On Learning

On Learning

To my four favourite teachers of all time. Mrs. Moulin (once Law and Government, now Psychology). Mrs. Wood (once Literature, now unknown). Mrs. Bierly (once Gifted Studies, now unknown). And Mr. Williams (Literature, who moved away to live the good life). Don't tell a bright child he's special. That's the only lesson here, and I think modern society has already learned it.

I

Mrs. Moulin taught me analytical and critical thought. Every step of the way, she was there to mould my mind into something like the one writing this lyric philosophy today. It's no wonder she got into child psychology late in life. Jung would almost certainly nod to her purpose in time. The importance of shaping a child's mind is priceless. May she forever shape the minds of the children around her to see the world the way I do. The future holds a special place for her in history. She was Mrs. Byers when she shaped mine; she's Mrs. Moulin now. Same teacher, same eigenstate — observation just collapsed a new label onto her.[1] The Quantum Lens holds, even here.

Mrs. Wood taught me about ancient world literature — something far larger than the room we sat in. Something that always resonated with me through time. Beowulf. The Canterbury Tales. And with them, a simple but illogical understanding: that the text we were looking at hadn't come down to us clean.[2] That didn't sit well with me. But it wasn't a bad thing. It's what caused me to look at the Bible with so much scrutiny. Also not a bad thing. Sooner or later I still found the answer. Oddly enough, it was in every book I ever read.

Mrs. Bierly taught me everything in between — critical thought, advanced history, problem solving, the beauty of the world seen through an analytical mind. She only ever let my mind expand, and checked me when my ego got in the way. A critical part of my development.

Mr. Williams. Where do I even start. If the music style Ska ever materialized as a person, it was Mr. Williams. He taught me more modern literature of the same resonance — Animal Farm, Fear and Loathing, 1984, to name a few.[3] But he also showed me the band MxPx. That's a side story I don't have time for today; I'll likely tell it in another piece. For now, just remember that after I walked out of that classroom, I looked at authors like George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson, Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. with the understanding that there was a far greater message in the words than in the paper they were printed on.

The point of this long dedication is this: the importance of learning is solidified through individuals like these. Not because they do it for the glory, the fame, or the money. They do it because they care about the future, and they know that future is built through the minds of children. Like I said in On Growing.

These teachers are the very reason my mind stayed as sharp as it did all through adulthood. I apologize to them for all the inexplicable moments my ego got in the way.

II

So, on learning.

What's the one thing you wanted to learn how to do, but never chose to spend the time learning? For me, it was the Rubik's Cube. I watched my cousins do it effortlessly — still listen to them brag about how they can do it today with ease — but I'd bet whatever was in my wallet they couldn't beat me right now.

One day recently, after moving in with my wife, around the time Covid and the fear of Covid took over the rational planet, I sat on the couch because there was nothing else to do. I put on a mask, went out into the disgusting disease-filled world, drove to Walmart, and bought the cube. Believe me, this was a stupid reason to leave the house for ten minutes when we didn't yet know how bad it was. But it kept me inside until we figured it out.

So I sat on the couch with an app, a YouTube video, an augmented-reality guide, and tried to find the mathematical pattern needed to get that six-sided cube — nine little squares to a face — back in order. My fingers, eyes, and brain worked together to figure out the layer-by-layer method: set the cross on one face, lock in its corners, fill the middle band, then crown the final face. One layer at a time. You build the thing the way anything worth holding together gets built — from the ground up, in order, each layer earning the next.

Simple. Right?

Of course it isn't. Neither is quantum physics. And I've always been of the school of thought that I could teach it to myself.

I did.

I didn't have to go to school to do it, either.

I fully understand the dual reality experienced by Schrödinger's feline friend. Or I don't, you know? That's sort of the whole point — the cat is alive and dead until somebody opens the box, and the knowing is what collapses it.[4] The Quantum Lens again: a thing held in superposition until observation forces it to choose.

I did that.

Can anybody? Probably not — but that's not what I'm trying to ask with this piece. I'm trying to zoom back in, to the reason I had to learn. First, the cube. I needed something that would keep my brain busy enough to stay out of the mess, physically and mentally.

Someone wise told me that this isn't always the right answer — to ignore the mess. Sometimes we have to lean into the mess, if simply for the ability to help others who are stuck there. It's also best to be reminded of why we're there, through intent. Sometimes we see the mistakes others make under pressure, and know not to put ourselves through that later. Lessons come in all shapes and sizes.

III

While the world sorted itself out, I sorted that cube. I learned how to do it. Not fast, though. I'll always meet someone faster than me.

But not my cousins.

Who knows — maybe by the time they warm up to me enough to spark a competition, I'll have forgotten the skill I'd need to win.

That's another thing I wanted to get to. You can teach an old dog new tricks. Don't believe me? Look at me. Two or three bits of madness turned philosophy a day. All of it simple things, ideas, and lessons I've picked up over forty-two years of being alive.

My jays — I don't know what they're doing, they're going nuts as my fingers cross the laptop keys. My wife sits beside me watching her favourite show. My headphones are in, music as loud as I can handle. Bob Marley meets electro house, that's all you need to know.

I guarantee that if I look to my right, my cat is staring dead at me. Completely relaxed, the way I told my wife the cat does when I write. Now, I'm not saying I'm a wizard, or that cats are aliens. I'm saying I was right.

A moment in time that makes sense. Being here with my family and my pets, letting my brain just move through time. Putting words to paper.

Wait —

The whole point of this piece was to learn. How silly of me to let the point of what I was trying to say escape me.

But maybe that's the parallel. Plato had Socrates argue, in the Meno, that we never really learn anything new — we recollect it, drawing out what the soul already knew. Anamnesis. The teacher doesn't pour knowledge in; she draws it out.[5] Every teacher named at the top of this page did exactly that. And yet Locke insisted the mind starts as a blank slate, tabula rasa, written on entirely by experience.[6] Both of them can't be right — and somehow, in the lived thing, both of them are.

We arrive empty and arrive remembering.

Notes

1. Register note: used metaphorically. A change of name is not a quantum measurement, and nothing in the physics is being claimed here; the joke is that the framework's vocabulary fits the moment, not that the moment is quantum mechanical.

2. Accuracy note: an earlier draft said the texts "hadn't been accurately transcribed," which understates and slightly misdescribes the situation. Beowulf survives in a single manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, scorched in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731, so the text has real physical lacunae. The Canterbury Tales survives in more than eighty manuscripts with no copy in Chaucer's hand, so the problem there is editorial reconstruction among competing witnesses rather than faulty copying. Two different kinds of uncertainty, and both worth the scrutiny they provoked.

3. George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971).

4. Accuracy note: Schrödinger devised the cat in 1935 as a reductio — an argument against the Copenhagen reading, not for it. He thought it plainly absurd that a macroscopic animal could be smeared between living and dead, and offered the scenario to show that the interpretation produced nonsense when scaled up. The essay uses the image the way almost everyone uses it, which is to say against its author's intention; that is worth knowing, and it does not spoil the image.

5. Plato, Meno 80d–86c: the slave boy is drawn to a geometrical truth by questioning alone, which Socrates offers as evidence for anamnesis — that learning is recollection.

6. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Bk. II, ch. 1: the mind as white paper, void of all characters, furnished entirely from experience.

References

Benson, L. D. (Ed.). (1987). The Riverside Chaucer (3rd ed.). Houghton Mifflin.

Fulk, R. D., Bjork, R. E., & Niles, J. D. (Eds.). (2008). Klaeber's Beowulf (4th ed.). University of Toronto Press.

Locke, J. (1975). An essay concerning human understanding (P. H. Nidditch, Ed.). Clarendon Press. (Original work published 1690)

Orwell, G. (1945). Animal farm. Secker & Warburg.

Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen eighty-four. Secker & Warburg.

Plato. (1997). Meno (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.). In J. M. Cooper (Ed.), Plato: Complete works (pp. 870–897). Hackett.

Schrödinger, E. (1980). The present situation in quantum mechanics (J. D. Trimmer, Trans.). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 124(5), 323–338. (Original work published 1935)

Thompson, H. S. (1971). Fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Random House.

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