Learning About Learning
Context is king when it comes to theory, unless your name is formalism, then you only care about yourself. Being a student at Radford has made one of my dreams come true, and I’m not just being sappy — I’m learning things again. That isn’t to say I wasn’t learning things before, but my gap year waiting for the state of Virginia to pay their Radford bill gave me a lot of free time. Now, trust me, I’m the kind of guy who loves a little free time. But spending some time away from formal education does one of two things — it makes you go “Whew! Thank goodness I’m not in formal education anymore,” or it makes you appreciate it a bit more in hindsight. For me, it was the latter.
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Hearing an ink pen click. The simple act of scratching out notes onto a pad of paper. Smudging the words you just wrote on the line above with your big, stupid hand — it’s all a part of the process. And I was starting to miss that process. Covid-19, if you guys can remember that crazy old thing, put us out of the physical classroom and into the Zoom classroom. Let me tell you, the quality of my handwriting took a big hit in that process. Lucky for me, I have done more writing in the past three weeks than a monastic scribe. As we talked about in class on Thursday, a lot of things are starting to bleed together — there’s a lot of conceptual crossover in these classes. But the ink on my notes is starting to bleed together a little bit less, and — hey! — I count that as a win in my book.
Tallying up all your little victories is sometimes the only way you can see yourself as a success — our journals have helped me do that consistently. I’ve started writing those entries right after teaching English 111 on Wednesday, and it’s helping me put to words what I actually learned from that day. In this week’s entry, it was not to wear a sweater in a hot room on a summer day. But we’ve talked about that exact scenario in our classes by now — the classroom environment has an effect on how we teach, whether we realize it or not. It’s neat seeing that immediately come into play, even if it means you’ve got sweat running down your forehead into your eyes.
I have heard so much about Plato over the past week, the wrinkles on my brain have started spelling out his name. And he’d hate that, ’cause you wouldn’t really get anything out of reading it, ethically speaking. To friends, I’ve compared myself to the Lovecraft protagonist who discovers the eldritch truth and gets all the cosmic knowledge beamed directly into his mind before it flays apart. That is to say, it can be a lot to take in sometimes. But it’s one step at a time.
