My Ladder of Learning: How It Shaped My Perspective
Currently I am reading a book above my pay grade, and I started to think I might write an article about my perspective on the content. The book is difficult to read, at least by my standards, so it is taking a minute for me to get through. I really feel I can’t write about a book I’ve read, without backstory to my perspective and how it has evolved to this point. Who knows maybe I won’t even write about the book; I am halfway through, so we will see. The idea of talking about myself is not something I was inspired to do till this point on this blog, but writing about the evolution of my learning perspective, that could be something I could coherently write about and keep my attention.
The reason I feel I need to explain myself is inherently I am not a smart person. In a measured sense, I’m totally not up to par with most who would be considered intelligent. I will admit I have what could possibly be an intelligent personality, which I think would be less measurable in a way. I do in fact have a problem with memory, phonetics, and spelling, which maybe dyslexia, although I’ve never been diagnosed with it; it does not seem to affect my reading comprehension if so. It is why I have found ChatGPT so very fitting for me, and has helped tremendously in many ways, and I don’t really have the words yet to describe what I think of AI except for what I’ve already written. Kind of a contradiction, I suppose.
But anyway, the evolution of my learning perspective. It all starts with Sesame Street. Which I watched obsessively and to the exclusion of hearing or seeing anything else while tuned in to the tube TV. I was locked into that screen and blocked everything else out, just me and 3-2-1 Contact, and all those shows I loved to watch. My mom first tried to teach me to spell my name, which I thought was hilarious and laughed at her. She only wanted to teach me because the school said I needed to learn before kindergarten, and I guess I knew that, and maybe I was kind of angry it was the only reason she was teaching me. So, I made it very difficult for her. She always reminds me about that. Not a bad word to say about my mother, it was the 80’s. My siblings who were older (by quite a bit) tried to help out with teaching me my address. They had a sign on the door with the address and tried to keep me away from it, a little reverse psychology. It worked, it was fun, although I was mad about the manipulation.
In first grade they placed me in the lowest reading group, based on a set of flash cards, and words that I really was just learning, and I got caught up with the word ‘with’...I could not remember the word ‘with’ for the life of me. And I stayed in the lowest reading group for years even though I really did not think I belonged there. I always tested several grades above my reading level on those MEAP tests and such. I will get to what happened later on with that. But sometime either in kindergarten or first grade we were learning vowels. Now I understood what vowels are, but I could not hear or remember the sounds very well. So, I decided in my head it just wasn’t important. I’ll never know if it was hard because I had an issue with hearing the sounds, or if my issue was because I dismissed paying any attention to learning vowel sounds. Either way I am just abysmal at spelling and phonetics. You’re supposed to live by your strengths, or a lesson in not skipping steps. Both I suppose.
So I started reading Charlie Brown comics, and any old school comic I could find, and then I started reading Nancy Drew and many, many, books. Nothing really I can remember exactly, they were all kind of random, just whatever was available at garage sales and library's.
So it gets to be 5th grade, (it might have been 4th grade) and I’m reading out loud in my reading class, for years waiting for someone to notice that I was fairly good at reading. But then I also had a lisp from my crowded teeth (that a retainer corrected...but that wasn’t until 6th or 7th grade). I had tested every year above my grade level in reading on those state evaluations. Year after year I kept waiting for the adults to notice. I look around, and realize, if the truth was so obvious to me, why don’t I just speak up. So I told my friend who was sitting next to me, “I don’t belong in this class, I’m going to tell him.” and before my friend said anything I walked up to the teacher and said I don’t belong here. He was very surprised. He looked down at his grade book. I’ll always remember that he didn’t look at me or hear me, but looked at the grade book. He got a test for me, and I tested high and was put in a different reading group, the average readers, which was how things were done back then; you were either in a poor, average, or advanced reading group, at least at my school, and you stayed in them for the duration. My friend went home and told her mother what I had done. Her Mother got her to be tested (she was good at reading too) and she got tested out of that class as well. We found out that if we had stayed in that class we would have had an extra year of reading that everyone else wouldn’t have to take. The oversight was odd, because for the most part it was a great school I thought.
I was ok at math. times tables were difficult, because of the memorization. Interesting enough I had a third grade teacher who taught the times table by using word combinations which I liked very much. Each number was denoted by half of a word and in combination with other halves would make words that equated with the answer. I do not remember any of that, I have a calculator now.
In high school, I Liked algebra...but I got stumped on square roots...again elements of memorization, that I was just not great at. I thought I could skip that step, but it kind of handicapped me, skipping those rungs on the ladder. I really did not like math in High School, mainly because of the 20 problems of math I had to take home every night and I never did. I’d set my alarm an hour early to do my homework and hit the snooze button until it was time to get ready. I relied heavily on testing because the homework in all my subjects was overwhelming.
In high school I did the Myers-Briggs test. I found it very interesting, this measurement of personality. I was an INTP which explained my love of abstraction and my need to think about how things work systematically and conceptually. It was my first encounter with the indirect works of Carl Jung which later I found him to be monumental in my life. Recently I did the test over again and I am most definitely an I and N. The second two categories were an exact tie, until I went and recounted and I was a T by one point. Maybe subconsciously I was telling myself that both categories are balanced, by making that mistake.
I thought these personality descriptions were interesting, and how they described my family. I saw this intelligence that emitted from my parents, from my sisters, all coming from character and personality. I felt it was ok for me to be interested in what I was interested in, to follow my personality, my character, and not worry about the measurement aspect. I saw the difference then, of subjective/objective but it wasn’t until later I could put a better definition of what I felt instinctively.
My English teacher let the seniors paint the ceiling tiles in her class before we graduated high school. They were going to remodel the school after we left. I put a lot of work into mine in my remaining days. I quoted a few lines from Poe’s ‘Dream Within a Dream.’ Very melancholic but felt succinct somehow.
So after High school I took a year off and would start community college, I told my parents that and I stuck too it. During that year I was diagnosed with ADD with Hypo-activity. I was on Adderall which helped me tremendously. But I only took Adderall a couple of years of my life, but it was enough so I could see how I could be different.
In community college I took a few classes and they went ok. I had it in my head I was going to test out of all the math classes...I would just study really hard and do well at the test and I wouldn’t have to take any math. I was a dumbass, trying to skip rungs in the ladder again. It didn’t go well and I did poorly in another class and dropped out entirely, and by that time I was down in it, and deep within a depression that would last a couple of years.
When I came out of the depression (with the help of books by Carl Jung, deep reflection, and being honest with myself) I started school again. I had humbled myself, and was planning on taking the lowest math class, take the placement test honestly, and just deal with it. When I started taking math again...I loved it. I loved the patterns, the consistency, and the harmony of how the patterns played out on the page. I loved it, but still, only average grades, but that was ok by me. I enjoy learning and I planned on staying this time. After my time of depression and reflection, I felt more connected to learning then I ever had.
I managed to take math all the way up to applied calculus, which for me is an achievement. Another class I want to point out which was interesting to me was my genetics class and the problems being solved. if you haven’t taken genetics the problems are so interestingly about patterns and arrangement, I enjoyed that as well, even though the teacher was an egotistical prick. Making mistakes on quizzes and tests and not admitting it, was but one example. Making the quizzes unnecessarily hard by having an unrealistic time to do the online vocab quizzes. I would write vocab notes and tape them to a wall and have my husband and his younger brother (who was our roommate at the time) help me search and plug in answers. Biometry and Physics were interesting classes as well. I was better at understanding the concepts of physics then solving for the problems, but both were hard for me. It took a long time, but I managed to get a bachelor's in science.
And I suppose by writing this, I am explaining what the motivation of my perspective is, that I love to learn and it is deep within my personality, and who I am. It is not because I am trying to prove anything to anyone. It just is and I just am. I think another aspect of why I hold on to perspective and defining it is, quite honestly, I had lost my footing subjectively and objectively after high school, and it is developing my perspective that saved me. That's the nice way of putting that I lost my mind for a bit. But I pulled myself out of that well, and here I am. I think I share my writing on this blog, so that I can hone my perspective even more, with a potential audience; it adds an element of feedback that I need I suppose, real or imagined. But most importantly is my journey continues, because I continue to be driven to define something, something I glimpsed at in the well, and continue to see mirages that I follow.
The subject matter of the book that I am reading is a bit challenging for me, aspects of that are an understatement. But I see a lot of possibilities in this book and I’m excited to explore aspects of it that I can fully relate to. But to do so I needed to share a bit of my spotty education, to really be honest and not skip any rungs in the ladder of understanding. Because while I don’t remember much from my education, I hold the substance, the discipline (disciplined for a type B personality:), and the background for understanding, and in combination with my perspective, these are the tools I take with me in my journey. So this blog is a work in progress, and I hope it can help someone else along the way.