When Learning For Real, Every Lesson Is A Big Deal
Tuesday • March 21st 2023 • 11:01:23 pm
You don’t have bad grades, you have insane teachers. – Abraham Lincoln
To learn something for real, you need three things.
One, You have to be really, really curious, about the thing.
If you are not curious, you will not learn, you will only memorize for long enough to pass a test.
You will be made to sell out for a GPA, so that your teacher can continue the charade and get paid.
Tricking you into memorization, aside from being utterly useless, is extremely unethical, because it disables your mind.
To take good old math as example, not only memorization does nothing for you.
Watching you recalling a formula that you don’t understand, is really embarrassing and sad.
You Can’t learn math, because math is not a real subject, it is a thing that seems like a subject, but it is not.
Similarly the question “Why are we here?” sounds great, it is impressive, large, coherent, but it is not a real question.
It has been called a silly question, it is a really good signal for a therapist, nit not a real question.
The field of mathematics exists, you can make a really cool map of it.
But mathematics the class, the set of lectures, the idea that here is a list of steps you need to learn math, is stupid.
If you have a really good math teacher, there are two things that block them from helping you.
If you go off script, learn on your own, away from a textbook, you will fail the final test, or near enough.
And your teacher needs to get paid, they will do anything to get paid.
They will hold up a textbook with the word math, and say this is proof math exists.
These are the steps yo need to take, not because it is true, but because she can hide behind the authority of the book.
It is her way of cutting you off from learning for leal, so that you shut up and she gets paid.
If she does not get paid, she can’t put food on the table, she has to look for another job.
Your authentic grasp on mathematics, does not matter to your teacher.
The only thing that matters, is the fantasy that you can learn math by memorization.
The only ting that matters is that she checks all the boxes, so that she gets paid.
And to make sure, you can’t prove a damn thing, she will prevent herself from ever asking.
Are my kids really learning math, do textbooks work?
In other words she will be in denial, she puts up a barrier in her mind, and she will never cross it.
Similarly, members of cuts do this, they never allow themselves to question the existence of their god or gods.
They reap all the benefits of the community, without examine anything at any length.
Two, to begin learning something for real, you need context.
Context is like a busy desk, when working on something fun.
So schools, destroy, devastate context, by cutting everything up into time periods.
They do this, to move a large number of students through all the classes, for the purpose of getting paid.
Working on something and then destroying that context, nay preventing context from developing.
And then being forced to start learning something else, will not only ensure that you are memorizing.
But that you are slowly going crazy, the kids without support, in fact do go crazy.
That is the walk, the walk from one crowd to the other.
They just give up on who they are, because they cant make it.
Cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, fighting, dangerous ideas, cheating lying, strange ideation.
A strange toxicity builds up, between arrogant parents, and nasty teachers…
Where a lot of kids, are constantly put in the line of fire, their parents punish, their teachers rob them, and bullies beat them.
All the while being threatened, by being held back.
Which will make teachers more arrogant towards the student, make parents more pissed off by being even more inconvenienced.
And fuel bullies to a degree, where very few bullied kids aren’t turned into bullies themselves.
This constant toxicity, pressure, threat, stress, makes a person crazy.
If they received a real education, they would not become crazy.
So the craziness isn’t in them, it is not who they are, it is that this constant toxicity, pressure, threat, stress, poisons them.
If they do become a bully, then they are pushed to cross a line, for which they will never forgive themselves.
Deep down they will always think there is something bad in therm, so like in real life, there are heartbreaking paths of no return here.
If you do have a friend like that, tell them, that to make their pain count for more,
They can protect others, from following in their footsteps, it is a path of healing.
Real context is quite a surprise, because it is rooted in your uniqueness.
You know how you feel different, that is real, we each have a unique constellation of stars within.
Context is born from that uniqueness, and the name for that, is curiosity.
To take a year for example, when you are not poisoned by stress.
You should show a cycle of curiosities, you start with something neat like buying a cheap 3D pen on sale.
You make a disaster of an art piece, that doesn’t quite stay up, and something else grabs you by the button.
Maybe listening to the Giants of Philosophy, as read by Charton Heston, making strange little notes that will look like gibberish in a few weeks.
Then summer comes, and you start putting together a backpack, tent sleeping bag, and set off on an expedition, to camp in your back yard.
With electricity, to charge your phone, of course,
Then after a few more curiosities, you discover, that Winter, has got something to do with your 3D pen.
But now as you dabble in it, you actually create a little something, that year of few months, made you more capable in reasoning about 3D tings.
You get a Ender 3D printer, couple of spools of PLA, pritn out a few things from thingiverse.
And boom, a new star emerges in your constellation of curiosities.
It is so new, and so seemingly unlike you, that you can’t comprehend how shocking that event is.
Now you are binging on Blender (a free 3D modeling program) tutorials, about precision modeling for 3D printers.
Might as well order couple of more spools of the PLA, because creating things out of thin air is something else.
The next time you return to Blender, after a few months of doing something else.
Your soul is not just ready, but it is ravenous for mastering geometry nodes.
At this point there is a corner in your house, a wall of a huge box, filled with strange 3D parts.
You have Blender Keyboard shortcuts up on the wall, and proudly display the bod in which your automatic bed leveling upgrade came in.
That's context, that is healthy, that is beautiful, that is pure genius, and three are many more stars in your constellation.
As you are packing for the Appalachian Trail, in hopes of Triple Crown, where you additionally walk the PCT and CDT.
Probably re-listening Giants of Philosophy, as your mind is flourishing far beyond simple constellations.
You don’t know how bad school is, because you have nothing to compare it against.
You don’t know how swiftly you will age, the moment you get your perfect job in a cubicle cell.
To quite Dixie, “The worst day at the trail, is still better, then the best day at work.”
Three, you need an aim, context will take you far, but it is exploratory, but you also need a hint of direction.
Now, none is allowed to tell you what that is, and it is really not that important, but it helps in learning.
In school, you are learning things without an aim, of if you have one of those teachers…
She will say that you won’t always have a calculator on hand, to dismiss you like a piece of trash.
On a large scale, aims should be discovered, just keep on exploring more and more curiosities.
But on a smaller scale, if you give learning mathematics, an aim that interests you, you will learn it as a side effect.
For example, bring back beautiful screensavers to modern computers, in the age of generative AI this is more interesting than ever.
The AI will take care of your graphics, or sprites, and you just need to do the math part – see what I mean.
Two Interesting Screesavers to look at are XscreenSaver on Linux, and After Dark on the old Mac, it is old software, but lovely.
Here you are learning math and programming, with the aim of sharing your screensavers with the word.
It is true that we live in a world where people close their laptop lid, so just make your screensavers that much more interesting.
Alliteratively you can set an aim to learn math and programming, by building strange things in P5.js
Make releasing video and book tutorials an aim, share with eh world what you have learned.
Now in school context, to really learn music, you need to set an aim of releasing an album in the first semester.
Generative Art AI will take are of your cover, do your music composition in LMMS,
And witness how much more profound your Music education, where it creates an aim of releasing a singe minimalist techno album on bandcamp for example.
Music composition with an aim to make songs, takes a couple of hours to get a hand of.
And less than two days to compose your first song, we are all born composers.
It is just that ineffective education, takes that from us.
Finally, one is curiosity, two is context, three is an aim, bu there ais also the matter of growing up.
No human being is allowed to grow a lite bit, nor would anybody want to.
So to grow up, means to grow all the way up, until we become Great Beings, and on our way there we will find our meaning.
All you need here is a hunger for real knowledge from real books, written by great beings held in high esteem by all the worlds authentic intellectuals.
In your quest to comprehend their great though, you will not be able to help, but to enter into their culture.
And eventually in your culture of greatness, make your own unique contributions to the wold.
As you stand on the shoulders of giants, and in turn lend yours to countess many that follow.