Learning Experience

It’s funny that I am struggling to come up with a “learning experience” to write about as I think back about the last couple of months.  There are so many, and yet so few that seem important.  What I’ve figured out over the last year and a half is that tests, grades, and shoving facts down throats somehow have become more important than actually giving students the experience of learning.  This is the exact reason that I am thankful for my non-science classes (although they are becoming fewer and fewer as I finish my core classes).  Don’t get me wrong; biology is awesome.  I’d even argue that it’s the most important thing to know about.  It’s just that when classes become more painful than rewarding, it’s hard to actually enjoy any type of learning experience.

Having that said, one class in particular has opened my mind more to other ways of thinking about life.  Literature and Civilizations, as horribly boring as it sounded when I signed up for it, has turned out to be rewarding in the sense that I do not have to categorize everything as black or white, fact or fiction, nucleophile or base.  Instead I’m encouraged to just think.  And believe it or not, it’s perfectly okay if what I think is not the same thing as what the person next to me thinks.  There is no right or wrong, but instead we discuss relevant issues that make a difference in the world.

Specifically, I want to write about a recent learning experience in that class that concerns Henry David Thoreau.  First I learned the irritating fact that his name was originally David Henry and I was ready to throw in the towel just because of that.  Reading parts (and thankfully not all) of Walden was an interesting experience because it made me think about the world from a different point of view, even if it was only for a few minutes at a time as I read it or as we discussed it.  Thoreau talked about living a simple, thoughtful, and “deliberate” life free of distractions.  He encouraged people to be themselves, and not simply conform to society without questioning why you are who you are or why you are doing what you are doing.  Although I can’t say that everything he suggested we do is something I agree with, he did have thought-provoking points, which really was the reason he wrote anything in the first place.  For example, he makes a point that he cannot stay where he is any longer because he has many more lives to live.  Everywhere else I’ve heard you only have one life, you only live once (YOLO), and you better live it up, but Thoreau throws out the idea of living many lives in a lifetime by continuing to change and not getting stuck in a rut.  Not a life changing thought for me at this point in my life, but still an interesting thought to ponder. Reading parts of Walden was eye opening and thought provoking, and even though it did not change the way I view life it is still an important learning experience.

Learning experiences such as this are not typical as a Biology major, so I think that it is important to have these types of classes that teach people how to think about everyday life and remember that the world isn’t always black and white.