What we talk about when we talk about learning

a biweekly blog on lessons, thoughts, and advice on teaching

Over the years I have had wonderful teacher training: courses on lesson planning; how to work with different students; how to teach language; how to listen, how to speak the world into existence before you; how to stand; how to look; how to breathe, and work with administration. But some of the best advice I received was from a musician, never a classroom teacher. Simply, a wise woman who said, “you just have to be one step ahead.” 

Long after the bell rings, after the class is over, maybe an hour, maybe ten years go by before learning takes place. When I think about teaching I think about this immeasurable time. Each student, no matter the context, allows the teacher in, or resists the teacher in a different way. The teacher cannot control this, only be in the moment with the student, holding the classroom with just one step ahead, ready to switch gears, change teaching mode at any moment. And the countless teacher training courses come into play. But no one knows how exactly the information will be disseminated. 

I was not a good student. I was resistant to rules, and in a habit that persists to this day, I did not read the instructions before jumping into whatever it was I should have been preparing for. In the middle of class I would be easily drawn into the smallest fracture of light. The rest of the world would crumble around the movement of a bug along the window pane. Taken by whatever it was, I would write a line of poetry, so when, naturally, the teacher saw me drifting and called on me, I would freeze. The meandering nature of my mind has never been specifically diagnosed, but it wandered like it was on a mission, and not a mission to learn times tables in class, but gaze out the window, or write, or sketch abstract and organic imagery on my note paper. 

Yes, if pushed, I could learn to memorize any number of facts and figures. Having a modest acting career in my grammar education, I memorized dates like I memorized lines. I know the date that Columbus sailed the “ocean blue.” And no, it was not a good thing to do, and now I will always remember. 

Memorization is a tool, even though I have poo-pooed it as nothing more than an excuse to do well on a test, henceforth becoming latent in the mind right after the answer is written. I’m sure you can ascertain my feelings about tests. However, these feelings don’t stop the tests from existing. Each test is its own puzzle, and requires presence of mind. Like a wish made in folly, be careful of the things you put to memory. 

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True knowledge is a process of embodiment. So, of course, the key is time and voluntary practice when it comes to learning by rote.

Memorization, like practice, is valuable. An artist and mentor of mine, Benigna Chilla, spent many months out of her year in Bhutan, teaching children how to paint traditional Buddhist paintings to their exact original stroke, the aim is to take yourself out of the artwork. In this same way, I would attempt to create perfect strokes as I swim laps in the local YMCA. Practice is a way of creating neural pathways through the brain whose channels set over time. Habits are a way of knowing. 

However, these well worn channels are not set in stone. Like a hefty spring rain on a bittersweet vine, they can be grown over and rerouted relatively easily for most. Brain plasticity allows us to change these pathways at any point in life.

The technical term is, neuroplasticity, and it requires a generous dose of problem solving, hence crossword puzzles, riddles, and optical illusions, but also measured breathing. You know what it’s like to make your brain work. I see it in my kids all the time as they work through words they are unfamiliar with, or through problems that are challenging to them.  

So, learning requires contradictory practices: repetition, and dynamism. 

When I think of neuroplasticity I imagine a doughy, fleshy brain expanding and contracting in snaps and swirls with the chaotic abandon of a character from Animaniacs. “Yes, to change the brain forever, Pinky.” 

The forever changing brain is a brain that can play. Some people call it beginners mind, some call it grit, or growth mindset, or meditation. But this is veritable play that brings the brain carrier – right here – into the present moment. 

I believe that true learning lies between the stable and the fluid, the established and what is to come. 

History, however it is passed down, creates the framework for learning no matter what the subject matter is. But, of course, these lessons are not complete. Learning lives in relationship. Both student and teacher have to know that the ground onto which they teach, and are learning is unstable, it may correspond to other ground, but it is new. The student, does not know themselves yet, and will fail in the real world. The real learning lies where the cracks in instruction were, in the silences and side stories, in the laughs and the spontaneous creations, in the complexities borne and nurtured in the garden of the mind.