Re-learning How to Learn

When I was 17 life seemed so simple. High school was a breeze, little more than an annoyance that must be accepted as part of the grander scheme. I had to go, it was the law, but it got in the way of so much that I thought was more important. I earned decent grades with fairly little effort, but only for the classes that kept my interest. English Literature and Algebra were easy, while Physics...not so much. The point is that at 17 learning was something I took for granted, not even something I thought about.

Then, graduation and some tough choices. Let's see, I could continue to live the life that I enjoyed, carefree and irresponsible, or I could buckle down and attend college and make something of myself. To me, that seemed like a waste of time, but I did what was expected of me. I enrolled in college straight out of high school. Then I withdrew two days in.

Eleven years later, there I was, working a meaningless, unsatisfying job and wondering where I went wrong. Then it hit me. I had withdrawn from school so many years ago, and time went on whether I had been paying attention or not.

My life had gone in many different directions over the years and I had learned plenty, most of it the hard way. I learned things like, "don't believe everything you hear", "don't trust someone just because they say you can", "don't give your heart away just because you want to", and "don't eat the brown acid", but I had stopped learning things that inspired me.

Since taking my first class as a DMD student I have been hooked. This relatively new world of digital media has captivated me. I already knew I loved photography and the digital world that it lives in, but I did not anticipate how much I would enjoy learning other things. I had lost touch with the love I felt for learning when I had been inspired by teachers who loved what they did.
While most of my classes have been online thus far, I have been touched and inspired by the instructors that taught them (well, most of them), and I have re-learned how to learn.

Whether from a book, an online lecture, a classroom full of computers, or in the school of hard knocks, learning is not something that ends. I'm just glad that I have found a way to enjoy doing it.

The Importance of my eduacation

I have often times been asked this question, by my brothers and of my sister (all who by the way never finished high school). Why is it that I out of four children chose to be the one to take the ball if you will and run with it? Why is college such a good thing? All very good and very important questions.

The response is simple, I want more.... I want things to be different for my kids and for me. I can be anything that I want to be, and well if it takes me years upon years to complete this task, then I will have done so knowing that I took the risk, and I made it for my kids and for myself. Sometimes I wonder if they resent me in some ways because I finished high school, I have a life that they chose not to experience, and because I will have a college degree that I earned and that I definitely worked hard for.

Why is college a good thing, what's the best part? Well, that to is simple... college is a good thing because it allows me to not only learn knowledgeable material to which I will use later, but to have an experience all in its own. I feel like I have came so far, and hope that my kids will take the initiative as well, to further their education.

All about reading???

Books are so 20th century does sound right... just about. No one really likes reading all the boring, big words that the author uses to make something sound more than what it is. If books got straight to the point, they would be cut down in pages and text to read. All the running on and on of this and that just to get to the real reason why you are actually reading in the first place just bores the reader and gives no interest on finishing.

I feel that this could also be a result of high school education. I'm not going to lie, I didn't take too much in high school very serious. I was a student athlete, receiving many awards in both fields and felt once it was all over, I didn't really work too hard. With the school hours and all the practicing throughout the day, I only managed to make it home to a cold supper and straight to bed, never really worked on schoolwork. I practically lived there, I guess. I was one of the students who was smart, but put only the effort needed into the work. But teachers never really sent us home with reading assignments, which now I feel it's hard to push myself to read in my free time. We always read our material out loud in class or the teacher gave us free time in class to do some reading.

In college, it's a different deal. We're grown-ups and are responsible. But then again, some instructors seem to not care the least bit about students and their education. Some just show up to throw the information out there and get out. Every student has their own little details/techniques that helps them take in the information and understand it. Hands-on, hearing and seeing, note guides, etc. are a few of what students like in their education. I feel as though educators don't give the students a good push and drive to want to learn the details. Finding something exciting in the text that could grab the attention of anyone helps. On the other hand, students need to realize it's the path they chose and deal with it. The least students can do is show up. So the faults are equally balanced between the two.

To end it, books are ridiculously boring and expensive. No one can argue that. :)

Never Growing Up...

...or always growing?

My cumulative learning experience has been extremely balanced thus far.  And perhaps cyclical. While in high school, I wanted to create concept art for video games.  Actually I wanted to program video games; however, my love/hate relationship with math kept me from that.

But before I dove into the world of video games even further, I fell in love with drama.  Because I always enjoyed English class, my mother having been an English teacher for thirty years, theatre was the logical vein off the artery.  During my junior year of high school, I took up plays and musicals and ultimately decided to pursue it as a career.  After two years off emotional ups and downs and two colleges later, I found myself at OSU main campus pursuing a BA in English and a minor theatre.  After wrapping up the undergraduate levels of college, I then earned my Master's at OSU in English language arts.

Then what?  I taught English language arts at Centerburg Middle and High School for three years, directing their musicals and plays to boot, all the while finding that my enjoyment of video games and graphics never vanished.  I discovered COTC's program while having a guest speaker from the school present to my juniors.  How ironic, yes?  After three years of teaching I went back to school.  Enter the DMD program at COTC.  

To put it shortly - I missed expressing my own artistry.  I taught how to express one's self clearly. How to synthesize and analyze.  But all the while, something was missing.  What great book had I written?  What great work was mine besides the diploma that occupied the corner of my bookshelf?  I needed more.  

So how is it cyclical?  In a couple of ways.  I continue to direct, but now I am directing at Big Walnut.  My old school...where this all started.

I am picking up graphic and web design, a close second to video games.

And as I started out as a student and became a teacher, I am a student once again.  I find that I am still a teacher in many ways - mentoring a cast member or helping a classmate.  I hope to reenter the profession down the road.

I would continue this relationship with education that I have as a pupil forever if I could.  A full-time student, picking up majors left and right.  I've already mastered the purposeful use of fragments.  What more can I learn?  Quite honestly, I want to study anthropology now based entirely from the video that we had to watch for class. 

Learning amazes me.  Nothing is as satisfying as discovering something new.  And of course, learning never ends, but there does seem a point that most people reach where he or she enters the live of passivity and mediocrity that I shudder to think about.  What brings people to this? Marriage?  Kids? Age? Food?  The pursuit and need of money?  Hard to say. 

In many ways, I am content.  But in the quest for knowledge, I am not so sure.  Hopefully it will not get in the way of my marriage and the life that we're designed to adopt.  Eh.

Textbooks Are So 20th Century (part 1)

You don't need to tell me that the cost of textbooks is unreal. As the cost of a post-secondary education continues to spiral upward, the cost of textbooks seems to be climbing at a faster pace.

There are several ways to fight textbook inflation in the classroom. 1) Used textbooks. This, of course, only works if the content being taught hasn't changed. In the fast-paced world of digital media, textbooks have to keep up with new software. 2) Look for inexpensive textbooks for the subject. Works great if the content is equivalent. Often it isn't. 3) Stop teaching from textbooks.

I'm a proponent of the last. Sometimes it's a successful methodology; sometimes it isn't.

Does anyone read anymore? Of course they do. They just don't read the way previous generations did. Didn't read the assignment? "Too much to read in too little time," is a major excuse. Okay, the world is moving faster today than yesterday, but there's still time for a visit to MySpace or to watch "The Game." 

No, the problem is most textbooks are boring. I know. I've helped write one. There are either too many words that take forever to get to the point or the lessons are aimed at the least-common-denominator student. And, for the most part, they're verbal rather than visual.

One thing we ought to have learned as teachers is that students each have their own preferred learning style... Active/reflective; Sensing/intuitive... Visual/Verbal... Sequential/Global. Textbooks on the other hand are... the same. And they just sit there.

Students, meanwhile, have been influenced by technology and their environment. Played a video game lately? Moves faster than a textbook, doesn't it? Education and learning consultant Marc Prensky says it with more words: "Because schools haven't adapted to the world their students know and live in, they simply get bored in the classroom. They tune out."

Prensky advocates using games as a teaching tool. The field of "serious games" is expanding rapidly because of this interest. But if you don't have games you can use as a teaching tool, what can you do?

Skip the textbook. Make up your own curriculum. Create your own handouts. More work? Yep. More success in the classroom? Maybe.

Computer-Aided Drafting

I was about 14 years old when my father was taking a class at Muskingum-Perry Career Center for AutoCad. The instructor would set up a computer for me to play around on, and that was what got me into designing on computers. So when I became a junior in high school I myself attended MPCC and took the Computer-Aided Drafting course. The first year we didnt touch a computer, all of the drafting we did was on a drafting board with a piece of paper and a pencil. By the second year we were finally drafting on the computer, and at the begining of the school year Sheridan High School was planning to build a new set of restrooms for their football field. My teacher came to a friend of mine and me and asked us if we wanted to design the new restrooms as one of our projects for class, and after we had finised the blueprints he submitted them to Sheridan. Two weeks later we were informed that Sheridan was going to ues our drawings for the new restrooms.

Born Not Made

I was supposed to be an engineer. At least, that's what my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather were. I'm left-brain on that side of the family going back for generations. My mother's side of the family, however, were artists. So I ride the fence between left and right brain.

It might be handy if there were some kind of test to determine what we should do with our lives, but there is only trial and error or, in my case, expectations. So it was off to college to study physics I went. Organic Chem. Quantum Mechanics.

It took a teacher to save me.

Her name was Mrs. Price, and in one of those twists of fate, I was in one of her Freshman English classes for six weeks. One of our assignments was to do a dramatic reading of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Nights Dream." I was Pyramus... or Thisbe... I forget which. It was fun, but I soon forgot it, as it was a time of great scientific excitement. Satellites. Men in Space.

I was a geek of the first order, even forming my own "Rocket Club," like Hiram Hickam of "October Sky" fame. I hung out with the brainiacs in my class, dreaming of a career in science until that fateful day in my junior year when Mrs. Price grabbed me out of my chemistry class and demanded that I show up that evening at "call-backs."

"Call-backs," apparently are the second try-outs for a play. Me? In a play? Yep. Mrs. Price had been waiting patiently for me to audition and just got tired of me wasting my talent. My talent? In theater?

I was cast in that play and the next three. I watched her direct. I learned to light. My whole crowd of friends changed from nerds to dramatists. I was National Honor Society and National Thespians.

So what did I do then? Right. I went off to college to study physics. Sometimes the lessons that teachers have for us take a while to sink in.