Tools for Learning Part 2

I guess I could probably talk about being mentally prepared to learn for an extremely long time, but we did cover attitude and how important it is for learning in my last blog. It's the old adage of “you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink”. So I'm going to bypass any more of my thoughts on the subject of having a good attitude for learning versus the attitude we grow into having as adults.

Now in the next part of my blog on learning I'm going to talk about physical tools for learning and how things have changed from when I was in school. When the teacher gave me a subject such as navigation and its importance to modern civilization I had four places that I could go to for research, our textbooks  first, which were very lacking in any information other than the obvious. I think maybe we should take a closer look or ask questions about what information can be gained from a textbook that only has the basic information about navigation and its importance to modern civilization. If it does give us the basic information, it would probably give us the names of either the inventors or names of people that helped research and develop what people needed to make successful navigation possible. These names are important so we come to the second physical tool that we're going to need to help us learn even though it will be two physical tools. I combined these two into one and they are pen and paper and their necessity in learning is to copy down anything that would help us research the subject which we are investigating. The reason for pen and paper rather than typing it into the computer is so that it can be spontaneous and easy to edit on the fly. The textbook would probably also give us dates in which important events, observations or inventions for navigation came about. Copying these things down from our first learning tool and, rather than calling it a textbook, let's call it our subjects basic information because many times the information won’t be coming from a textbook at any given time.

Research is the major tool that we will need to use in our exercise of learning. Back in the day it wasn't quite as easy as it is today to do research. The school library, even as good as a lot of our schools back then were,  those libraries were limited on information on some given subjects. They would have some of the best encyclopedias and reference materials available at that time. Encyclopedias and other research materials are just as limited as our textbooks were so it meant a trip to our larger community libraries. Our community libraries sometimes could be a long distance from where we lived and, if our family was unable to transport us to the library, that meant taking long bus rides and doing such things as riding the bus for a long day at the library doing research meant that it would probably have to be done on a weekend or not on a school day, so that we could give the proper time and effort in finding more information about our subject. As you can see this prospect was not the greatest environment for expanding our knowledge of our subject matter.  In those days this would have been what we would've needed to do to go beyond our normal memorizing of names and dates and trying to learn in depth about our subject we were given.

A person living in the 21st century however generally has at his fingertips one of the greatest devices ever conceived for doing research and it is the Internet. It can be accessed from a multitude of devices, from smart phones and tablets to laptop computers or larger desktop computers. If someone did not have access to a computer at home, most school libraries and community and city libraries have computers that can be accessed by anyone for a limited amount of time but in that limited amount of time a person can find more information faster and more in depth than we could in the early to middle 20th century.

Gather up all of the information we have collected either from books, newspaper articles, periodicals, blogs and any pertinent documents available. Read these research materials and find out the questions of who, what, where, when and why.

Make sure that we have researched each person that was involved with our subject even if it means researching each name independently of the subject, which can give us a more in depth look into why each one of these people got involved with our subject.

Take a look at each event that happened as our subject comes to its conclusion. It also may be of help to look at the dates in time that these events happened to see what impact or why our subject was affected by a particular date in time. This can also make us understand why the date might be of particular interest to our subject matter. Anything that can be added to the knowledge of our subject is fair game.

Be careful though not to get overly indulgent in obscure facts if you are on a time line that you have to meet, because doing research can sometimes become addictive and take more time than you have, so alot yourself the proper amount of time for research and then reading of your research materials so as not to get off track or get behind with the conclusion of your paper or work toward your subject.

In our next installment we will talk about writing a paper with our findings, conclusions and thoughts. This does not mean that writing a paper is important. Doing all the research and reading about the subject would probably be sufficient for just learning, but I have found writing a paper gives me an edge on remembering all that I have learned, which is, of course, what we are after, retaining knowledge, which is learning.

The first 60 years
You know a lot of us have seen a lot of things in our lifetime and I for one have enjoyed every single thing that I have seen or done or been a part of in this great big wonderful world of ours. When I came into this world in 1956 it was a simpler time for most folks who were just trying to make a living and have a family. I remember it as if it were yesterday, getting up eating some little something for breakfast and blasting through the front door to find my bicycle and see who was out there waiting for a great big adventure in the neighborhood that we called home. I don't think any of us were rich by any means but we all had our bicycles and various toys and especially our imaginations to power today's great adventure or even sometimes just relaxing in the woods behind our homes and eat a few green apples and talk about all the great accomplishments that we were going to be a part of in the future.
You and I both know that we probably weren’t responsible for any great achievement ourselves, but I do know however we made an impact on this world and I personally think that we made a good impact on it. Who knows one of our future ancestors may find a cure for cancer or have the knowledge to stop global warming. The possibilities are endless just because we were here and a part of this wonderful world.

I have seen communication and information that most people would've never had access to become available at our fingertips 24 hours a day. I have seen knowledge become commonplace on something called the Internet, I wonder if we had mentioned something like that to any of our friends about something this mind-boggling in 1961, they would have thought what planet had we fallen to earth from. Yes it would have been considered ludicrous to even think of such a thing let alone computers being so commonplace that every household would has at least two of them nowadays. Instead of having only one television per household there's almost one in every room and they're even connected to this wonderful thing called the Internet.
If you don't know how to fix something or need a recipe for tonight's dinner you don't have to go grab a book and start reading on how to repair it or how to prepare it, all you have to do is go to your computing device and entergoogle it on You Tube and there will be a video pop-up of someone enthusiastically telling you how to repair it or how to prepare it. If you can't remember what actor played in your favorite movie no problem just go to the Internet movie database and find out every single thing about that movie that could possibly be known to mortal man and in just a split second. You don't even have to be using your computer to find out this information you can do that on what we now call a smart phone. Believe me they look absolutely nothing like a telephone. The telephone in my day had a base a receiver and cord attached from the base to the receiver and even the base attached to the wall with a cord which was attached to a chord that ran to the telephone lines that ran all the way back to the main telephone station in our town and the smart phones which are better known as cell phones have absolutely no wires and you can still talk to someone in China and not be connected by a cord at all. I guess these things are all done by satellites and cell towers.

The satellites are in orbit around our earth and the cell towers are basically just antenna towers were the cellular telephone companies have their antenna arrays so that we can bounce our cellular telephone signals from one tower to the next until it gets close enough for your aunt Martha to be able to hear your voice on the other end of her cell phone.
I even have something called a Roku box or stick that allows me to get over 3000 television stations and, at 60 years old, I find that completely overwhelming when, originally, our first television could only pick up two television stations and, I think, by 1960 we had the huge number of four television stations which included WKNO TV in Memphis Tennessee that signed own as Tennessee's first public television station outlet on June 25, 1956 from their studios at Memphis State University. Wow, that was the year I was born. So this June WKNO TV in Memphis Tennessee will be 60 years old this year, television has come a long way since then. I can remember the television sets having snow and ghosting pictures and really terrible reception, but not today, we have what they're calling either UHD or 4K television with dynamic picture range and all kinds of devices and they look so good you feel like you can almost walk right into the television screens.

I even remember that there were still passenger planes being flown out of Memphis's airport to far-off destinations that were using piston driven engines. I can remember as a kid going to the airport and sitting in the graveled area that was made for people to watch the planes coming in and landing and taking off and going to far-off destinations when the first of the jet engine aircraft for the airlines took to the air in 1959 and became popular in the airline industry of the 60's.
You see we grew up in an age where it was always changing from one day to the next you never knew what to expect. I even thought that the Jetsons' type automobiles would be flying around from house to house, from city to city, state to state and country to country by the time I turned 60 years old, but that hasn't happened yet. We are still driving around in these old piston driven engine automobiles wondering why aircraft have jet engines and we still are polluting the air with fossil fuel driving automobiles. I have to say though there is hope we're going back to the electric automobile. Yes, that's right, Thomas Alva Edison had an electric automobile back in the days of the model T and they just weren't popular and I have to tell you that they are not that popular today either, but with all the things that are going on with pollution and global warming we may have to learn to love the electric automobile. I just can't help it, until I can drive as far as I want to without having to stop for hours in between to let it charge back up I don't think I'll ever have one. You know I just thought of it, that my great-grandfather probably spouted almost the same words “until these tin Lizzie's can eat hay and make fertilizer don't think I'll have one”.
Don't want to make it seem like the world has gotten to be the Utopia that we thought it would be. Yes there are horrible things that happened today like mass shootings in schools and all kinds of other stupid stuff going on. I have to tell you that I have had a wonderful life my wife and I have traveled to exotic locations that I never thought I would ever get to see and that gives me one more thing to be so thankful about I really truly have met my soulmate. I want to tell you I never thought not one iota that love was more than just a state of mind or that anyone could be so perfect for another human being that they could call anyone their soulmate, but after 34 years of marriage I have to tell you and I mean it, I have found out what love truly is because I have found my soulmate in life. I would not want to do anything without her, go anywhere without her and, yes, I realize with such great love eventually will come great pain when we are no longer together. So you ask is it worth it or why would you go through that knowing what the outcome will be. All that I can tell you is that all that I am for all that I ever will be is because of the love and the patient's and the understanding of the woman that I am married to. Yes, it is worth it and I would go through it 1000 times more knowing that at the end either she or I will have great pain at the loss of our soulmate.

I just wanted to give you my impression of what a little tiny taste of what the 60 years have meant to me. Before I close I want to say something about my family life, my mother and father and my brother, none of them were perfect and some people might say that it was a dysfunctional family and that it was not an ideal environment to grow up in and I'm here to tell you, if you haven't walked a mile in my shoes and gone through the love and joy with all of the heartache and despair that I went through, the bullying and teasing, the taunting and having a loving mother wipe away your tears and a father who worked his fingers to the bone so that we could have more of the wonderful things that life had to offer than my mother and father had, then you don't have the right to think that. I always looked up to my older brother and for many years I thought he was perfect and, yes, nowadays we don't see anywhere near eye to eye on religion or politics or any of that kind of stuff as we did when we were kids, but he was then and is now one of my greatest heroes in life. So you see none of the bad things that happened to us as kids mattered, it was the love and the patience that my family had with an OCD and dyslexic child that made the difference from having a mediocre childhood to the absolutely fantastic loving childhood I had. I guess that's what I really wanted to say is that the first 60 years of my life have been wonderful thanks to the love of my family and the grace of God in my life “And A Little Help From My Friends”.

Happy Birthday to us!