Whoops. Two pages.

Learning. Learning is a constant process of human beings. To say that one is not learning is impossible; everything we do, everything we see we take something from it whether we want to or not. To die is to finally stop learning. I think everyone needs to embrace that. I am not just talking about learning in the classroom, I am talking about the things you hear on the news, the people you meet everyday, the things you see happening. To say you can't learn from a tree is ridiculous, even though saying that you can sounds extremely silly. Everyone can learn from everything if they open their mind to it, and that often seems to be a problem. Some students seem to not really care about what they are doing and school and, rather, go on auto-pilot. The amount of people I see do this has certainly changed drastically from when I was in high school, but still, the fact that people still do that is astounding.
Do not get me wrong, not everything you see or hear in the classroom necessarily needs to be learned. What good is a chemistry formula to, say, one who works in Public Relations? No, to such things I say write down and keep for later if the need arises. Keep your eyes open nonetheless, as one never truly knows what is useless and what isn't. But what about subjects that you need to learn about? How does an English major, for example, learn about writing styles or theories? How do you differentiate from learning a math theorem and learning an essential thing you need to know? What a terrible sentence. But anyway, one needs to be aware about such things and the difference between what they should pay attention to and what they should just write down. As there is the banking style of teaching where the teacher just inserts knowledge with very little rhyme or reason, there too is the banking style of learning, where even if the teacher or professor is great, the students just marks the notes in his or her
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notebook and is done with it, only learning until the exam hits.
Learning, or at least academic learning, does not end in the classroom of course. This concept is not a difficult one to understand, as so many people accept this it is almost redundant to mention it. Nonetheless, it must be reiterated. As a student, I am obligated to not only do the homework but to understand it. What is the good of reading, say, Stein, if you do not at least understand why you are reading it? This is not to say that you should fully understand what Stein is saying, for example, as that is an exercise of tedium and may result in constant frustration in addition to taking months of constant attention to fully understand it. But understand the bare bones of the reading or at least why it was assigned and what else was assigned around it. There is another thing about learning and understanding, you have to make associations. Think about what is assigned and how they tie into each other. It is easy to read multiple essays at the same time and comment on them, but more than likely if multiple readings are assigned at once it is with a purpose. So one must be constantly observing.
I feel an obligation to the professor of the subject to pay attention or at the very least take notes. To procrastinate – as I often unfortunately do – or to not do the homework assigned almost defeats the purpose of the learning process. To forget that learning is important and always active is to fail, I think.
It is of course a struggle. Nobody is saying that is isn't. How does one overcome that struggle? Is it subject matter? An interest in that class? I don't know if I have gotten to that part yet.