This is going to be brief because, frankly, I’m tired, but I need to talk to you about a rarely recognized fact.
Learning is an activity unto itself. We all know we can learn without another human physically present (although another human’s ideas must be). No one expects Euripides to footnote his play so that students can be fed the nuances of Medea’s character development piecemeal. No one criticizes Mozart for not breaking every composition into tiny, playable chunks for a novice. If you’re tackling Euripides, or Mozart, or Hume, or Pythagoras, YOU are tackling them; the onus is on you to make meaning of their work.
Teaching is trickier. There’s an expectation that the teacher will make everyone understand everything, that a teacher should be good enough that her words alone get across all the essential components of the learning.
Students expect a teacher to control their learning. (If only that was possible.)
What they fail to see is that their job is to do something too: learn the material.
I understand why students feel this way. On a macro level, we’ve taken away their agency, so why should they accept responsibility? At a micro level, teachers too often fail to provide appropriate, scaffolded, rigorous learning opportunities leading to meaningful assessment. There’s far too much lecture to notes to study guide to multiple choice test. There’s far too little mastery of content or skills.
We have a rare opportunity to actually learn the things we want to learn, without bells. Without anyone telling us how to do it.
Falling down the YouTube rabbit hole doesn’t count.
A million worksheets won’t do it.
Binge-watching documentaries won’t mean anything.
Unless.
I’m begging you: process the information or it isn’t learning. Help your kids or younger siblings or friends process theirs.
I’ll offer some structures that can help you.
But, at the end of the day, you have to do the work.
Educated and Free 