My Life as a Learner

For this weeks reading articles, our assignment was to dig deep and think and reflect on our activities as a learner in this class, this semester and our Independent Learning Project and how they all relate to our lives as learners. This week’s module was filled with interesting articles that were related to learning, education and how students learn. There were many points in this week’s articles that I am eager to share with you and many of them I felt that I have shared these same experiences.

The first article I want to share is by Emily Mitchum entitled, My Generation Essay: Redefining Education. As Mitchum pointed right off that education is everything. It is how we define ourselves. How well we do on an assignment, essay,  or test will determine everything in a sense. In addition, education is all about the numbers. She stated, that this obsession with numbers has taken an overshadow to learning. I have to agree with her. How many times have you found yourself studying and preparing for a test and in a week, you couldn’t remember what the information that the test was on?  I have found myself there countless times. At times, I found myself just going through the motions to pass the test and in the end, not really learning the information. It is sad that our world has come to a point that all they feel and see are the grades and the numbers. But, then if you don’t get the good grades, you can’t go to college or the scholarship, its a sad spiral.  She concluded her essay with this and it has stuck with me, ” In the end, the numbers aren’t going to be what pushes through life. Our identities will.” This is what I feel we need to focus on.

The second article that I want to share is, Learning. It’s Not About Education by Laura Grace Weldon. In this article, Weldon states that, “Learning is a whole experience of mind, body, and self in relation to the world.” She went on to state that schooling  has changed the natural process of learning. With schooling, it is very structured and the education is designed by other people and what the children should know and learn. Children are put into classrooms by age and there are multiple limitations on what they can and can not do in a school setting. Weldon went on to state that there is another way for children to learn. She gave the examples of homeschoolers and unschoolers where these  kids receive a great education, all the while learning from topics that they have interest in, explore, ask questions, volunteer. She states that this is not new to our world, it is actually how people have learned through out time dating back to even the hunter-gatherers.

These articles have given me many things to ponder and think about this week. Reflecting on this semester and my Independent Learning Project, I can say that it has brought me realize the freedom and new found appreciation for learning. It was refreshing to be able to learn something that we choose to learn and create ourselves, as we did with our Independent Learning Projects. Sure we had some direction, but it was up to us. We had a little spark of curiosity in a topic and it was up to us to go with it and learn. This is the new approach I would like to take in learning. Find something that sparks my interests, and see where it takes me.