While sitting in the strange land of Englishia 100 with Kaiser Wilhelm at the head of the circle of students (if there can be a head at a circle), I have learned a great deal about learning. Some of these elements, dear reader, do stem from what I have learned thus far, but the majority of what I have taken away from this glorious class filled with genius students has reshaped the way in which I have learned how to learn. So far in our young lives, we have been learners that were containers, being filled to the brim on the brink of overflowing with information that crams our heads and tarnishes our human ideas. Now, in this class, we think abstractly. More simply put, we learn what it is to learn by expression and real life ideas rather than by memorization and fact cramming. We only had access to “the greats of literature” because the cannon of who and what was read was decided for us. How narrowed our minds were compared with how open they are now! Anybody having access to a dictionary could, no doubt, easily define the word “learning.” But we in Englishia 100 define what we learn by what we know, what we have experienced, and by what ideas cling to the rhythm of our brain waves. When I was a child, I read books for fun. That’s simply what it was; Fun. The Cat In The Hat would sit alongside me and walk through the story with me. Now, I walk with Brathwaite and Stein and Nabokov and all who speak through their text in much the same fashion. My theory about how to learn and why we learn and what we learn has become a formidable thunderstorm in the tropical rainfall of life. We must learn how we know best, by what we can relate to and with what speaks to us both in writing and extratextually. We must learn because to be restricted is to be oppressed, held down by minimizing our exposure to what is new and uncomfortable. We must learn what means the most to us, by focusing on what speaks to us and what remains memorable and if something does not hold meaning to us, then we must not dwell on the fact that it did not make sense, but disregard it and move on to something that does and we must not worry about what the author wants us to feel, but focus on what we feel without regard to any other individual’s emotions. It is now November 3 in the year 2007 and my theory, you see, stands as such; that to learn is to embrace at the utmost highest level what makes us human – understanding what we would otherwise have never understood and making sense of what makes sense to us. Strange, strange…
By: Melissa Grogan
