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!