Tower To Trenches
Consider these words: discalced (unshod, barefoot), gambrel (a wood or metal device for suspending a slaughtered animal), firedrake (a mythical fiery dragon). These are not words for ordinary conversation. I came across them while reading The Road, a book by Cormac McCarthy. The Road is a novel about a post-apocalyptic world, a place extraordinarily dangerous and dark, where the best to hope for is an unknown future down a long road. You hope you don’t get captured by “the bad guys,” who will either enslave you or eat you. It is also a book with unusual language--incomplete and unpredictable sentence structures, a near-absence of apostrophes, and obscure vocabulary, all of which mirror a fragmented, altered, and unrecognizable world.
When I started reading this book, I quickly came across words I didn’t know. I had to make a choice: do I keep reading and just try to get the gist from the context, or do I stop and look up the words? I made the decision to look them up, which led to halting and slow reading, perhaps like the journey of the book’s main characters, a father and young son.
Since finishing the book, I have found various scraps of paper with words and definitions I copied down. Already I have forgotten the definitions, and I barely remember even seeing the words in print. So I have to ask, “Was there a point in looking them up in the first place?”
For me the answer is “yes,” which brings me to the topic of today’s entry: What is the point of learning things that (a) we have no real use for, and (b) we know we’ll forget before too long? Must learning be “justified” by its apparent usefulness? Is learning wasted when you forget what you’ve studied?
I face these questions constantly as an instructor who must choose what to include in a course. Part of what I claim as an experienced speech-language pathologist and teacher is the right to say, “This has value! It may not seem so important now, but I promise you that there’s good reason for learning it.” Sometimes the material is important because it is immediately useful in clinical work, but sometimes its importance is indirect or delayed. Sometimes the content is not important but the learning process is.
Over the years I’ve often heard students say, “I’m never going to do ____, so I don’t need to learn this.” This statement makes me laugh! First, we cannot know what we will or will not do. When I was a graduate student in speech-language pathology, I was interested in working only with adults with neurogenic disorders from stroke or head trauma. I uttered those famous words, “I’m never going to work with children.” Within five years, I began the transition that led to my exclusive focus on pediatrics.
Second, it’s hard to know what will be useful, especially when we are new to a subject. We may concentrate on one aspect of the material, only to miss its significance from a different perspective. A good example is that of clinicians doing practica with adults who stutter. In truth, many SLPs work a professional lifetime without serving adults who stutter.
But practicum with an adult who stutters isn’t solely about learning the methodology of treating stuttering. It’s about learning to work with an adult, someone who may have a complicated life story wrapped up in the speech disorder. It’s about examining our attitudes about stuttering and our beliefs about behavioral change. It’s about learning to work with someone who can challenge our position as the authority and, sometimes, make us feel powerless to help. It’s about realizing that clinical work isn’t only about the nature of disorders but about the nature of people (and that includes us).
Now, what about the second issue--what about the fact that we forget much of what we learn? I recently found a collection of class notes on child language disorders from my graduate school days--yellowed papers, stored in a box that had traveled from Illinois 27 years ago. I was stunned to read them. They were filled with detailed information about language development and treatment approaches. Not only did I not remember the specifics of the information, I didn’t remember ever learning it in the first place! I would have sworn that I did not learn that material until much later in my career. I would have said (with certainty and perhaps irritation), “I didn’t learn that when I was in grad school.”
So here’s the sad reality: we study hard, we take tests, we write papers...and then we forget. You will have experiences where you will say, “I wish I had learned this in my courses” or “the instructor never mentioned that,” and the truth is you did learn it, the instructor did mention it! (Professors regularly gnash their teeth when hearing students complain about what they didn’t learn.) Unfortunately, our brains don’t keep everything we learn readily available. But when we need to, we will learn the material again (more easily, we hope), and perhaps it will stick the second time, or the third. I’ve had “repeat customers” at my counseling workshops, many of whom say, “I hear it so differently each time.”
I believe this to my core: Learning is never wasted. When I looked up words as I read The Road, I remembered my love of words and I felt connected to my family’s love of language. I stood in awe of the author for his astonishing vocabulary and the creative ways he made the unusual vocabulary part of the story. This motivated me to contemplate creativity and risk taking.
Learning is part of a rich life. We consciously remember some of what we learn and unconsciously forget a lot, but over time we build up knowledge and memory that become part of us, driving the way we think and problem solve and respond to others. As for the learning that stays hidden and never gets called into direct use, perhaps it helps create a cerebral compost pile: not recognizable in its original form but yielding more fertile ground for whatever is planted next.
Learning: Nothing’s Ever Wasted
