Learning About Learning

[About The Class of Thursday Sept. 16]

I'm writing this reflection on a Monday, four days after the class. It's like pressing the “play” button instead of just chronicling an immediate past. This is new. And it means that I need to be careful and type or write down the list of topics for the blog either in class or immediately after I arrive home.

PLAY:

Before class started, everybody was curious about the number of pages the other students had written. I'm not sure if I was the only one who said “13.” I probably was. NOTE TO SELF, COMENT WITHOUT PAUSING THE TAPE: But, why did I write too much about learning? And about myself?

PAUSE: “I talk too much, but I should write more,” this is what I always tell myself. But then, just like when I was a teenager, the simple idea that people will learn about me from a diary scares me. This is the reason why I have written short stories and tried to write poems, so that I stay away from journaling. The assignment of writing our learning biography scared me at first, because I didn't know how to start it. Then the fear of saying too much or too little was there, like an unavoidable Monday. When I had the idea of how to organize my biography, the writing became easier. I have to admit that my mood and focus on my surroundings changed several times while I was writing the biography.

PLAY: When we started to talk about the process of writing our biography as a group, I was relieved. I wasn't the only one who had a little trouble starting or finishing. I write and talk a lot about other people and subjects, but I talk too little and write less about myself. But this time, I wrote a lot about me and I'm not the best topic. COMMENT TO SELF: Besides, there no articles and Wikipedia entry yet that can serve as starting points on the learning life of Lulú De Panbehchi. COMMENT TO A CLASSMATE: "I just hope that the 13 pages I turned in will not invite more problems when using them as a source for other activities or papers that this course for sure will ask for in the very near future."

PLAY: The video clips were helpful and also helped me to understand that adult education and literary criticism are two similar fields of study. PAUSE: the -isms, again. I have to be careful, otherwise I will suffer “ismsitis.” PLAY: We can study any book or learning biography with different lenses at the same time, but some lenses will be better suited than others. I have read both Pygmalion and A Doll House, but I have never seen the movie versions of those two plays. It was a great way to make the theories easier to compare.

PLAY: When we read the two biographies in class and discussed them with a partner, I realized that maybe I had written a good amount of pages about me. The information about the two prisoners was enough to provides with a clear idea of who they are, their learning problems and learning context. PAUSE: If I write a paper based on what I wrote, it will be difficult to me not to include what I didn't write, which now makes me worry about the amount of information, not just the length of the paper. CONTINUE: I like the fact that we were able to discuss as a group the learning issues of two real people that the professor knew. This way, I was able to compare my understanding with that of my partner in this activity, what other students thought, plus what we as a class somehow concluded. I say “somehow” because by the time I got home I had more ideas and questions regarding these two individuals. If we revisit these mini biographies at the end of this month, and then at the end of the semester, I'm pretty sure there will be even more to say about them. PAUSE: This tells me that since learning is constant, the learning of my own biography of learning may change from this week to the next one. But this is fine. STOP: Learning never ends, therefore learning about learning doesn't end either.