Learning is articulating my thoughts in a language that isn’t mine.
Speaking with someone whose mouth molded into these words naturally, the dialect in which their first coherent thoughts met the air around them. Whereas, for me, after 16 years of speaking, I am rewiring my mind to not jump to English, to mold my internal opinions and exclamations into something new.
Learning is laughing at jokes and singing and thinking in Spanish.
It is discovering an entirely new paisaje de palabras to articulate myself, a whole new range of synonyms to choose from. It is feeling fluida because I finally understand where and when to insert lo que and la cual in a sentence.
Learning is viewing life through a literary lens.
When symbolism is no longer just the easiest device I write an essay about to take a stab at wringing some semblance of meaning out of whatever words somebody strung together. When it is now the sunlight like clockwork on the kitchen table at noon, the half-hearted effort of a lazy day outfit. When it is a jacket and jeans, the details I notice when watching a movie.
Learning is writing this column with a structure that I thought about before I started it.
I realized that it’s not that I inherently dislike poetry, it’s that it isn’t a cult classic literary genre of mine. Seeing that the line between typing thoughts and typing a sort of poetry is more interwoven and blurred together than one would think.
Learning is seeing politics as a reflection of humanity.
Relating an argument to the Cold War, understanding that some of history’s villains weren’t singular-dimensioned antagonists with pure maliciousness as the coffee they drank in the morning. Learning why, in countries that are a 15-hour flight away but might as well be on another planet, half the nation despises the other. Realizing that countries fractured in two don’t just exist across the ocean.
Learning is being a skeptic.
Constructing arguments and whispering counter-claims under my breath because I become easily wound up in a discussion and know I can prove my point. It is researching and reading and reviewing and not throwing away the knowledge on a bubble sheet for a grade. It is understanding the context, implications, and lead-ups, why this—whatever this happens to be—made it into my textbook, why anyone cares after 6, 70, 800 years.
Learning is not what happens when I am sitting silent in a classroom because the teacher believes in calling on people only because they don’t know the material.
Being poised in a room in which students’ senses of accomplishment and pride were erased for the sake of a fresh start, where industrial desks form uncomfortably intimate chains. It is not being surrounded by peers who don’t care, students who are only there for a GPA boost, to appease their parents, or get into some dream college.
Instead, learning is excitement over new topics.
It is a change in how I think after 2:45 PM.
It is a multi-dimensional lens through which I see my life.
