Dear readers, With schools around the world closing to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, many are seeking to understand the dynamics of learning at home. Here is an article I wrote when my daughter was 9, years before her first day of school. Were we homeschooling? Unschooling? I liked to call it slow learning.
We often ask, what is learning? Now let us ask, what is slow learning?
1. Slow
In Space and Time in Classical Mechanics, Einstein asks to imagine that he has dropped a stone while in a moving train. As it happens he asks us to imagine that he has dropped it outside the train, from the window, as the train movedi.
Inside a moving train, if we drop a stone we will see it fall down in a straight, vertical line. If we are inside the moving train but drop the stone outside the train, we will see the same thing. To the falling stone, once released from Einstein’s (or anyone’s) hand, it makes no difference whether it is inside or outside the train.
