No goodbye. No see you later. No nothing. You just left. I don't know much, but I know that.

This is my first semester of my freshman year here at ISU, and I must admit that I am bit thrown off by the request for me to write a philosophy of learning. For the fact of the matter is I am one of the worst candidates to write this paper, for I don’t really know what I am doing.
But I suppose that this is why I am at Illinois State University in the first place, and by acknowledging the fact that I am lacking in life experience, academic knowledge, and social skills, and overstocked with sarcasm and strange habits probably puts me in a better place than some of my colleagues.

See, I don’t know a whole lot about anything. I am no expert, or even a specialist of any sort. There are two things I can say with 110% certainty and those are:
A) I will never like Steely Dan
B) No one is just going to listen to what you have to say, you have to keep t­­hem interested.

First and foremost, in able to learn, one must be interested, not necessarily in the topic at hand, but perhaps in what the educator has to say about a topic. Something has to catch the student’s attention at each and every lesson, or nothing will be taken from it. Whether this make it entertaining, controversial, fun, sad, awkward, or just intense, any type of memorable emotion will help the information passed along in class much more memorable than anything that is described as boring, or sleep inducing.

Open communication is a necessity. Nothing can be learned by either party if there is confusion. Paulo Friere examines this in his essay The “Banking” Concept of Education,

“When their efforts to act responsibly are frustrated, when they find themselves unable to use their faculties, men suffer. ‘The suffering due to impotence is rooted in the very fact that the human equilibrium has been disturbed.’ But the inability to act which causes men’s anguish also causes them to reject their impotence by attempting to restore their capacity to act (Friere, pg 73).”

“Education as the practice of freedom-as opposed to education as the practice of domination-denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from men. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without men, but men in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it (Friere, pg 75).”

The difference between knowledge and intelligence
Intelligence: the capacity for learning; reasoning, understanding, similar forms of mental activity. Aptitude in grasping truths, relationships facts, meanings.
Knowledge: acquaintance with facts, truths, principles. As from study or investigation, general erudition, knowledge of many things.

In order to teach something efficiently, an educator must understand at least a little of every single aspect of their chosen subject. I would at some point in my life, like to teach Theatre arts at the high school level, and I know (thanks to personal experience) that a theatre teacher that only knows acting, is not an effective teacher at all. To teach theatre, one must understand and be able to perform the technical, managerial, and performance tasks that are required. For this to happen, a person must realize that they will never stop learning. As cliché as it sounds, knowledge is indeed everywhere.

Some ideas and theories are best illustrated rather than described.

Not a lot of things have never been thought of before, but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to reach for them. And it’s always fun to add to already determined theories.

Write a song. Music makes the brain work better.

No one will learn if they are miserable. Challenge people, but not obscenely.

Abstract: This essay attempts to describe and analyze all the aspects of modern education. What the author believes works and does not work, why the author believes learning is important, and how academic learning is just a viaduct into actual knowledge. True knowledge can’t be taught, it can just be uncovered. As an educator, your job is to expose students to ideas, theories, and historical instances that in other situations would be left undiscovered or forgotten. Hopefully, by the end of the essay, a previously unheard of or misunderstood aspect will be discovered, or at least explained a bit more thoroughly.