SLOW LEARNING

If you have persevered thru any of Transparent Drawing, one of the sub themes that I continue to harp on is our culturally divergent approach between logical thinking and visual thinking. Quick links to past posts here and here on this general topic.

I guess I take this subject very much to heart, given that I place myself in the visual category; I never could really understand exactly what a multiple choice SAT question was really asking.

Frank Riessman, writing back in 1962, wrote extensively on just this cultural divergence. In his book, The Culturally Deprived Child, he identifies the following traits of that child:

1.  Visual rather than aural
2.  Problem centered rather than abstract centered
3.  Spatial rather than temporal
4.  Slow, careful and patient (in areas that they care about) rather than clever and facile.

Recognize yourself? I sure do. And I recognize students I have taught. I ended up shutting down when presented with purely formal and therefore unproductive problems.
When I entered architecture school, I still remember to this day the phantasmagorical shift that occurred in my mind. I could not believe that I was finally free of logical relationships with tiny meaning. I was able to operate spatially in the temporal world. I was able to productively solve meaningful problems. I was able to frame my own problems and solve them, rather than have some very narrow construct presented to me to see if I could deduce an irrelevant difference.

By Riessman’s definition, I was a Culturally Deprived Child: that’s funny. To this day I remain ever so thankful that I was somehow lucky enough to claw my way out of a logical realm that I simply was not comfortable operating in.  Many of us are not that fortunate.

We now have slow food, among others, as a fresh cultural attribute. How about slow learning? Of course, someone has put those two words together and is blogging about it. Here is a link to slowlearing.org, which is one take on the matter.

To paraphrase that popular beer commercial, Stay Slow, My Friends.  And then by Mr. Riessman’s reasoning, you better stay culturally deprived as well.