The Desire to Learn: A Quick Look at Education and Passion

    From my earliest memories going through elementary, middle school, and later on through-out high school, the routine has always been the same. Go into class, listen to a lecture, take notes, memorize the information, and recite the information in written or oral form a week later. Around the end of my high school career, I began to question this method. I would find myself interested in the topics being discussed and studied, however I had no desire or motivation to repeat the knowledge being told to me... I wanted to either see it for myself or do it myself in a real life senario. For instance, math was never my strong point and each night we would have to complete 30 problems for practice, now before I go on... there is nothing wrong with repetition, it is the effectiveness of how often repetition is being depended on that I am discussing. Anyways, for homework, I would have much rather our math instructor given us a senario in which we had to either use geometry to create a blueprint for a home, use algebra and trig to calculate distances, plan cosmic trips, or gather data about the earth, etc. I wanted more than just the give practice problems, memorize and repeat process. I wanted to actually put it into practice.
    All to often these days, do I believe that students are given a rather ineffective educational experience. There is too much pressure to fit a mold. I mean, look at any great philosopher, artist, mathematician, etc of history's past. Chances are that most of them were so great at what they did, because they had a passion for it. They had a desire to create, solve, reason, or question. Now-a-days teachers cram information into 5 page packets and literally ask the student to merely memorize the information. Kids always say two months later that they forgot everything... Well I wonder why. Let's look at the movie "Dead Poets Society."

    English teacher John Keating had the right idea of how to teach a class. Poetry is something felt and taken to heart by both the writer and the reader, thus Mr. Keating teaches the class accordingly. He tells his class to stand on their desks to view the world a different way, helps each individual student with there outlook on life, and instructs the students to rip out the introductory page of a strict and narrow-minded English textbook. In short, he turned the class and its topic into an experience. A memorable one as well. The human mind retains far better when presented with situations where learning is not just told to be memorized, but when it is forced to be memorized by nature. For instance, learning poetry to win a girl, learning equations to bring men back from space, learning the anatomy of animals to save a pet's life, etc.. Instill in the human soul a passion of any sort, and learning will never be an issue. So get out there and discover, find your passion, pursue it, ponder over it, question it, never stop the pursuit for more knowledge.

 - Tim