And when I am forgotten, as I shall be, and asleep in dull cold marble, where no mention of me must be heard of, say, I taught thee.
—William Shakespeare, Henry VIII
As an English teacher, much of what I teach my students is how to learn how to learn. Yes, we have the literature—novels, poetry, essays, drama—and we have writing and presentations, all of which can be narrowed down to five concrete concepts: read, write, speak, think, and listen. In August of each year, after I have distributed the syllabus and gone over the classroom rule (Be Respectful), I begin to layout my approach to learning for my students.
“This year, everything you will learn can be broken down into five concepts,” I list the concepts and then explain that these concepts comprise the foundation of learning that has occurred in the human race since we first walked this Earth. My students are digital natives and understand the concept of input, processing, and output. I explain that reading and listening are the inputs of information, that speaking and writing are the outputs of knowledge, and thinking is the processing of recognizing patterns and making meaning of those patterns.
Some astute student will state, “Wow Dr, Gresham, no one has ever explained learning to me like that before. It makes so much sense.” I take a moment, looking at each face in the class, letting the idea percolate for a moment. Some students will be frantically writing this information down; others will have an expression of shock (or awe). At this point I smile and ask them to buckle their seatbelts.
“Think about something you recently learned and write it down,” I pause. “Think about how you learned this new information and write that down too.” A quick survey of the class reflects that many students learned this new information from either reading about it (Internet, SnapChat, Reddit, etc.—I mourn for the days of The Atlantic, Harpers, The New York Times) or someone told them. “Ah, listening and reading, sounds like familiar terms.” I respond. When I ask how those who shared this new information with them did so, they look confused. I smile again. “Perhaps they wrote it down, or maybe told you?” They look back at me as though I’ve stated the most obvious point in their entire lives. “Speaking and writing?” I emphasize. Two additional words of the five we’ve discussed.
“Let’s talk about thinking for a moment,” I continue. “Your brain is a pattern-recognition device, and it analyzes patterns of previous knowledge, prior experiences, and anticipated outcomes to make meaning for the purpose of these patterns.” An analogy that seems to work well with my students involves stealing a piece of gum from the convenience store. If they get caught, and incur consequences, are they more or less likely to steal a piece of gum again, verses not getting caught and experiencing no consequences. Our brains make meaning of these patterns of previous knowledge and experiences. We have learned something in the process.
There are many ways we actually learn, and many ways we may know what we know. An additional consideration in learning is the impact of time. You may walk into my room at 10:25 am on Tuesday morning. I may be lecturing on the use of mythological allegory in Eliot’s The Waste Land. You may have an ah-ha moment right there in the classroom, and when you leave ten minutes later, time has passed, and your understanding of your world has changed during that time. Your ah-ha moment may take a few hours or even a few days to kick in, let’s say by Thursday afternoon. Time has still passed, and your understanding is different because of the passage of time. Learning is time dependent; it is seldom instantaneous.
The last point I leave my students with is that this is the way we humans have learned since our ancestors first roamed the planet. Each of us is the tail of a long line of learning that has been passed down from one human to another for eons. One of your ancestors may have witnessed lightning strike a tree and set it on fire, taking a piece back to the cave to warm it a little. He may have taught others to be on the lookout for fire in the sky. Another ancestor may have learned to rub two sticks together, another to hit two rocks together to create a spark. Somewhere down the line, another discovered oils and fats, and yet another gunpowder. Today someone learned about batteries and filaments, gunpowder, Zippo’s and BIC lighters. The point is that each successive human being has taken knowledge that was shared with them and built upon it.
If we do not teach our children to build further on this shared knowledge, their limb of the tree of human knowledge is at risk of falling off, with all that was previously learned and shared, lost forever. Much like the loss of the Library of Alexandria, of Egyptian embalming methods, Phoenician engineering, and who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays and poetry.