Tag Archives: learning

Learning From Mistakes (Or Not)

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When I was young, I was supposed to learn from mistakes. Other people’s mistakes, not my own. My parents were devotés of the “No one is so worthless that they can’t serve as a bad example” school of thought. (This, combined with the Girl Scout Law, produced fodder for my innumerable therapy sessions. I thought that only bad people (like my cousin Callie Jo) had to learn from their many mistakes or serve as bad examples. I wasn’t supposed to make mistakes to learn from. Did this make me a Goody Two-Shoes? Yes. Yes, it did. But I digress.)

Since then, I’ve learned through years of psychological treatment that this school of thought is BS. The only way that anyone, good or bad, learns is by making mistakes. Now that I’ve learned that, though, I’ve made some whoppers. I’ve taken up with the wrong boyfriends. (Including one who my parents said proved their point about no one being so useless that they couldn’t serve as a bad example. He was a tow truck driver and knew all the secluded spots where people had run off the road. That wasn’t useless. It proved handy for al fresco entertaining, which my parents didn’t know about. But I digress again.)

Marrying my husband, however, was not a mistake. But, I must admit, I’ve learned from Dan’s mistakes. Sometimes I’ve learned that I’m right, even on subjects that he’s supposed to be better at, like spatial reasoning. When there’s a piece of furniture or a mattress that needs to be transported from one place to another, he continues to rotate it on every axis several times and shove it into the car, while I watch and say, “That’s never going to fit.” When I prove correct, he says, “Well, I had to try.” I reply, “No, you didn’t. You could have listened to me.”

Another time I had to bail him out was when he was fixing to put cement in a hole in the lawn destined to hold something decorative in place. He had to mix several cups of water with the cement. Unfortunately, he used a coffee carafe to measure the cups. I pointed out that those weren’t the same kind of cups that a measuring cup measures. He was flummoxed. I had to do some quick math (including a visit to my study for computer consultation) to determine how many ounces Mr. Coffee thought was a cup and how it compared to a regulation cup. Then I had to figure out how many actual cups of water he needed to add to what he had already put into the hardening cement.

Not that he’s the only one who makes mistakes. In addition to the boyfriends one, I’ve forgotten that we asked the contractor to put in an extra half-step leading up to the front door because the sill is too high for my increasingly unreliable legs. Just the other day, though, I forgot all about it and stumbled over my own feet, only narrowly averting potentially bloody disaster by catching myself on the railing we also insisted they install. (The half-step was necessitated by a fall I suffered during the construction, which I wrote about in “Gravity Is Not My Friend,” a post from 2020. But, being a mensch, Dan didn’t rub my nose in my awkwardness. He said, “Be careful, honey,” (I don’t know why people only tell you to be careful after you’ve taken a fall. But I digress some more.))

But the topic (way back there somewhere) was learning from mistakes. So, what should we have learned? Well, in Dan’s case, it should be: Listen to Janet. (Though I’m afraid that will never truly sink in.) For me, it’s: Avoid complicated men (or so my shrink said). And watch your step. (I’m afraid that hasn’t sunk in either.)

But there are plenty of fresh mistakes to be made, and I’m sure we’ll make our share of them. Or more, more likely.

Learning Things

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This is a poster I have in my study. Lately, I have begun thinking that what it really should say is “That’s what I do. I read books and I learn things.” To put it simply, I wouldn’t know things if I didn’t learn things. And now I think the learning is perhaps more important than the knowing.

I had a course in grad school that was called Research and Bibliography. (We called it R&B.) We did the usual things you do as an English major – write papers about assorted literary figures, mostly. (I once did a paper on William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. I referred to it as my “Willie and Wally” paper. But I digress.)

The final exam, however, was not an essay test or another sort of normal academic exercise. It was, in essence, a scavenger hunt in the university library. Each of the seven or so students had her or his own personal set of questions and had to find the answers. The trick was, you had to know where to find the answers, not so much what the actual answers were. Each set of questions could be answered using the same reference books (this was before computers were available to anyone except the librarians), and students were allowed to point each other to the correct ones.

For example, a question might be “When John Milton used the word pandemonium, how long had it been part of the English language?” (Trick question: Milton invented the word. It means, literally, “all the devils.”) The answer could be found in a reference book called the OED, or Oxford English Dictionary. Another student would have a different question that also required using the OED. And you could say, “you’ll find that in the OED.”

In that case, the test was not at all about knowing the answers to the questions, but knowing – or learning – where to find them (something that we should have learned from writing our papers and bibliographies).

There are different types of learning. My husband learns mostly by visual means, absorbing information through television documentaries, for example. Some children learn their letters and numbers best by drawing them in a sand tray or fingerpainting them. For a while, these multiple styles of learning – visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. – were a major influence on education, and teachers were encouraged to use a different style if a child wasn’t learning through the one that was normally used to teach. (They may still be. I haven’t done textbooks in years.)

So. I read books and I know things – but only because I learn them. I was reading a book about mountaineering, for example, and came across the word salopettes. I could tell from the context that it was an item of clothing, but I just had to learn which one. A quick Google and I learned that salopettes are to the French (and mountain climbers) what bibbed overalls are over here (only, presumably, down-filled instead of denim). It’s a completely useless thing to know – I can’t imagine it being useful even on Jeopardy. But it was fun to learn.

Of course, I’m not putting down reading or knowing. For me, reading is what comes before learning, and knowing is what comes after. And, for me at least, both are pleasurable occupations.

I wrote about learning a while back, and this is what I said about it:

I count a day when I don’t learn something new as a day wasted. I love it when I’m able to start a Facebook post with TIL (Today I learned) or “I was today years old when I learned that….” Learning is all around you. You just have to reach out and grab it!

That’s still my philosophy.