I've been having an incredibly stressful week, including re-locating for a couple of days with my 2 yr old crazy child & no DH, being pregant, and some serious family disasters.
I sat down durring a nap to do some languages homework. It went really, really well. I had to translate a passage that I really could *almost* just read, and because of my exhausted brain, I actually managed to drudge though the fairly easy work *properly.* In normal form, it would have been too easy an asignment for me to have gotten much out of, yet I really do need to re-inforce my "basics" if I want to move forward with this language. So this one hr of study really made a difference.
I got to wondering if anyone's written about local variations in zone of proximal development, or about differing widths of that zone from individual to individual?
Or anyone thought about it?
Some of these kids (like I still am, apparently), who have a lot of trouble drilling the easy stuff into submission -- could they be suffering from a narrower-than-optimal zone of proximal development? Could they be helped by making more/better use of the small variations in capacity that happen over the course of a day or a week or a month? Or by adding/removing stressors to actively manipulate the Zone?
I remember an article saying something about people learning certain types of rote information better when slightly stressed by hunger or temperature, published maybe two years ago? Could that be a way of shifting the Zone a little lower to facilitate re-inforcement of partially learned material?
Me and my vague and philosophical questions...
-Mich
