In my own experience, from earning college degrees or learning the piano, I have come to believe that learning, above all else, requires a great deal of hard work and effort. There is no substitute for application, practice, and repetition to truly learn and become excellent at some skill. In summer 2019, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, where he articulates a study finding that somewhere around 10,000 hours of practice constituted the magic number in accomplishing greatness at any task. Thus, learning requires both patience and the humility to start a career/skill/technique as an outright amateur, and then allow yourself to make mistakes, accept criticism, and advance. Learning, in my view, must be a never-ending process of discovery wherein you grow in self-knowledge, in an understanding of our society, and in some unique discipline or field of study—academic or otherwise. Learning obviously has a major role in my professional life, as I am constantly reflective of whether my own teaching has penetrated a student’s mind to affect actual substantive learning. I am always asking myself if students are just memorizing disciplinary jargon as a trivial pursuit, to learn just enough to succeed in the class but not so much that their life is affected. Learning should be a constant across any individual’s life. I believe it is necessary pre-requisite in order to have a progress-oriented, democratic society.
Learning also plays a role in my personal life. Outside of academic learning, for me it is important to keep an active reading agenda on anything that sparks my curiosity. Learning keeps the mind sharp and prevents complacency. As an individual oriented toward various social justice issues, learning must be at the forefront of creating a more just world. For me as a student, I have to constantly have some kind of easy reading going because it keeps me in the reading framework. This proves incredibly useful when I have to then transition to reading difficult academic pieces; if I go straight to reading scholarly work from not reading anything at all for a few weeks, a barrier goes up that makes learning much more difficult than it has to be. When I have let myself stop reading for pleasure it is very difficult to have the where with all to pickup a scholarly work and read it for school. Alternating between easy leisure reading and graduate school reading keeps me in the zone of learning, so to speak, and helps me to stay on track and engaged.
Matthew West 