Why are you so uncomfortable telling someone what you want to learn? It isn't your fault, that is for sure. You have been conditioned to let other people tell you what is appropriate for you to learn. You say "I am a Political Science Major" then they respond with a list of classes for you to take.
Then tell the prof "I want to learn" then they respond with a list of information that they want you to learn and remember. If you were to tell me that this is the way things should be I will tell you right now that I am going to laugh in your face.
While I am not saying that you should not let others teach you things, I am saying that you shouldn't let the dictate what it is you learn completly. There is a time and a place for being told what is the right thing to learn. I will freely admit that I too need that kind of instruction. How could I not? I have never really had the chance to tell a professor or a teacher what it is that I want to learn. This certainly is not the environmet for learning about bow ties and World of Warcraft, but it is the place to stear the conversation towards what YOU want to learn, at least to some limited degree.
7 comments:
Maybe folks are uncomfortable because they've never had to face the void; they've never even asked themselves what they want to learn.
And maybe a couple of things happen: a person asks herself what she wants to learn, and she realizes that not only doesn't she know, but she really doesn't want to learn.
Or worse: she asks herself, and there is no one there to answer.
Good point, I guess I let myself get a little too gung ho about something new and exciting.
I don't think you were too gung ho at all. Rather, than implications are really challenging.
Then thank you, and I hadn't even thought of the possibility that someone would not be even partially as gung ho as me.
I hadn't either, but I now think that I should have suspected that: why else would I think that staging my non-presence in the first class would have some kind of 'effect'? So, I'm having to look at my own expectations here and wonder if I was somehow kidding myself that this would be easy and pleasurably seamless. Maybe another way to put the point: that the open structure is scary might indicate that the struggle is important, the experience worthwhile, the attempt to disrupt the given pattern of 'learning' potentially vital.
It is most certainly a worthwhile. It is the first and possibly the last, especially for seniors, chance any of us would be able to find out what exactly it means to truly self educate.
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