February 6, 2012

• Thinking about thinking...

   

  

   

  My morning involved calling an ambulance for a 70 year old woman. I was working at the parish reception desk, and was about to leave and go to mass when she appeared before me, pale and staggering and telling me she didn't feel well and could I please not leave her all alone she's scared. I was scared, too. It was not an emergency in the somebody-is-having-a-heart-attack-right-now sense, but she was disoriented and couldn't answer the questions I asked her and looked both terrified and in pain, although she struggled to tell me why or how. After some worrying and some consulting actual grown ups on my part (all of whom were equally unsure of what to do - since when did we become so hesitant to take care of one another, myself included?), she left in the arms of paramedics. Which are far better arms than mine. It seemed like she was going to be okay, and I hope that's true.

  It has been a strange week full of the sorts of discoveries I have no idea how to write about on the internet. The easy (ish) bit to explain is that I'm learning about how I learn, about how I understand things. This feels like a big deal, mostly because I've never actually thought about it before. I assumed there was only one proper way to do it: you start at the beginning of something and build upon your knowledge until you get to the end. It all happens in sequence, and there are concrete things to be grasped along the way. This is how they teach you in school. It never occurred to me that there were other ways to do it, that not everyone's brain operated like this. 

  (This is going to be long, and possibly abstract - consider yourself warned.) 

  Generally, my understanding of things is a lot more... mysterious. For whatever it's worth, my life is full of objective proof that my brain works quite well. I've always been an A student. I am in graduate school. These are not things that happen to people who are not on some level intelligent. But I've always felt kind of stupid, and while you could argue that confidence has something to do with that (and you wouldn't be wrong), it has also had a lot to do with the fact that learning, for me, has always felt overwhelmingly unpredictable and, though this will sound strange - scary.

  What happens, for me, is the exact opposite of the concrete, linear style that I always thought was The Way: I usually know the end point first. More often than not, I start with the answer, or at least I reach the answer much more quickly than most people. I have intuition that borders on freaky. (In the Myers-Briggs test, if you're familiar with that, I am an INFJ.) It's taken me a long time to identify and trust this, but it's the truth - even when I have very little understanding of a subject, I often draw conclusions that are correct. This is why I am able to pull papers out of thin air the night before they're due and without having done any of the reading, and why those papers usually receive high grades. I "get" things.

  But I don't learn them. I can almost never tell you how I have reached a particular conclusion, or a particular understanding. I can't trace my train of thought, or identify the steps that led me to an answer... because there are no steps. I just "know" things sometimes - a lot of the time - and although I am learning that I can rely on that ability, it is also incredibly frustrating and sometimes scary. 

  (I mentioned the Myers-Briggs test earlier only because, for me, it's evidence that this is actually a thing - that other people's brains work this way, too. I know it sounds a little weird, but I am not the only one.) 

  It makes me feel scattered. Internally, my world sort of oscillates between searing clarity and utter chaos: I am either completely certain about something, or concepts and observations float around, rearranging themselves into combinations I can't follow. It's a lot to filter through, and it has made school a challenge - for years I have tried to force myself to follow this sequential pattern of learning that seems, from the outside, to be perfectly reasonable. But it has never worked for me, and so a lot of the time, when I study, I content myself with simply "putting in the time," because I feel that I am supposed to, without that time ever being terribly productive. (There are probably ways for it to be productive, though I am only just beginning to figure out what they are.)

  If I've ever seemed to grasp a concept well, it's because I have memorized it rather than because it makes actual sense to me. (In elementary school, this is how I did everything. I wrote out my notes - word for word - over and over and over until I could basically recite them.)

  Though, there are subjects for which this has never worked - anything science related. I am good with theory, but horrible with anything practical. Facts and figures don't stay in my head. If they do, I lose myself in them - in the details - in the hopes that they will help me understand the bigger picture (but they never do). 

  In university, I found that showing up to lectures was my best strategy. I didn't have to take notes (I took fewer and fewer notes every year). Simply paying attention was usually enough to give me what I needed to do the work. My grades have always reflected a solid understanding, whether or not I have ever felt like I've actually had one.

  But for all my talk of how learning has always been frustrating, I like it. I wouldn't have stayed in school for this long if I didn't. It's an overwhelming process, but I am hungry for knowledge, for ideas, all the time. It's just that I have never made the effort to understand my own, particular system - I have never known that I could. 

  It's like... a tree. I get the leaves first. And then, slowly, I build the branches... but never all at once or in order, from one side of the tree to the other. They appear here and there at random, until every group of leaves is connected to something. This part is slow, but exhaustive - every leaf is accounted for. And then eventually I get the trunk. The trunk is less a literal beginning point or base - I am not actually learning backwards - and more of a metaphorical thoroughness, a sense that whatever it is that I've understood is grounded in something solid. 

  But this thorough and backwards way of learning takes a long time, and I am not always that patient. So I've learned to rely on my instincts, because I can, even though it isn't always what's actually best. When I am particularly frustrated, I avoid the "learning" altogether, because the need to be thorough combined with the weird mystery of knowing and not-knowing overwhelms me. 

  Now that I am aware of this, I'm working on finding a system that works. For now, the tree analogy helps a lot. I find that illustrating things with maps or charts is really helpful, too, because it gives me the freedom to jump around a bit more, to map out big ideas without necessarily needing the details. I know that I am much better with theories and concepts than I am with specifics or concretes. The more abstract, the better. 

  And I know this whole thing will probably only ever be interesting to me... but figuring it out has felt like a big deal. Even just admitting to the fact that half of the time I am full of knowledge I have no idea how I've obtained has erased some of the mystery from my daily life. 

  For anyone who reads here (and who has read this far)... have you thought about how you learn? What works for you? 

   

  h. 

   

   

  • 2:07 am
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