my philosophy of learning

For one to learn one must want to learn. Learning, in my opinion, is being open to gaining knowledge of things outside of your comfort zone. Without the want and passion to learn, you allow yourself to shut out information. I am going to answer the questions how do you learn and why do you learn in this paper.
How do you learn? Everyone learns in his or her own way. For me, flashcards and writing notes helps me learn. I like to go over flashcards because I picture what the answer will be in my head and while I am looking at them I get to remember what the answer is. Taking notes is the best way for me to learn. If I am just staring at the teacher while they are lecturing chances are, I am not really concentrating on what the teacher has to say. I know a lot of students that are like this. They look like they are paying attention but when they are staring at the teacher usually they are thinking of other things like what they are going to do after class or what they ate for breakfast.
Taking notes helps me learn because I have to listen to what the teacher says in order to write down the notes. Even if I am not thinking about what I am writing down I can go back and reread what I wrote. Also, on tests, I can remember writing down those specific facts and it helps me remember the answer. Taking notes helps learning even when you don’t think so. These are ways to help learning now I am going to explain how the learning process actually happens.
With the help of flashcards, taking notes, and studying, learning, in my opinion, has a lot to do with the want to learn. It is easy to shut your brain off during a lecture and not remember anything the teacher has said but what about the students who gain knowledge and can recite the whole lecture? How does that happen? These kids have a passion for learning and know that it is important to learn. Learning is not very difficult as long as you are open to it. Babies learn how to talk because they practice and want to make out those words. Kids get potty trained because they want to learn how to be a big kid. Learning in college is no different than these situations. Students want to learn about calculus because they want to be more educated.
Learning is instinctive. We learn from our relatives and that is why we have such amazing technology now. We learn from the inventions they had before and create new and improved inventions. Learning is second nature to us and as long as we are willing to accept this knowledge, we will never stop learning. You learn new things every day.
Out of all the books we have read this semester in English 100, I have contained many different points of view on how and why we learn from these authors. I believe that in A Defense of Poetry, Gabriel Gudding was using humor to get people to understand what he meant. He uses phrases such as, “Someone cut off my head and punted it,” throughout his whole book (52). He uses humor and strange phrases to grab the attention of his readers. They look into what he says more because they want to know why he is saying such absurd things. That is one way students can learn; by finding strange things and wanting to solve them.
In How to Write, the author uses long sentences and questionable writing methods to catch the attention of her readers. She uses run on sentences and some sentences that seem incomplete but then she is telling you that that is the correct way to make a sentence. For example, she writes, “Very carefully what is it. What is it. They know they knew,” (Stein 166). When I read that part I questioned if the sentences she was saying were correct were even sentences at all. Like Gudding, Stein writes in an unusual way to get her readers’ attention. She believes that this will help them question things and learn about something that have never encountered before.
Vladimir Nabokov also writes in similar fashion to Gudding and Stein. He uses humor to get his readers involved. His whole book Pale Fire is a made up story that is quite humorous. Its about one guy writing a poem and another guy dissecting it because he thinks its about him but it truly is not. The man who is dissecting the poem is very strange and does not think he is humorous but while reading the book I found myself laughing at his thoughts. He states, “I am quite sure it was I who one day, when we were discussing ‘mirror words,’ observed that ‘spider’ in reverse is ‘redips,’ and ‘T. S. Elliot,’ ‘toilest,’” (193). He believes that the poet used his ideas in the poem but he did not have anything to do with why the poet wrote what he did. This is funny and interesting. The readers of this book will find this humorous and want to keep reading. By reading more, they will learn more. I believe this was the philosophy of Nabokov.