read. Most of my way through school I didn’t really ‘get’ reading. None of it stuck. I’m quite a slow learner in general and it wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I started to soak up what I was reading. I think I have an internal flywheel that has quite a lot of inertia. Now that it’s running it allows the new stuff I’m reading, concepts mainly, to stick to what’s already there.
I think there’s two things at play: the way we receive information and the way we teach people.
My Myers Briggs preference is for introvert intuition. I have to understand things and how they fit with my own internal model before I add them to the store. Of course if it takes me a while to build up an internal model so I have something to compare new inputs to. Other friends of mine pick up the rules they’ve been given and use them to try and unlock the secrets of whatever task they’ve been given from first principles. Unfortunately life doesn’t conform to dutiful application of the rules may not be that effective. Our ‘models’ aren’t robust enough to cope with the variations in fine detail. Some people are lucky enough to be able to regurgitate the patterns they’ve learned – part of the brain is good at pattern matching. It’s the pattern matching bit, though, that doesn’t engage the higher functions. The regurgitation of these patterns is highly measurable in written exams but they don’t necessarily indicate understanding.
I’m not an educational psychologist but I have been teaching flying and related subjects for 15 years. I’ve also been trying to learn for 47 years. Even recently I failed one flying test and scraped through another. In preparation for those tests the instructors were delivering the facts without necessarily the ‘why’ or the ‘how to get there’ or even ‘several ways to get there’. Just like so many of us who say that we learn to drive after we’ve passed our tests I more or less had to go back and try and understand what I should have learned first time. Once again, I was being a slow learner. Or maybe I was consolidating in a way that gave me a much greater understanding.
Even how we’re taught to read might not be that effective for whole swathes of people. Some people will dutifully intone the spellings and pronunciations they are given by people higher up the tree – their teachers and parents – but others will want to know why it’s important and what their motivation is. Once they’ve worked out that it is important they’ll metaphorically pick up the map their teacher has given then and try and find their own way to the correct reading of the words. ‘And’ works, ‘the’ sort of works but when you get to ‘lose’ and ‘read’ (past tense) the rules they have been exhorted to learn don’t actually work. And what about, ‘rough’, ‘through’, ‘cough’, ‘Slough’, ‘thorough’ etc? The children who strive to find ‘why’ and ‘how’ might well be the ones who could help the world be a better place.
My point is that if the standard way we ‘teach’ reading is only partially effective what else are we missing the point on? If you teach someone else to do something and even if you followed the accepted format don’t assume your pupil is thick just because they didn’t get first time. I don’t think I’m thick…but maybe I really am.
Have a look at this Guardian article on creativity.