We, of a certain age, may often hearken to the days of childhood and youth when the unstoppable delight of learning was only matched by the boundless desire to learn more and more at each passing day. We had the exuberant capacity then and a brain to match the ability of a sponge. We observed, we learned, we remembered, we did and enjoyed all the processes associated with growing up. Of course, farthest from our thoughts then was that the ticket price for growing up was growing old. And now we, again of a certain age, and you know who you are, are constantly reminded of the adage we used to ignore or deny. We knew too that, "Old dogs can't learn new tricks" was never an allusion to dogs. Who ever first coined it, he or she knew what it meant. More of us today are realizing we could not keep up with the daily barrage of new technology and the ever changing ways to deal with them. We sometimes worry but the question is, "Why?" Indeed, why do we and why should we?
If you, again of a certain age, is reading this, has the time for it, comfortably enjoying the rewards and bliss of retirement and the freedom to not have to wake up to the blaring alarm or soothing music or heavy metal wake up call, or whatever gets folks these days to get out of bed at a certain time to go to work each morning, then you are fortunate. What you have, I will tell you, is copious amounts of time to experience once more the joys of learning. Actually, it is the joy of re-learning. I will explain.
Covid-19 has opened a door. Instead of focusing on the glass being half empty we knew we could look at it too as being half full. Here's one suggested way to do it.
Scrolling through YouTube one day I paused at a topic, "Sine, Cosine, and Tangents Explained", or something like that. The host's presentation, according to him, was going to make his audience understand in simple and easy steps everything they needed to know about the subject in less than half an hour.
Wow! I thought excitedly. Not because the subject matter was new but that for the first time in so many decades I remember it and when I first encountered them. It propelled me back to Engineering freshman year, second semester trigonometry preparatory to differential calculus next semester. Calculus was not taught in high school where I grew up. College was over fifty years ago and since after graduating not once in my entire career had I ever had to use or apply the practical uses of sine, cosine and tangents, specifically. I even completely forgot how they worked and what for. I was excited to re-learn the whole thing. It turned out it didn't take longer than a few seconds to bring them all back. But I was still excited. Then everything made so much more sense, or I was able to think in terms of how these sine, cosine and tangents have their influences in everyday stuff we take for granted today.
Re-learning, while not the same as learning, shines a different light. Sine cosine and tangent have their finger prints all around me, I just realized. How screws and bolts work, propellers and turbines, gradients along curves on highways and race tracks, land surveys that determine your property lines or why your GPS can take you to where you want to go, etc.
It opened doors to re-learn but more importantly the brain is suddenly re-acquainted with long lost chapters in your life, long forgotten challenges and sources of delight. Above is just a mere sliver of an example of things forgotten that are now worth re-visiting. Every now and then we may want to remember the things that were exciting when we first learned them but more significantly for some of them to mean differently now or that the light they shine presently may reveal perspectives you may never have thought about.
I remember hearing someone talking about the movie, "Groundhog Day". She was talking about watching it several times over a period of many years at different stages of her life. She said that each time she watched it, her perspective changed each time. We know what the movie was about, right? The main character spent his days over and over again in an eternal loop of deja vu. But what she observed was that each time she watched the movie, after having gone through her own life's experiences over time, the movie's message for her changed from the last time she saw it to the time she saw it again.
Indeed, learning and re-learning, even if it is the same subject matter, brings back one different perspective or another. Answering why is actually the key to understanding ourselves and others in our own circle and beyond. But that is far too deep, much too cerebral for re-learning to be delightful.
Not ignoring the English majors among my readers, no offense is intended or ascribed, one may find new delight in remembering the differences in poetic style, rhyming mechanisms involved from the simplicity of the children's favorite - acrostics - to the humor of limericks, to the stanzas of sonnets and epic poetry to the 5-7-5 syllable structures of haiku, etc. Or, why "Don Quixote" may have a different message now from what it had in high school. The music majors of yesteryear or fans of Broadway or opera (two distinct camps that don't often mix) may learn, from re-learning, that "West Side Story" is based on "Romeo and Juliet", "Miss Saigon" from "Madame Butterfly", "Rent" from "La Boheme", "Pygmalion" gave us "My Fair Lady" and on and on. In fact, some of the stories can be re-examined as to give us pause. For example, one may now frown at the way Henry Higgins treated Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady". New Perspective, new thoughts that today we could re-examine.
An English major may still cringe at hearing the phrase "different than" when it should really be "different from". He or she may still be unforgiving because "different than" does not make any sense at all, not ever, because nothing or nobody can be "different than" anything or anybody, except to be "different from". But he or she is re-learning when realizing that common usage makes almost anything universally acceptable. When "Star Trek" debuted in 1966, hardly anyone noticed, except the English majors of that era, that "to boldly go" was actually improper grammar - splitting an infinitive. But today, almost everyone is guilty of breaking that rule. However, re-learning how these things develop over time will open up new doorways for the brain to look into when there is nothing good on TV. Seems corny or insignificant but that is a form of brain stimulation that involves re-examining the once familiar but viewed from a different light today.
Re-learning becomes an undiscovered avenue to actually learn some things for the first time, except that these are stuff one is not only already familiar with but that he or she once had the unbridled enthusiasm for it. I am talking about music lovers who once could tell a Vivaldi composition from Ravel or Strauss (father and son). The modern enthusiast may brag about distinguishing immediately any John Williams compositions even when he or she only knows the composer from "Superman" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and several others. Ennio Morricone has a cult like following from his famed soundtrack for spaghetti westerns topped by "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly". I mention these because one will be surprised that many of a certain age are re-learning as they hearken to the days of their youthful education. We must accept the fact that not everyone was enamored with the classics, Greek Mythology, or Shakespeare. All I'm saying is that re-learning is a way to recapture not just what anything meant to anyone then but how everything has changed or nuanced toward the ever changing views we develop or experience.
Re-learning is also a way to look back at subjects we may have struggled with but now that there is no longer the sword of a mid-term grade over our heads, we may realize why your high school teacher wanted you to learn algebra or geometry. Now, you will know the method to the madness except that presently you realize there is a way to distill arguments of today in an orderly fashion as easily as one would assign a value to unknown x, y, etc. in a manner that makes sense.
John Nash "who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics for his landmark work" and whose life was featured in the movie "A Beautiful Mind", was foremost a top notch mathematician who introduced us to "game theory". I had a glancing encounter with the subject way back in college but lost interest. Re-learning it now is less intimidating but more significantly it comes with the realization of its relevance today when dealing with how or why people take on one view or the other in dealing with social justice, socioeconomic travails and all the political posturing or understanding both sides of the debate that involves society and human behavior. The thing is we do not need to learn everything about game theory. Perhaps, we only focus on the "prisoner's dilemma" which is one interesting feature of the theory. Look it up and you'd be surprised at how interesting, even intriguing the simple scenario presented by the "prisoner's dilemma".
I am just putting all of these out there because in re-learning you may find hidden gems you may have missed back then. You may be a retired doctor now and you remember how you struggled with chemistry in premed. Now you can go back and revisit valences or valency of an element that "is a measure of its combining power with other atoms when it forms chemical compounds or molecules". Biology was more interesting to you then but now here is a chance for re-learning what you dreaded the most but not have to worry about a passing grade. You could be a retired accountant now and you realize there used to be something about industrial or engineering accounting you did not care for but now you know there was a reason for it. I can't obviously go into all the possible ways to re-learn anything but it is something to get into when binge watching anything needs a break in this Covid episode of our lives.
Re-learning is like riding a bicycle but now there is a chance to do it with a variety of choices you never once had. It is like riding a mountain or off road bike and know you may only want to go a few feet or at least make only part of a long ride and that you can get off anytime without anyone to judge you or suffer any consequence from not continuing. And the good news is that you can do all of these in the comfort of your living room.
You take the good with the bad in social media or consider the good Google and YouTube have to offer. There is a ton of re-learning opportunities from both. Now, with voice-activated command that comes with almost all new TV, "everything at your fingertips" is now passe. Just say, "prisoner's dilemma" or "General Relativity for dummies" and suddenly the doors to learning and re-learning are opened up for us, of a certain age, and anyone of a certain inclination to once again re-discover the hidden gems or confront everything that you used to dread in your early education.
Let x, let y and you know there are a's and b's out there.
Wow! I thought excitedly. Not because the subject matter was new but that for the first time in so many decades I remember it and when I first encountered them. It propelled me back to Engineering freshman year, second semester trigonometry preparatory to differential calculus next semester. Calculus was not taught in high school where I grew up. College was over fifty years ago and since after graduating not once in my entire career had I ever had to use or apply the practical uses of sine, cosine and tangents, specifically. I even completely forgot how they worked and what for. I was excited to re-learn the whole thing. It turned out it didn't take longer than a few seconds to bring them all back. But I was still excited. Then everything made so much more sense, or I was able to think in terms of how these sine, cosine and tangents have their influences in everyday stuff we take for granted today.
Re-learning, while not the same as learning, shines a different light. Sine cosine and tangent have their finger prints all around me, I just realized. How screws and bolts work, propellers and turbines, gradients along curves on highways and race tracks, land surveys that determine your property lines or why your GPS can take you to where you want to go, etc.
It opened doors to re-learn but more importantly the brain is suddenly re-acquainted with long lost chapters in your life, long forgotten challenges and sources of delight. Above is just a mere sliver of an example of things forgotten that are now worth re-visiting. Every now and then we may want to remember the things that were exciting when we first learned them but more significantly for some of them to mean differently now or that the light they shine presently may reveal perspectives you may never have thought about.
I remember hearing someone talking about the movie, "Groundhog Day". She was talking about watching it several times over a period of many years at different stages of her life. She said that each time she watched it, her perspective changed each time. We know what the movie was about, right? The main character spent his days over and over again in an eternal loop of deja vu. But what she observed was that each time she watched the movie, after having gone through her own life's experiences over time, the movie's message for her changed from the last time she saw it to the time she saw it again.
Indeed, learning and re-learning, even if it is the same subject matter, brings back one different perspective or another. Answering why is actually the key to understanding ourselves and others in our own circle and beyond. But that is far too deep, much too cerebral for re-learning to be delightful.
Not ignoring the English majors among my readers, no offense is intended or ascribed, one may find new delight in remembering the differences in poetic style, rhyming mechanisms involved from the simplicity of the children's favorite - acrostics - to the humor of limericks, to the stanzas of sonnets and epic poetry to the 5-7-5 syllable structures of haiku, etc. Or, why "Don Quixote" may have a different message now from what it had in high school. The music majors of yesteryear or fans of Broadway or opera (two distinct camps that don't often mix) may learn, from re-learning, that "West Side Story" is based on "Romeo and Juliet", "Miss Saigon" from "Madame Butterfly", "Rent" from "La Boheme", "Pygmalion" gave us "My Fair Lady" and on and on. In fact, some of the stories can be re-examined as to give us pause. For example, one may now frown at the way Henry Higgins treated Eliza Doolittle in "My Fair Lady". New Perspective, new thoughts that today we could re-examine.
An English major may still cringe at hearing the phrase "different than" when it should really be "different from". He or she may still be unforgiving because "different than" does not make any sense at all, not ever, because nothing or nobody can be "different than" anything or anybody, except to be "different from". But he or she is re-learning when realizing that common usage makes almost anything universally acceptable. When "Star Trek" debuted in 1966, hardly anyone noticed, except the English majors of that era, that "to boldly go" was actually improper grammar - splitting an infinitive. But today, almost everyone is guilty of breaking that rule. However, re-learning how these things develop over time will open up new doorways for the brain to look into when there is nothing good on TV. Seems corny or insignificant but that is a form of brain stimulation that involves re-examining the once familiar but viewed from a different light today.
Re-learning becomes an undiscovered avenue to actually learn some things for the first time, except that these are stuff one is not only already familiar with but that he or she once had the unbridled enthusiasm for it. I am talking about music lovers who once could tell a Vivaldi composition from Ravel or Strauss (father and son). The modern enthusiast may brag about distinguishing immediately any John Williams compositions even when he or she only knows the composer from "Superman" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and several others. Ennio Morricone has a cult like following from his famed soundtrack for spaghetti westerns topped by "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly". I mention these because one will be surprised that many of a certain age are re-learning as they hearken to the days of their youthful education. We must accept the fact that not everyone was enamored with the classics, Greek Mythology, or Shakespeare. All I'm saying is that re-learning is a way to recapture not just what anything meant to anyone then but how everything has changed or nuanced toward the ever changing views we develop or experience.
Re-learning is also a way to look back at subjects we may have struggled with but now that there is no longer the sword of a mid-term grade over our heads, we may realize why your high school teacher wanted you to learn algebra or geometry. Now, you will know the method to the madness except that presently you realize there is a way to distill arguments of today in an orderly fashion as easily as one would assign a value to unknown x, y, etc. in a manner that makes sense.
John Nash "who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics for his landmark work" and whose life was featured in the movie "A Beautiful Mind", was foremost a top notch mathematician who introduced us to "game theory". I had a glancing encounter with the subject way back in college but lost interest. Re-learning it now is less intimidating but more significantly it comes with the realization of its relevance today when dealing with how or why people take on one view or the other in dealing with social justice, socioeconomic travails and all the political posturing or understanding both sides of the debate that involves society and human behavior. The thing is we do not need to learn everything about game theory. Perhaps, we only focus on the "prisoner's dilemma" which is one interesting feature of the theory. Look it up and you'd be surprised at how interesting, even intriguing the simple scenario presented by the "prisoner's dilemma".
I am just putting all of these out there because in re-learning you may find hidden gems you may have missed back then. You may be a retired doctor now and you remember how you struggled with chemistry in premed. Now you can go back and revisit valences or valency of an element that "is a measure of its combining power with other atoms when it forms chemical compounds or molecules". Biology was more interesting to you then but now here is a chance for re-learning what you dreaded the most but not have to worry about a passing grade. You could be a retired accountant now and you realize there used to be something about industrial or engineering accounting you did not care for but now you know there was a reason for it. I can't obviously go into all the possible ways to re-learn anything but it is something to get into when binge watching anything needs a break in this Covid episode of our lives.
Re-learning is like riding a bicycle but now there is a chance to do it with a variety of choices you never once had. It is like riding a mountain or off road bike and know you may only want to go a few feet or at least make only part of a long ride and that you can get off anytime without anyone to judge you or suffer any consequence from not continuing. And the good news is that you can do all of these in the comfort of your living room.
You take the good with the bad in social media or consider the good Google and YouTube have to offer. There is a ton of re-learning opportunities from both. Now, with voice-activated command that comes with almost all new TV, "everything at your fingertips" is now passe. Just say, "prisoner's dilemma" or "General Relativity for dummies" and suddenly the doors to learning and re-learning are opened up for us, of a certain age, and anyone of a certain inclination to once again re-discover the hidden gems or confront everything that you used to dread in your early education.
Let x, let y and you know there are a's and b's out there.
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