Power in Learning

The Flint Journal, MLive.com, Creator: Jake May

“When I was 8 I almost drowned.” PN gazes at me, her big brown eyes soft yet intense. She’s squatting on the deck, post swim, leaning toward me to chat.

“Really? Wow! That’s terrible. In a pool?” I usually don’t partake of conversation while I’m in the pool, trying to swim laps, but I have to stop for this story. The swimmers around me are splashing and flailing. Many look like they’re drowning, but in fact, that’s just how they swim. I watch as a young man splashes spastically in the deep end before one of the lifeguards yells at him to grab the lane line and then moves him to the shallow end.

“Yes. I remember being in the pool and sinking and seeing the ladder underwater, but I couldn’t reach it because I couldn’t swim.”
      “Oh, my god!”

     “Yeah…fortunately, someone rescued me.” She shakes her head, her short dark curls dripping water on her round brown shoulders. “I told myself that I was going to get my daughter swim lessons. I wasn’t going to let her go through the same thing.”

            “Yeah, that’s so important. It’s amazing that you are able to be in the water at all after that happened to you,” I marvel.

            “I didn’t swim until I was 30,” she said. “But then I told myself, get over it. You have to learn this.”

            She paused for a moment.

            “There is power in learning!” she beamed, rising now to head out.

            “Yes,” I agreed. Thinking how this has been my whole life. The belief that there is power in learning. I’ve been teaching college students how to write, research, read and yes, LEARN, for decades. But now, I wonder. With the advent of AI (No, I didn’t set out to write about AI; I’m so sick of reading and hearing about it, but it’s here whether we like it or not), will anyone be bothered to learn anything as easily mastered by AI as writing?

            I’m already seeing the dearth of students at the writing lab. No one is sending in their papers for help tutoring anymore. I’m sure they’re all just using AI to not only check their grammars, but to write their essays too. A friend of mine who teaches in the community colleges, research writing specifically, told me: “The research paper is dead.”

            And I had to agree. It is. Who is going to bother to research anything, to go through the arduous process of coming up with a focused question to explore, sifting through all the journals, books, websites for evidence, choosing the most pertinent ones, and then organizing it all into a coherent essay?

            Only those who are really interested in learning.

            I hope that they’re still out there. I know I still want to learn. Though my continued attempts to learn Spanish for the last 6 years seems to yield little progress.

           But I like the process of learning. I like discovering a new word in Spanish, or a new grammar topic that is difficult, taking multiple tries to get it right. For years, I’ve been trying to master the indirect and direct object pronouns. And, the other day, after reading an article in the NYT , I actually used one of the direct pronouns to write a sentence about Manuel Ortega: Despues de las eleciones ultimas, nadie lo desafi por poder. After the elections, no one challenged him for power. The lo equals him! I did it! What a feeling of triumphant satisfaction!

I like learning a new piece of music on the piano, especially if it’s a difficult or challenging one: right now, I’m tackling Schumann's Kindersehen —all 13 of them! Some I already knew and needed to only polish. But the one I was working on today, number 3, “Hasche-Mann”, needs lots of focused practice: to get the notes; to get the rhythm and tempo; to master the dynamics.

            I love it! Of course, I'll never sound like Tiffany Poon, but that's okay. It's a project!

            But I know from all my years of teaching that many don’t. The process of learning something difficult or new is just too hard. They give up. They don’t bother. They are lazy.

            Hah! There goes my elitist professor voice!

            Yet, with something like swimming, if you don’t learn it and for whatever reason, you end up in the deep end of the pool without a lifeguard, not learning how to swim can be deadly.

            There is power in learning.

            Power to read.  Power to write. Power to think. And, yes, power to swim!

Stop Yelling at Us Women

 

“He says that they never yell at them in the men’s locker room about closing time,” P points at Frank, Mr. You Never Smile at Me Man, sitting woefully in the corner of the room outside the locker rooms of the Kennedy High Pool, his wife still in the locker room.

            “Of course not,” I huff.

            P bellows a boisterous laugh. Frank hangs his head. Thinking oh no not again? I’m the brunt of another unintentional sexist behavior accusation? I didn’t mean it. I didn’t do anything. That’s not what I meant….

            “Don’t even get us started,” P continues, opening the door for me.

            Earlier, we’d been marveling at how no one had screamed at us to get out of the locker-room by the designated 15-minute time rule. It was already 12:17 by the clock; we were supposed to be out by 12:15 since the pool closed at 12:00 noon. P and I had laughed about it.

            Always, someone was yelling at us!  “LADIES! 4 MINUTES LEFT!” and  “LADIES 2 MINUTES LEFT!!!” and “ARE THERE ANY LADIES IN THE LOCKER ROOM STILL?”

                        It was so goddamn annoying. I mean, part of me got it having been in the customer service work sector for much of my working life. You want to get out of there as soon as possible. No one wants to work past their shift time.  But I was more subtle and devious about it. An obnoxious family of 6 strolling into Polar Bear ice cream at 2 minutes before closing and then proceeding to order up multiple milkshakes was met with: “I’m sorry, but the shake machine is broken.”

            I lied.

            It was very effective.

            I lied teaching too. A student would ask me a question about grammar or even university policy, “Professor, what will happen if we plagiarize?”

            “You will be thrown in jail.”
            Of course, I was just kidding, but often students would take me at my word. Especially, the international students. I was the authority. I must be telling the truth.

            Or back in their home countries, cheaters really were thrown in jail. Or worse.

            Today, when I found out that the men never get yelled at to get out of the locker room, it made perfect sense to me.

            Men don’t get yelled at by lifeguard youth working part time at the pool. Only the women do. Why? Because women don’t matter as much. They’re not going to fight back. Or if they do say something back (Which I’ve been known to do when the yelling starts to become too irksome: “2 MINUTES LEFT LADIES!” “THIS CLOCK SAYS WE HAVE 4 MINUTES!”), women just aren’t taken as seriously. It’s ingrained in our culture. Women are still second-class citizens and it’s not changing anytime soon.

            When I was in high school, way back in the dinosaur era, we fought for the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, making women on par with men. Did this amendment ever pass?

            Nope. Still no passage.

            And things just get worse. The Supreme court striking down of Roe v Wade. The ascendence of Donald Trump. Men will continue to rule the world.

            What can we women do about it?

            Is Frank the cause of it? He must think so after my schooling of him not telling women to smile and now this instance of men not getting yelled at to vacate the locker room.

            P and I head out the door, into the bright windy day. “See you next time,” she calls out.

            I wave and take a seat at one of the blue iron picnic tables, pulling out my granola bar and unwrapping it.

            Then El Creepo emerges from the building, staring at me. I ignore him. He starts to sing:
“Oh Carol, I’m not a foool for you!”

Oh Carol, Neil Sedaka

            Shit. Sure, I’d probably brought this behviour on myself earlier in the pool when he’d pushed Elisabeth out of her own lane and into mine just by his sheer presense. “I hate that guy!” I’d said to her, probably a little too loudly.

            Even so, I don’t think he’d sing that song to a man. Even if his name were Carol.

            He walks on by, a pleased smirk on his mug. Gives me a backward wave.

            I glare into his receding back. Wanting to say something back, but he was gone before anything came to mind.

            Not that it would matter. Anything I said would simply encourage him.

            Ian said I was a provacateur. That I the reason these weirdos pick me out of the crowd is because I invite it.

            Maybe so.

            Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut.

            Oh, hell no! I think, wondering if there’s a song about stupid men that I can sing to him next time I go to the pool.

            I’ll do some research on that and get back to you.