The process of learning is more important than the final product. In life you never stop learning and we have to appreciate the journey of it. If we stay fixated on an outcome, we miss out on the beauty that comes from learning. Karen Jodoin taught me that in 9th grade science. I’ll never forget it. Perfectionism never made me a good student…it was me stopping to appreciate the gift of actually learning and using new knowledge that made me a “good” student.
AM (former student)
My response:
I promise to give you credit when I use what you’ve said here. It is the process. And, I can’t begin to list to you all the things that I’ve learned from Karen Jodoin, too!
AM response: She’s a smart woman that Karen!! I admire her wisdom so much. The comments under this post are so awesome to read. Thanks for this, it made my day:)
More about learning and appreciating the journey:
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman (1865)
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
A friend who taught English shared this poem with me early in my career. I interpreted it as Whitman saying how sometimes the magic of an experience, like looking up at the beauty of the night sky, can be diminished or even destroyed by the classification and analysis done by a scientist. The idea that a scientist is unable to appreciate the innate beauty of something in their journey to understand the minutia that underlies an observation or a process.
I initially took offense at what I thought Whitman was saying. My experience has always been the more I know about the specifics of an event, the more I see the beauty of it and value it.
Sunsets come to mind. I think most people agree that sunsets can be beautiful, serene, and transcendent. You can look at the sun’s changing colors as it dips below the horizon and feel a sense of closure, or hope, or peace.
To me, knowing that it’s really the earth’s rotation from West to East that causes the setting sun doesn’t make it any less special. In fact, knowing that, as well as understanding that the color changes come from the light traveling through a thicker section of the atmosphere enhances my admiration of a sunset. Thinking that the light is traveling as both a wave and a particle amazes and humbles me.
When viewing a sunset, you see a rainbow. The sky right on the horizon is red. A little higher up you see orange, then yellow, green blue, and finally violet above your head. This is caused by different wavelengths being scattered to different degrees by the atmosphere. During a sunset on Cape Cod the blue that you would see is actually scattered somewhere over California.
Upon further reading, and maybe a little maturing, I now see that When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer is more of a warning than an absolute. He wasn’t saying scientists are incapable of comprehending the beauty of nature, he was reminding us that charts, graphs, and data aren’t the only thing to depend on.
I still prefer “Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical” (1861) by Herbert Spenser, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, over Whitman’s poem.
“… Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it?
Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning?
Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snowflake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals?
Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago?
The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. …”
Each of these examples speaks to me deeply. Each seems like something small and maybe insignificant. But each speaks to a greater order to the universe. Especially here in New England, I can’t take a walk in the woods without seeing those parallel scratches made by glaciers. It connects me to the past in a way I have trouble describing.
When I have observed really effective teachers it is these philosophies that stand out. They reach their students with the awe and wonder–the beauty of an observation and match it with the supportive data. Examples of this can be seen in any discipline. Let me give a historical and a mathematical example.
History is rife with examples of knowing more of the specifics of the story enriches and deepens it. The story of the Puritans coming to the New World was always something that seemed pretty boring to me. They came to the “New World” for religious freedom. They met tribes of “Indians” that helped them survive their first winter.
My understanding of their story and that of the Native Americans they met was expanded after reading The Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick and other accounts of the early settling of Massachusetts by the English. The religious freedom they sought was because the Church of England wasn’t strict enough!
Meetings between members of the Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag nation involved attempts to work together, cultural misunderstandings, and possible misrepresentations, as Tisquantum (Squanto) may have been maneuvering against Massasoit for leadership among the Wampanoag people. This could just as easily be a modern story. Looking deeper into the history of both of these peoples makes their stories more vivid and compelling.
Mathematics is also better admired when you know even more of the story. I wrote about the pythagorean theorem in a previous essay. What I didn’t include was that the Ancient Greeks didn’t have a number system like we do! They proved a2 + b2 = c2 geometrically through areas constructed on the sides of a right triangle. That’s kind of the reverse of how we think of it. And they were proving something that the Babylonians had been using for centuries before. This gives me a greater appreciation of how deeply they thought.
Knowing more about a subject never diminishes its impact. Facts do not drain beauty from the world. They reveal how much beauty was there all along. The deeper we study something, the more there is to admire. Taking the journey of learning more is what makes things more special.
Leave a Reply