[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Enthusiasm for the method began to run high in the heartland.At that point, Iowa researchers, teachers, and professors founded the Society forSuggestive, Aecelerative Learning and Teaching, a mouthful that's known as S.A.L.T.TheSociety publishes a journal and a newsletter and runs a teacher-training program.It hasalso hosted three international conferences on rapid learning.Just as lowans had helped find the key to opening outer space with the discovery of theVan Alien radiation belts around the earth (Dr.James Van Alien and colleagues,University of Iowa), maybe lowans, with their delving into the mind's capabilities, wereheading toward being among the first to explore keys to inner space.Early in 1976, Schuster convinced educators and state legislators to fund large-scaleexperiments.On a $100,000 grant, the achievement, adjustment, and creativity of 1,200students in different public schools taught by twenty S.A.L.T.-trained teachers for oneyear, was compared with control groups.Schuster calls the preliminary findings"significant scientific documents."Though some of the teachers never got their projects going, of those that did, manyfound their students' performance vastly improved.Junior high and high school studentsseemed to benefit more from rapid learning than did elementary students.Charles Gritton was both science teacher and wrestling coach at the Woodrow WilsonJunior High, a school in a low-income neighborhood.You'd give a good lesson, Grittonsays, and afterward you'd realize the kids didn't hear a damned word you said.You'd gohome at the end of the day wanting to shoot yourself, he says, because you'd wasted yourday there, their day, and all that energy.The kids had their own worries to think about."When apolice siren goes off down the street, there are a half-dozen kids in a class of fiftywho look nervously around," says Dr.Schuster."If there's a knock on the door and apoliceman comes in that door, three kids go out the window.Every so often, kids don'tshow up in class: 'Where've you been?' 'Oh, I spent a couple of days in jail.'"Pessimistically, Gritton had learned to live with limited results, only possible throughheavy discipline.When Schuster and Benitez-Bordon told him about rapid learning, he wasscornful."Nobody can teach kids fifty or one hundred new science terms in a week, letalone a day, and make them like it."Nevertheless he gave rapid learning a try.As his classes learned more easily, rapidly,and successfully, he began to get a kick out of teaching again."Each group of studentshas achieved more because I have been more encouraged to try even more of the ideas."In 1977, with a new group of classes, the mean percentages for the four classes were:98.5 percent, 94.0 percent, 97.0 percent and 100.0 percent, with an overall meanpercentage of 97.5 percent."With those kinds of results, the students are highlymotivated to work."The kids, it seems, were elated, and proud of their new-found skills.For many, it wasthe best they had ever done in their lives.They had a new image of themselves and theircapabilities.Gritton knew for sure there was something different about rapid learningwhen kids sent out in the hall for misbehaving didn't cut classes, but hung around hisdoor trying not to miss anything."If S.A.L.T.helps but one, it would be worth it," says Gritton, "but when you have 115students at a ninety-seven percent level in four days, teaching is a lot of fun!"The kids' excitement was contagious.It changed Gritton from a pessimist to an optimist.The "illusion" that people are limited had been dispelled.He tried the same techniqueson his wrestling team and couched them to the city championship.5253 SUPERLEARNINGSUPERLEARNINGGritton prizes his daughter's compliment "You're a much nicer person now."Gritton added mind calming and environment records soothing sounds from nature to easestress and anxiety.Kids come to him now and say, "I've got a headache," "I've got apain," "can't we do mind calming?" It helps him too, he says.One girl told him the mindcalming was helping her in family fights.When her mother hollered at her, she dida'breathing exercise and felt very calm.On a trip to Iowa in 1977, Dr.Lozanov dropped in on schools there and said he wasdeeply pleased with the work going on.Dr.Owen Caskey of Texas Tech University told us their initial success with rapidlearning of Spanish encouraged them to start all kinds of programs including a one-yearhead-start program for five-year-olds; an English program for Vietnamese; and a remedialreading program for military personnel.There is military interest in rapid learning, not only for recruits who can't read butalso for personnel who must learn the volume of technical data required to man modernmilitary equipment.Somewhat to our surprise, from the time reports of the systemappeared here, apart from teachers and private individuals, those most stirred by thepossibilities of opening supermemory were the top brass in the military.Like theircounterparts in the USSR, they seemed more immediately aware of what wide-scale rapidlearning and supermemory could mean.On the West Coast, Charles Schmid got hold of Dr.Bancroft's superlearning instructions.Schmid, fifty-one, was a former professor at New York University and the University ofTexas at Austin.He dropped out of teaching, he says, because he was fed up withinefficient teaching methods.In California he studied the human potential movement.Hehad the idea of combining Lozanov's techniques with Gestalt and consciousness-raisingmethods
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
