On Learning

On Learning

To my four favorite 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).

I

Who taught you how to think? Did they put it there, or find it already in you?

I can name four.

Mrs. Moulin taught me analytical and critical thought. Every step of the way, she was there to mold 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.

Mrs. Wood taught me 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.¹ 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: 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.² But he also showed me the band MxPx. That’s a side story I don’t have time for today. 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: learning is solidified through people 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. Kids soak up whoever is standing at the front of the room. Fund the schools that hire people like these. None of what those four gave me happened inside me alone. Learning is a thing two people make in a room. I only carried my half of it out the door.

These teachers are the very reason my mind stayed as sharp as it did all through adulthood. I apologize to them for every inexplicable moment the ego won anyway.

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 (I 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 a few years ago, 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, and 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 it from the ground up, 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, on one reading, the knowing is what collapses it.³ The Quantum Lens (physics’ words for watching, worn like glasses over an ordinary life), and only a lens: it holds a thing in superposition and never 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. If I let it, a moment that goes wrong, mine or somebody else’s, turns into a lesson. 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.

The Jays pile up fast as my fingers cross the laptop keys, each one a felt flash of a sentence, with its own lean toward or away. My wife sits beside me watching her favorite 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, the soul turning up what it already knew. Anamnesis. The teacher asks, and asks again, until the student finds it.⁴ Every teacher named at the top of this piece did exactly that. And yet Locke insisted the mind starts as white paper (what later readers called a blank slate, tabula rasa), with every idea written there by experience.⁵ They can’t both be right. And somehow, in the lived thing, both of them are.

Maybe a mind goes together like the cube. Every moment I’ve lived went down as a layer with its feel and its lean, set on top of the ones beneath it, and no one reaches the last face unless the first ones hold. My teachers didn’t hand me the layers. They sat beside me while I set them.

We arrive empty and arrive remembering.

Notes

1. Beowulf survives in a single manuscript, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv, scorched in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731; its burned edges went on crumbling for years afterward, so the text has real physical gaps. The Canterbury Tales survives in more than eighty manuscripts, none in Chaucer’s hand, and the work there is reconstruction among competing copies rather than repair of one damaged witness. Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, Klaeber’s “Beowulf”; Benson, Riverside Chaucer.

2. Orwell, Animal Farm; Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four; Thompson, Fear and Loathing. Thompson’s book ran first in Rolling Stone in November 1971 and appeared from Random House in 1972.

3. Schrödinger built the cat in 1935 as a reductio. One can even set up “quite ridiculous cases,” he wrote, and the cat was his example: pass atomic uncertainty up to an animal in a box, and reading the wave function as a literal picture of reality stops making sense. Schrödinger, “Die gegenwärtige Situation”; Schrödinger, “Present Situation.” The image is used here the way nearly everyone uses it, against its author’s intent. That knowing is what collapses the state is one interpretation, and a minority one. Von Neumann showed that the cut between the observed system and its observer can be placed anywhere along the chain that runs from the apparatus to the person reading it; London and Bauer, and later Eugene Wigner, placed it at consciousness; Wigner afterward gave the view up. Neumann, Mathematische Grundlagen. In ordinary physics, a measurement is the system’s contact with a detector or its surroundings, and no mind has to be present.

4. Plato, Meno 80d–86c. Socrates leads an enslaved boy to a geometrical truth by questions alone and offers the result as evidence for anamnesis, the doctrine that learning is recollection.

5. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 2, chapter 1. Locke’s own words are “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas”; tabula rasa is the label readers later gave his view and does not appear in the Essay. What experience supplies, for Locke, is ideas, “all the materials of reason and knowledge,” while the faculties that work on them are native.

Bibliography

Benson, Larry D., gen. ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s “Beowulf” and “The Fight at Finnsburg.” 4th ed. University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Clarendon Press, 1975. First published 1690.

Neumann, John von. Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik. Julius Springer, 1932.

Orwell, George. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. Secker and Warburg, 1945.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker and Warburg, 1949.

Plato. Meno. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett, 1997.

Schrödinger, Erwin. “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik.” Die Naturwissenschaften 23, nos. 48–50 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01491891.

Schrödinger, Erwin. “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger’s ‘Cat Paradox’ Paper.” Translated by John D. Trimmer. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124, no. 5 (1980). https://www.jstor.org/stable/986572.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Random House, 1972.

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