We learn, we forget, we keep on learning

My travels as of when I started college

Grading exams leads to shudders and sighs about what my students don't know. Sometimes I'm sad because it was a clear teaching failure; the students did not learn what I taught them in class.  Sometimes they don't read ("anabolic" is not the same as "anaerobic" and just because a student skims the last two syllables does not make, "Which of these processes is anabolic?" a trick question).  Sometimes they don't think.  And sometimes they just don't know stuff.  They can't label a map with where potatoes and wheat were domesticated because they can't find Peru and Iraq on a map.  They can't answer questions about increases in corn yields not because they didn't learn the significant changes in corn breeding, but because they don't know when the US mid-west was settled and when World War I was.  Stuff.  Stuff American college students should just know, in my opinion.

My map now

Meanwhile, whenever I advise my students about other classes, I am stunned by what I have forgotten.  I can no longer integrate anything (in the area under a curve sense) and can only write about 15 of the 1,500 Chinese characters I once knew.  That's not really surprising since I do not use calculus (although perhaps I should) and it's been 23 years since I last studied Chinese.  But I still vote and can no longer espouse all of the amendments in the right order.  I'm a failure at US Presidents in the 1800s (aside, I suppose, from Lincoln and Grant).  I had to look up properties of a normal distribution recently, although I still use stats all the time.

Travels with my husband and ex-boyfriend

Adult travels without parents, husband or boyfriend

And then there's the stuff I didn't know as a college student and have learned since.  Halfway through college I didn't know what NPR was.  I didn't know what a penstemon was. I could not name a Joni Mitchell song. I hadn't read anything by a South American writer, not Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not Isabelle Allende, not Mario Vargas Llosa.  I probably couldn't use "cladistics" in a sentence.  I didn't drink beer.  I didn't eat raw oysters.  I  had no idea that there were whole parts of the US where stone houses are the norm. I had never, ever googled anything.

I know so much different stuff now. Much of it that I can't imagine not knowing.  I'm regularly amazed at twenty-somethings doing a great job of parenting because I can't fathom that they know enough.  I'm drawing from 41 years of experiences and I feel I'm barely scraping by.  There is just so much to learn. About everything.

I've been working on this post for several days and I'm still not sure where I am going with it.  Part of it is in a call to leniency when dealing with the young. They just can't know that much.  Even the well-traveled (like me when I started college-- top map*) have huge gaps.  Part of it is a call for leniency from the relatively less young to those of us younger.  We just haven't had as many opportunities to experience as much as you have. And please feel free to laugh at any of us when we think that we've figured it out.

But mostly, it is a call to keep learning thing.  To put yourself in new places.  To read more.  To experience. To go. To learn.

And then maybe you won't be so mortified with all the things you forget.

* Key for the top two maps is white- unvisited. Red-drive by (or longer visit when I was one).  Orange- at least spent the night and learned some things.  Blue- multiple visists or an extended trip (e.g. honeymoon to Newfoundland).  Green- lived there.
The third is places I have been with my husband (who I met when I turned 31) orange, my ex-boyfriend (blue) or both (green). Wyoming should be green on that map. The last map was a project with some of my students in mind, who think that they need to have met their mate or be part of a traveling family in order to explore.  These are places I have been without my parents, husband, or ex-boyfriend.  I took the train across New Mexico and the bus from Denver to Santa Fe. I think it should count for something. Learn more and make your own map here on defocus.net.  I think the prairie dog map would look much like the husband map, but the prairie dog was not yet on the scene as of the Yellowstone-Glacier trip.