Cleaning out the garage this evening, my husband and I came across some old academic work - thesis defense slides, class notes, labs, exams. Having been out of the meteorology business for a few years now, I was astounded to see just how many things I once knew and have since forgotten. And what we remembered remembering (as the grades on the papers could attest), but don't really remember until we're reminded. [apologies if you pulled a muscle that last sentence...]
This comes hot on the heels of a conversation with a friend about how much calculus I've forgotten since college. It does come back quickly, like when a student asks me about a question on their math homework, or I read it in a quiz-bowl question. There's that unnerving familiarity, without the immediate recall, that can be pretty frustrating until you read part of a textbook and it (mostly) makes sense again. The paths are there, I just have to hack my way through a dense jungle of overgrowth to find them again.
Conversely, some subjects, like one I now teach, gave me a certain amount of frustration when I was younger. I'm continually surprised to find I now love it; it comes so much more naturally and makes so much more sense. Admittedly, I have a couple degrees behind me now, plus the burden of the teacher: I have to understand the material or I have no hope of communicating it. I'm impressed with the ease by which my students pick up some concepts I teach. I often wonder how my high-school self would compare to them. It's interesting to consider that subjects can be more readily mastered under different circumstances. And how some subjects are merely vehicles for learning how to learn, in contrast to learning the pure material. I suppose this plays out in my own classroom - I know I teach more problem-solving skills than pure science.
I'm no neuroscientist, but perhaps that's the very distillate of education. Learning is not instant access to all one's files on the desktop of one's head, but is instead the cultivation of the ability to maintain and navigate the filing system. To rediscover what's been learned before with a bit of prompting or refreshing. The difference between trivia-recall and understanding. I suppose it's a corollary to the Curse of Knowledge: that which has been learned, some part of it, is always present - it just may take some work to find it and shake the dust from it. Or maybe it's just a lyric to a Paul Simon song: "It's easier to learn than unlearn."
This comes hot on the heels of a conversation with a friend about how much calculus I've forgotten since college. It does come back quickly, like when a student asks me about a question on their math homework, or I read it in a quiz-bowl question. There's that unnerving familiarity, without the immediate recall, that can be pretty frustrating until you read part of a textbook and it (mostly) makes sense again. The paths are there, I just have to hack my way through a dense jungle of overgrowth to find them again.
Conversely, some subjects, like one I now teach, gave me a certain amount of frustration when I was younger. I'm continually surprised to find I now love it; it comes so much more naturally and makes so much more sense. Admittedly, I have a couple degrees behind me now, plus the burden of the teacher: I have to understand the material or I have no hope of communicating it. I'm impressed with the ease by which my students pick up some concepts I teach. I often wonder how my high-school self would compare to them. It's interesting to consider that subjects can be more readily mastered under different circumstances. And how some subjects are merely vehicles for learning how to learn, in contrast to learning the pure material. I suppose this plays out in my own classroom - I know I teach more problem-solving skills than pure science.
I'm no neuroscientist, but perhaps that's the very distillate of education. Learning is not instant access to all one's files on the desktop of one's head, but is instead the cultivation of the ability to maintain and navigate the filing system. To rediscover what's been learned before with a bit of prompting or refreshing. The difference between trivia-recall and understanding. I suppose it's a corollary to the Curse of Knowledge: that which has been learned, some part of it, is always present - it just may take some work to find it and shake the dust from it. Or maybe it's just a lyric to a Paul Simon song: "It's easier to learn than unlearn."
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