Question 2 on Freire: How do you read the world? How does your ability to read the world connect to your education or your world reading?

My view of the world is, dare I say, Descartian. I begin with my own thoughts and senses and build out from there. I read to acquire facts or to acquire other opinions or beliefs that I compare to my own. (Note: My instructor pointed out in his response that Freire undoubtedly uses the same methods. I agree. Interesting.)

My procedures for reading the world make me a difficult student. Education is merely a new set of inputs to be compared against my existing opinions and beliefs. Overall, I’ve never been a very successful student, precisely because I am never “learning”, but evaluating. I’m the expert. The subject has to prove itself to me. This makes me very popular with professors.

Only in writing this up did I realize that my method for reading the world explains why science is the one subject I don’t teach, and why I would be simply miserable at any grad school that required actual mastery of new facts--like med school. In science, I have no basis for comparison. All the facts come in new. Moreover, there’s no pattern to science that makes sense to me. Similarly, if I were in med school, I’d have to learn everything from scratch.

And--further insight--this explains why I hate learning how to do new activities. I loathed and despised learning how to drive, for example, which I didn’t do until I was 22. But I absolutely love to drive, and have since I learned how. The learning was misery, and I just now realized it’s miserable for me because I have no context.

So. To try and put this together, here’s what I have learned about myself and about learning in this exercise. What most people consider learning environments (say, going to grad school in education or MIS), I consider just new inputs for me to think about. I simply don’t consider that “learning”. It’s just new information that goes into the big library in my head. Whatever anyone says about this information is just their opinion; I don’t consider them experts just because they are previously aware of the information. This is why I am always flummoxed when asked in class to describe what I’ve “learned”. I have read the information and tested it against my own opinions and answered either in agreement or disagreement. I‘ve learned nothing--in many cases, not even new facts. (Arrogant, much? Oh, well.) As far as I’m concerned, I learned nothing new in college or either grad school experience. I formed new opinions, discovered new ideas that I considered and accepted or rejected, but I learned nothing.

The subjects or activities that actually require mastering new information without context, that don’t require my opinion, that don’t appear to have any particular pattern that I can grab on to--ick. That requires a lot of work and discomfort. I am unhappy. That doesn’t mean I’ll refuse to do it, but I won’t do it for fun, that’s for sure. No skiing or horseback riding for me, thanks.

So it is only the second group that I consider learning. What have I learned since I was 18? Math. Programming. Driving. Parenting. Note that none of this happened in school--any effort to teach me math or programming in school resulted in failure.

And so, I know now what to do if I want to master science. I have to grit my teeth and learn. Do the unfamiliar. Accept the lack of context. Look for the patterns that might make sense to me.

Or I can continue to leave science off the list. I’m old. Option B, thanks.

I also know now why I don’t have much time for school, despite knowing an awful lot. School has never managed to teach me how to learn. I had to do that on my own. I happen to be good at teaching others how to learn, though, and that’s why I’m here.

I use my knowledge of how uncomfortable I would be in given learning situations to look for similar discomfort in my students. I know that not everyone is comfortable learning the same way, and that many of my students will have difficulty acquiring reality from books. Helping them find their way, helping them learn how they learn, is an essential part of teaching, for me.