I’ve had to choose where and what I spend my time on as life unravels and new ventures present themselves. Unfortunately this has forced me to spend less time on Steemit, for now, as I’ve been spending my time re-learning how to learn. Looking back to the days at school, all the way from primary to high through to tertiary, I’ve always been a passable type of student, didn’t really excel in anything except art, because art was fun and I could express anything however I wanted and during the end days of high school I was really pushing the boundary between passing and failing. I remember once just simply not doing an assignment because I just didn’t want to anymore. I couldn’t see the point, it was a toxic mix of naivety, rebellion, lack of foresight and understanding of what it would mean for my future should I wish to play the academic game.
I realise in my more mature years that I’m not unintelligent or incapable of learning, it’s the way in which the teachers were taught to teach that made the whole experience boring, it felt like a churning robot factory of I tell you this, you write it on a piece of paper and I give you an A, over and over and over again. It’s not a case of teaching students the passion of curiosity and understanding the mechanics of the world’s order that sparks one’s natural gift for learning with open eyes, ears and hearts but rather a test of how well you can memorise and repeat information spewed at you in a factory manner. For instance, maths - ooooh spew! How unsatisfyingly boring are those numbers that make NO sense at all, and if you zone out at the zooming cars or the rustling leaves of a tree watching the birds defend their nest for just one minute, forget it! You’ve basically succumbed to being what I calI an unsolvable equation because you’re five digits short of a wave function and no amount of positive multiples can get you back on that grid! Geography? I remember we live on planet Earth.. did someone declare that Pluto was no longer a planet, does that mean I now fail that past exam on our solar system. I wonder how many of you can relate to that?
So, upon realising this and journeying through the discovery of learning with passion and a natural love for knowledge, the rate at which I learn now is increased exponentially, information is a joy, techniques and discovery is essential and learning becomes easy. I link to one of my first posts that offers one such specific technique here on how to memorise. I think it’s such an absolute shame that the majority of us weren’t taught this way when we were in school. I think it’s imperative to question what we’ve been taught, start to develop your mind for thinking for yourself and not just accept the first piece of information that’s spewed at you because it may be easy to deal with or fit your prerequisites. I believe at birth we all have the gift of natural information absorbers and translators, then it gets stomped out, suppressed as we’re thrown into a production line to churn and burn, making those with the upper hand, those with the castles.
I often wonder how I would teach children a class on maths, English or history, maybe they’re the ones who should teach the adults.
** Learning stuff again
