Thursday was Learn Nothing Day, invented by Sandra Dodd, a smart lady no doubt. She and others want to point out that there really is no way to go about living without learning something. Even in a bare room, you still have your thoughts circling around in your own head and you are bound to make some kind of a connection that helps you see things in a new way. Learning is inevitable, this is true. I didn't really know how the day would bare out for me, but I did have a cool moment of learningness. I was looking at a beautiful patch of mushrooms coming from a log and started to think about what they might be. I didn't have my guide to help me, so I thought about it's features - veiled with free gills, smooth, large, the color... none of the features triggered the name for me. However, it did make me think that if I knew the name that I would not think I had learned anything by seeing this cluster and recognizing it as a blankety-blank type. Then I thought about how that really stinks for me to think that way. I am going to try to see learning as something that happens all the time and happens over and over. It is no small thing to see or do something you already know because you get to experience it again and who knows what kind of surprises await! On Friday we went to the library and I felt compelled to check out a book on knitting more for eye candy than to actually knit something in the book and it was filled with fabulous quotes - one that fits my Thursday experience so well. I will leave with it...
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way. - Marvin Minsky
Saturday, July 26, 2008
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3 comments:
i love that quote!! wonderful!!
i learned something that day at rock creek...people are really cool!! i know that sounds so blah. but it's true. we had so much fun, talking and laughing and playing.
i get knitting books for just looking at too, i get lots of books like that. sometimes i know i'm getting them just to look and other times i actually believe i'm gonna do something really snazzy...but most of the time i just end up looking and drooling and thinking...why don't i make cool stuff like that. i can be lazy!!!
Hey, "it's cool that there are so many answers in the world" is my new mantra.:)
Love the quote you put up. That is SO true. There's a depth and layeredness (is that a word?) that happens when we learn things over and over in new ways.
I have a bread book I got just for the pictures, and an embroidery book I thought I'd use for embroidery, but no... it's a coffee-table book. :-)
Thanks for saying something nice about me, for understanding Learn Nothing Day so well and for saying great things about learning. From now on if people ever come for unschooling help and express any doubt, we can say "Hey, we *tried* learning nothing and that didn't work."
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