How we learn

After looking up those two words, I am struck at how they go perfectly together. We do not arrive at a point in life to be able to say, we are learned. Bad English there, that is to say that we are never done learning. To engage in the process of learning is to continually develop how we learn. To add further meaning here, we just will not be able to say that we have this thing called life figured out. You can see this kind of statement made by many of the most famous writers. I heard a pastor that I admire (I truthfully admire many pastors) say, “When I was 30 I said ‘the me of 10 years ago was stupid.’ Then I repeated it again every 10 years.”

Isn’t it true that we know more than we did even yesterday? If that is not true than you need to examine what you did today to not use your mind at all, because I can think of a couple of ways to do that. Knowing more than yesterday can help us process the many things that we will experience today. I can think about all of my roles in life – a teacher; a husband; a father; a grandparent; a neighbor; a housekeeper; a financial planner; a traveler; a man of faith – and say that I don’t have any of them figured out completely because they can be different every day. Each day I can learn something within one of those roles. Heck, I might even learn how to do laundry today!

This can be a reason that anxiety finds a hold in us on a regular basis. I actually heard a quote today that said thinking of our past can bring frustration, thinking of our future opens us to anxiety, living in the present is where God likes to meet us. Instead, we can live in present, choose to learn from what we are doing and choose to enjoy those that we encounter each day. This is also the reason that writing my pages here on learning have been my last to introduce into this site. The three pages that I have listed to the side will be under construction as I have only parts written for each. I also need to decide where I want to go with them and what will help you along your journey.

Curiosity

Do you know why they say curiosity killed the cat? The cat actually did not want to know, so was not actually curious. The cat wanted to see, feel, or experience what it was like, without using prior learning or knowledge as a tool to understand what would happen in that situation.
I was teaching in front of class when I saw a student standing at the window. When I asked him to sit down, he did not turn all the way around to respond saying “Ok.” After several of these requests for him to sit down, I walked over to inquire what was going on. The student had their finger stuck in a hole in the handle of the window. Over 20 minutes later of lost class time, after involving the principal and a jar of vaseline, the students hand was free. When asked why they put their finger in the hole, the student said, “I wanted to see if it would get stuck.” Exactly like the cat.
Wait, this gets better. Just 3 days later in the same class with all of the same students present, I became annoyed by a student talking too much during the lesson. I stated to take their chair and move from the table. “Anywhere?”, he inquired. I did not care where. He picked up his chair and went right over to the window. A few minutes later I noticed this student standing at the window. When I asked him to sit down, he did not turn all the way around to respond saying “Ok.” I looked at the class and they were thinking the same thing I was. No way! Sure enough his finger was stuck in the hole of the handle of the window. I asked him why he tried that. His response was, “I wanted to see if my finger would get stuck too.” Is there something worse than the cat? Well, I found it.

Quotes

“My mother always used to say: The older you get, the better you get, unless you’re a banana.”
Betty White in Golden Girls

“You know you’ve reached middle age when you’re cautioned to slow down by your doctor, instead of by the police.”
Joan Rivers

“Well, it took me 17 years to get 3,000 hits in baseball, and I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.”
Hank Aaron

“Yo, Rugman, haven’t seen you for a millennium. Give me some tassel!”
Robin Williams in Aladdin