“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
For the last few years, I have been learning French. I first learned French in high school, sort of, as much as you can learn French in high school. I studied German, as well, with Frau Mautner with her glorious Austrian accent and her impressive hauteur, but it didn’t take. Under the tutelage of various peevish and offended French teachers, I learned French grammar, but was unable to speak any French at all, nor could I comprehend short French passages in literary works without looking them up.
As an adult, I was offended by having spent that much time learning not to know anything. I swear that utter ignorance is the goal of many students.
After my husband died, after I was free of working and free of tending to him, I decided to re-learn French. My adult child was already using Duolingo, so I followed suit, and I worked my way through at least one lesson a day until I had completed the whole course, getting in just under the wire before they started incorporating too much AI into the app. Since then, for the last year or so, I have been listening to various podcasts for French learners.
There was no purpose to my studies, and not much in the way of results, either. That didn’t matter.
When I went to France to visit my brother, for instance, I mostly survived by pointing and smiling. To this moment, I probably could still not say a sentence in French without embarrassing myself. But earlier this morning, I listened with half my attention to a twenty-minute podcast in French about the Bastille Day Parade, understood all of it, and could answer the comprehension questions afterwards.
That is why I have begun to review pre-algebra every day as well, using Khan Academy on my phone. I have finished ratios and rates, and am embarking upon percentages, a sub-topic which I thought would be easy but am finding interestingly varied instead. Instead of wasting reams of paper, which is what I did when I was learning to diagram sentences fifteen years ago, I use my iPad and the Notability app, and I scribble numbers on electronic graph paper to solve problems, then wipe everything away.
I was always good at math, which is a problem; I know what kind of number the question is asking for, and can estimate a reasonable range for the answer, so I often don’t think my way through solving the problem, just glance at the question and answer it without much thought. Now that I’m an adult, I don’t want just the answer. I want the diligent pleasure of solving a problem step by step. I want to learn a procedure, and I want to know why math works the way it works.
I have spent my whole life learning new things. I was a teacher, and at various times I taught all the grades K through 12 and college. That meant I was teaching myself constantly, and learning things thoroughly, so that I could figure out all the many ways to convey knowledge to my students. It was one of the great joys of my life to have a child (or a student teacher, or an intern) exclaim, “Oh now I get it!” because I had laboriously over-learned a topic to the point where it made sense to me in twelve different ways.
And now I’m not a teacher any more, it turns out I didn’t need the excuse of my job any more. I can just learn things, and I can sometimes surprise myself by saying out loud, “Oh, now I get it.”
From time to time, late in the school year when my students had learned to trust me, I would inquire one day, “If you get through a course without learning anything at all, do you win?” and watch their faces suddenly go confused as they thought through their assumptions about cramming-and-forgetting, or about cheating. I don’t flatter myself that it took; that would be too much to expect in a society that devalues teaching and learning, and that thinks of school as a credentialing process instead of a transformation, a boring one at that. I just hope that at some point, after they have something for its own sake, as they all do eventually, whether it’s a sport, a skill, or a body of knowledge, it might occur to them to go back and learn again something they dismissed when they were young, if only the consolations of poetry, mathematics, or a foreign language.