JOY OF LEARNING
When I was young, learning new things was difficult. My parents lost patience with me. Perhaps it was because I was near- sighted which was not discovered until I was ten years old and fitted with thick glasses. Maybe because I was a kinesthetic learner and needed to do it, be shown it, move through it before I mastered it. Or maybe I was just stupid, as my mother reminded me daily.
I didn’t like forced learning. Switching languages at age four wasn’t fun. Spending first and second grade in a country school and then moving to Shanghai to a private school where the third graders had already mastered multiplication and division was a shock. Working with a tutor as well as missing recesses with my teacher wasn’t fun. Arriving in the U.S. and switching languages at age 11 wasn’t fun either.
But learning to ride a bike or to roller skate or how to raise silkworms… those were fun because I wanted to learn those skills, and friends taught me patiently.
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As a summer- camp counselor, I spent all my free time attending classes with the other campers. I had never been to camp as a child, and learning to ride horses, to weave baskets, to make copper enamel jewelry and ashtrays was gloriously fun.
At St John’s College learning Ancient Greek was fun because it was new and exciting to everyone in my class. I learned enough to help my husband translate his Greek homework when he attended Yale Divinity School the first year we were married.
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I completed my bachelor degree at Univ of N. D. in a government program called Northern Plains Indian Teacher Corps. Most of my classmates were Lakota Sioux or Chippewa. I learned how to bead , to make porcupine quill items, to cook Indian dishes, to dance and worked hard to learn Lakota. A Lakota priest gave me private weekly lessons, and I gave a lecture in Lakota at the Fort Yates Centennial celebration. That experience was wonderfully fun.
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Our 1600 acre farm on the Standing Rock Reservation ND contained a butte with lots of fossils. My husband Ray was an amateur paleontologist. Together we found all sorts of fossils. I learned to identify crocodile teeth, triceratops vertebrae, T rex teeth, turtle shell, cephalopods. Etc. Many of our fossils are donated to various museums in Chicago and ND.
When our daughter was working on her PhD in bird studies, I learned to band birds, to gently remove them from mist nets without getting bitten or sprain their wings, to identify them and to find their nests. Later after much trial and error, I received my master bird banding license.. a document that brought me more joy than getting my driver’s license at age 55.
Although I was probably the worst student in Arabic the teachers ever had, I worked hard to learn this beautiful language. Each week I went with my tail between my legs embarrassed about the lack of progress I had made, but I continued for eleven years, eager not to give it up.
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Now that I am 86 and retired, I find that the most fun I have had with my free time is to learn. I have signed up for 17 classes per week at AACC.. 4 hours each of Spanish and French, two hours of sign language and autobiographical writing. The homework load is heavy but hey, I am learning!!!