Fred's Learning

Whether I have learned from an experience can seem an easy thing to know, but a hard thing to explain (sometimes I just know that I know that I know). I think probably the best evidence for whether I have learned is whether an experience has been transformative. If I gain knowledge but it does not change the way I perceive the world, even a little bit, then I have not actually learned- I have just memorized. This idea is especially relevant now at a time when Google and Wikipedia have made rote facts about as important as knowing Morse code, and thus the transformative action of learning experiences is almost the exclusive goal for an individual. Granted, there are some experiences that cause great transformation; for example, the awareness of poverty that comes with spending time working in a deaf village in Jamaica. Other experiences seem smaller but still shift or enhance our perception; for example, learning how the calculus can be applied to optimize profits in a business application. Whatever learning experience I go through, however, I don’t feel I’ve learned if I don’t come out a slightly different person.

In courses, typically my learning is communicated to the teacher by way of their evaluation methods (e.g. exams, papers, homework) and this is usually a good indicator for me. I can really think of few times when I felt like I knew the material, but could not perform in these tests of my learning. However, it is completely possible that throughout my sixteen-plus years of formal education that these traditional methods of evaluation have infiltrated my personal definition of learning to where the test not only measures my learning, it defines my learning. This would be a disappointing conclusion since it reduces the richness of an experience in my own mind to an algorithm.

The only possible exception to learning despite what the exams show is the rare case when a teacher’s expectations are ill-defined and the study material is unknown to the class. This usually can only happen when there is a very small class size, perhaps making the teacher relax too much- one particular class of mine where this situation occurred had an enrollment of six students. In this case, I remember feeling that I learned every time I left class or did the homework, but the exams seemed to emphasize random subjects that I had not taken the time to master. This lack of communication with regard to expectations between teacher and student could have been helped by the implementation of a more specific syllabus or study guides outlining what he wanted us to know.

The communication of evidence of my learning outside a class depends on if the course is closer to general education or technical education. To communicate my mastery in an area of general education is easier, as many people will have gained enough knowledge of their own to relate to what I have learned, even if it is above and beyond what is common; this could be explaining grammar learned in my English class, which many can remember learning back in high school. To communicate mastery in an area of technical expertise to the average person is difficult because they may be so removed from the background of the material in vocabulary, methods, or history, that no bridge can be built in a short amount of time that allows them to understand if I know my stuff or if I just seem “fluent” in the foreign language that is “magnetohydrodynamic modeling algorithms” or whatever. Context determines whether others can see evidence of learning.