 |
| Thinking takes time. In our culture of speed and instant gratification, our students don’t necessarily come into our classrooms recognizing or valuing the time required to think deeply about things, so it’s important to create space in our classrooms to help them slow down, even–or especially–at this frantic time of year.
In this short essay, “I Made My Students Write by Hand. It Gave Them Their Brains Back,” Hannah Pittard reflects on what she learned about slow thinking when she required her students to do all their note-taking and in-class writing by hand: “If you hand a student a machine designed for speed and infinite substitution, you will get speed and substitution. If you hand them a page and say, “Linger here for a while,” something else happens. They slow down. They hesitate. They cross things out. They try again. They think. They think.” |