Hey there,
Remember me? I used to write this blog haha. I succumbed to the comfy laziness of a two week gap in my bloggy time once more, so I have a million ideas. I picked autodidactism. What is it? I knew what it is but I’ve never had to explain it, so I looked it up on wikipedia for you guys. (YES WIKIPEDIA 😀 This is not a school paper so Ha. I will use wikipedia just because I can!)
Anyway, the most trustworthy source of info on the web told me that autodidactism “has its roots in the Ancient Greek words αὐτός (autós, or “self”) and διδακτικός (didaktikos, meaning “teaching) and that it is a “contemplative, absorbtive process.” Apparently one does not NEED to attend school in order to learn something. Just go to your local library and read it yourself until you get it, then maybe supplement it with a class or by setting up a meeting with a professor to chat about it. In reality, autodidactism is a complement to other types of learning, but here are some of my favorite crazy awesome autodidacts:
Robert Frost
Thomas Edison
Hans Christian Andersen
Maya Angelou
Jane Austen
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This whole idea came about when I was sitting on the chinatown bus from 34 West 31st Street, NYC to 128 Central Ave, Albany. It was a four hour ride (including the atasco of my life on the carretera… that means traffic jam on the highway and I’m not being pretentious. I thought it in Spanglish, so it seemed wrong to write it in English because a blog is supposed to be my brain throwing up on the keyboard until something useful happens). I read parts of the Rig Veda, listened to a “Best of the Left” podcast, practiced the numbers 1-10 on my chinese character workbook, and jammed to some tunes. 😉
Just as I was finishing a horrible-looking diagonal stroke in number four (“sì” or “四”), I started to think about my year in Spain. I had taken tiny lessons in Mandarin from a few of my Chinese friends, but I never really studied or retained any of it. All of the things that I am learning quite quickly right now could already be in my brain if I’d tried at all last year. So I thought of the first time I heard the term “autodidact” used in a culturally relevant way: the new 90210. And that really explains it. There’s something wrong with learning educational terms from the crappy remake of a crappy show.
Okay so I used to be obsessed with this show. Here’s the autodidact pushing the popular girl up against a locker 😛
I just looked for the clip on youtube for a half hour, lost a few brain cells, and then gave up. The summary is that this tall, anorexic-looking, blonde girl accidentally makes the new bad boy’s mom realize he’s not going to school. Because the girl is annoying, he explains to her that he does not need help from school. He is an autodidact. Then he condescendingly explains what that means. They start dating later in the show.
Autodidactism is fascinating to me, because most people don’t even learn much when they are supposedly made to do so by schools. Personally, I never would have considered teaching myself something outside of my high school world. Just like with Chinese, I’ve always waited for a legit class to happen before I really put any effort into learning something. Is it the pressure of getting a good grade that makes me do it? I don’t know.
The idea of autodidactism is super fascinating because I could have learned SO MUCH in these past 20 years of my life if I’d just read a few books and had taught myself certain theories, explored certain ideas. I know people who read non-fiction for fun, and I am becoming that sort of person. I listen to NPR now, as the Honors advisors told me to do during my freshman year in college. I didn’t.
Did anyone else ever think that the news, documentaries, educational youtube clips and podcasts were either lame or boring? Yeah. This is coming from someone who graduated close to the top of her class in high school. How does the rest of the world approach this?
Why, yes, Boromir. This is true. We all wish we knew five languages and calculus but we’d really rather look at that meme. Or this one:
Okay, I got those here because I accidentally started a sentence with “One does not simply” and then couldn’t resist…
Anyway, back to the point. I am allowing myself to become knowledgeable by deciding to see learning as learning again, and not equating class with grades. Yes, I want to keep my GPA because it’s perfect, but I actually want to retain some information for once.
I need to become an autodidact in some ways anyway, because I am not taking a Spanish class this semester, and I don’t know how to use Excel.
Don’t you have anything that you’ve always wanted to learn but never did? Technology can help. One of my roomies looks everything up on youtube and she installs door stoppers and stuff without help now!
Let’s spend some more time on ted and npr! Let’s autodidact a little sometimes. We don’t have to be Albert Einstein about it or anything. 😀
It all comes back to the search for finding your passion.. but that’s another blog for another day, and it’s time for me to study now.
Love and stuff,
Julia
