Why You Should Go Learn New Stuff That You Don't Know Anything About
Isn't it amazing? We have all of human knowledge, history, art, and music in our pockets. Open source courses and libraries and archives-- the internet is an astonishing artifact-- a weightless Alexandrian library.
Sometimes I even remember that fact, and poke at my Kindle reading list, and then go back to scrolling through "Garden Design" and "Celtic Tattoo" tags on Instagram, or *LOL* or *ANGRY REACT* to memes on Facebook.
Not doggin' on Instagram or facebook, I love it and I love all your kids' shining prom faces and your beautiful crème brulee and your pouty selfies and your yoga-in-the-surf shots.
But I'm been thinking about something--about the value of being exposed to things you don't seek out-- allowing yourself to have curated experiences from some other brain that shock, shake and stretch you.
I love driving with my podcast library, and all my favorite tunes and playlists bluetoothed onto my car speakers. It's a relief, in the mayhem of life, to have the narrow band of Stuff I Like so available to me. But every time I remember to turn on the radio, I realize how much I've missed it. NPR wakes up my brain from the dullness of self-selected content, with interviews with unfamiliar authors, news headlines without the truncated memefication of my social media bubble. A wander around the bookstore and a slow peruse through a print magazine and I'm stunned at the quality of content, the beauty of the imagery. It's not all just on pinterest. The good stuff is still out there, but it's not falling into our laps through the magic of social media and the internet.
For one, you can only search for what you know exists. And google and other automaton brain-services in our lives-- meet us only on our level. They try and divine, by scattering the algorithmic guts of our youtube searches-- who we are and what we like.
But not who we want to be, who we could grow into, who we should be. Just that we once looked up how to wing eyeliner, so we will probably want to look it up again, tomorrow, and always, and forever. If you develop new interests, new curiosities, you have to get the germs of those new interests from somewhere outside the crazy echo-box of internet information.
Not that there isn't something fun and fruitful about the descent into a Wikipedia wormhole. I've found myself in fantastic places by starting a Wikipedia search-- the esoteric family trees of Greek gods and goddesses, or concise lists of brain-twisting logical fallacies. There really is cool stuff out there. But I had to start the search with something I knew to search for.
Some people think college is a thing of the past-- we have the internet, we have Wikipedia. I utterly BALK at this. I panic when people claim that we have access to everything online, and college is some big corporate conspiracy to make money, or a societal trap to separate the classes and protect the privilege of the privileged and ensure the continuing oppression of the disadvantaged. Not saying that higher education doesn't sometimes veer alarmingly into a corporate venture rather than a one for the human good, or that the world of PhDs and hyper-specialized research doesn't utterly unpluck itself from reality of relevance, access, or application. But dismissing it, amputating it like a gangrenous limb, is the beginning of a descent into groundlessness, disconnection, nihilism, and societal short-sightedness.
The thing with education, is that it takes you places you didn't know how to access. It shows you things you didn't know you didn't know.
As a teacher, I know this, as I've often dragged students into the unknown, and been delighted with they make genius comparisons between geology and modern art, YA literature and Hindu Mythology and historical journals and conspiracy theory. Their young genius brains (and they are all genius brains, even if sometimes they are also moron brains and asshole brains, bless their tweenager hearts) make astonishing connections and give me hope for humanity. So I know the value, in other people, of introducing them to stuff they didn't know existed.
But I had forgotten, in the specific, how it feels to be grabbed by your brain, and dragged into unknown territory.
In January, I started an online master's program at WGU-- there was a last minute scholarship thing I could apply for, it was kind of a mad scramble, but I'm in it now. I'm learning about Instructional Design.
Building curriculum is one of my favorite things about being an educator (my favorite thing is the kids because Middle Schoolers are Extremely Weird and Hilarious). I like the challenge of breaking down difficult processes and content into meaningful chunks. I like the crazy way things come together when you combine different human brains, time, and stories. It's the stuff of life. So the curriculum design stuff was pretty familiar-- some cool new ways of describing the process I had already figured out, and some useful tools for articulating some of the stuff I hadn't thought to make explicit. But nothing too revolutionary.
But I've just started the next section of the coursework. It's about Evaluation. I girded my loins for some dry readings about assessment design and organizational accountability. But I've been delighted to plod along and think, over and over again-- I never imagined it that way! I never knew this process existed! Of course, of course!
So I'm cheerful at the moment. There is a big world out there, and even though I know what I know, I don't know that much. And that's pretty neat. Now back to my reading homework.
Sometimes I even remember that fact, and poke at my Kindle reading list, and then go back to scrolling through "Garden Design" and "Celtic Tattoo" tags on Instagram, or *LOL* or *ANGRY REACT* to memes on Facebook.
Not doggin' on Instagram or facebook, I love it and I love all your kids' shining prom faces and your beautiful crème brulee and your pouty selfies and your yoga-in-the-surf shots.
But I'm been thinking about something--about the value of being exposed to things you don't seek out-- allowing yourself to have curated experiences from some other brain that shock, shake and stretch you.
I love driving with my podcast library, and all my favorite tunes and playlists bluetoothed onto my car speakers. It's a relief, in the mayhem of life, to have the narrow band of Stuff I Like so available to me. But every time I remember to turn on the radio, I realize how much I've missed it. NPR wakes up my brain from the dullness of self-selected content, with interviews with unfamiliar authors, news headlines without the truncated memefication of my social media bubble. A wander around the bookstore and a slow peruse through a print magazine and I'm stunned at the quality of content, the beauty of the imagery. It's not all just on pinterest. The good stuff is still out there, but it's not falling into our laps through the magic of social media and the internet.
For one, you can only search for what you know exists. And google and other automaton brain-services in our lives-- meet us only on our level. They try and divine, by scattering the algorithmic guts of our youtube searches-- who we are and what we like.
But not who we want to be, who we could grow into, who we should be. Just that we once looked up how to wing eyeliner, so we will probably want to look it up again, tomorrow, and always, and forever. If you develop new interests, new curiosities, you have to get the germs of those new interests from somewhere outside the crazy echo-box of internet information.
Not that there isn't something fun and fruitful about the descent into a Wikipedia wormhole. I've found myself in fantastic places by starting a Wikipedia search-- the esoteric family trees of Greek gods and goddesses, or concise lists of brain-twisting logical fallacies. There really is cool stuff out there. But I had to start the search with something I knew to search for.
Some people think college is a thing of the past-- we have the internet, we have Wikipedia. I utterly BALK at this. I panic when people claim that we have access to everything online, and college is some big corporate conspiracy to make money, or a societal trap to separate the classes and protect the privilege of the privileged and ensure the continuing oppression of the disadvantaged. Not saying that higher education doesn't sometimes veer alarmingly into a corporate venture rather than a one for the human good, or that the world of PhDs and hyper-specialized research doesn't utterly unpluck itself from reality of relevance, access, or application. But dismissing it, amputating it like a gangrenous limb, is the beginning of a descent into groundlessness, disconnection, nihilism, and societal short-sightedness.
The thing with education, is that it takes you places you didn't know how to access. It shows you things you didn't know you didn't know.
As a teacher, I know this, as I've often dragged students into the unknown, and been delighted with they make genius comparisons between geology and modern art, YA literature and Hindu Mythology and historical journals and conspiracy theory. Their young genius brains (and they are all genius brains, even if sometimes they are also moron brains and asshole brains, bless their tweenager hearts) make astonishing connections and give me hope for humanity. So I know the value, in other people, of introducing them to stuff they didn't know existed.
But I had forgotten, in the specific, how it feels to be grabbed by your brain, and dragged into unknown territory.
In January, I started an online master's program at WGU-- there was a last minute scholarship thing I could apply for, it was kind of a mad scramble, but I'm in it now. I'm learning about Instructional Design.
Building curriculum is one of my favorite things about being an educator (my favorite thing is the kids because Middle Schoolers are Extremely Weird and Hilarious). I like the challenge of breaking down difficult processes and content into meaningful chunks. I like the crazy way things come together when you combine different human brains, time, and stories. It's the stuff of life. So the curriculum design stuff was pretty familiar-- some cool new ways of describing the process I had already figured out, and some useful tools for articulating some of the stuff I hadn't thought to make explicit. But nothing too revolutionary.
But I've just started the next section of the coursework. It's about Evaluation. I girded my loins for some dry readings about assessment design and organizational accountability. But I've been delighted to plod along and think, over and over again-- I never imagined it that way! I never knew this process existed! Of course, of course!
So I'm cheerful at the moment. There is a big world out there, and even though I know what I know, I don't know that much. And that's pretty neat. Now back to my reading homework.
Comments
Post a Comment