Learning: Wonder and Pain.

When I think about learning I think about the first time I read a piece of theory that BLEW MY MIND. When I was a freshman in college I read James Paul Gee's article about discourse communities. Discourse communities are the way that we learn how to speak and write, and we learn these languages in layers. First we learn from our family (primary discourse communities) and then we learn from school, movies, society and sports (secondary discourse communities). Most importantly though, there is a DOMINANT discourse community. It's the language of lawyers, of professors, of politicians. It's the language of power, and you are either born into a family who speaks it, or one who doesn't. If your family doesn't, gaining power is very difficult.

I read this article along with ten other people in the common area of the dorm. I was in a learning community, and we were all stuck. This article was by far the hardest thing I had ever read. We decoded it, sentence by sentence, like it was a hieroglyphic text. By the time I was done the page was heavy with notes just so I could understand what what being said-- just so I could have access to a whole new way of understanding the world. The way discourse communities re-framed my understanding left me in a haze of wonder. I was re-seeing the world, and that was a huge and powerful experience-- I began chasing that experience.

Fast forward through my masters into the PhD program. Now I was fully in love with learning, but starting to get very... suspicious of the form of school (I still am, by the way). While I had spent 8 years of my life engaging in this learning, I was starting to view the Academy as a church. It was a church that I had been trying to become a holy person in-- my goal was to have the magical professor title bestowed on me. However, I still mostly trusted the process. During the second year of your PhD you have to take a test however. It is a test that feels like hazing. Keep in mind, there had been no tests for a long time, and this test consisted of 24 hours to write 5 essays summarizing our field, and a week to write a paper on a topic chosen by the committee. It was brutal, and went against everything we had been taught about writing. I didn't want to play.

I failed it.

No comments told me why. Only that I had failed. It was the first time I had ever failed anything, and it hurt more than I can really articulate. At this point I no longer trusted my church. I no longer trusted the people who had been teaching me. However, I knew then that there was a game to be played, and I knew that I had different morals and desires than the institution that I was working for and sanctioned by. I learned about myself and I learned about my relationship to faith.

This was the greatest learning experience I have ever had. Learning, while wonderful, can be painful. It can be hard. It does not come from people outside, but how we frame the reality we have. It changes us.