What’s Not to Like?

I’m having so much fun learning, and relearning, Photoshop that it made me remember one of the reasons I found teaching so disappointing.

Now, more than most, I realize education can be painfully boring. So much so that, until I started teaching myself, I was constantly appalled at how much time teachers spent going back over stuff that we, or at least I, already knew.

Most of the time, though, I found class a delight, so much so that I was glad to see the end of summer, especially since sitting around in the sun doing nothing had lost much of its appeal by the end of August. As a teacher, though I was always surprised, and disappointed, at how few students seemed to find the same joy in new ideas.

I was particularly fond of classes like geometry or logic, where I discovered totally new ways of seeing the world. It seemed miraculous that you could begin with rather meaningless premises and end up with a comprehensible world where logical decisions prevailed. Of course, it was several years later, especially while in Vietnam, that I learned just how imaginary such rational worlds really were.

Still, as I’ve been rediscovering in the last few weeks, there’s something delightful in learning new ways to do things you haven’t been able to do before, even if they are as meaningless as learning how to recover a photograph of someone you really have no memory of and, apparently, no one else does either.

3 thoughts on “What’s Not to Like?”

  1. “As a teacher, though I was always surprised, and disappointed, at how few students seemed to find the same joy in new ideas.”

    Do you remember back in 1983, it was your freshman english class right after lunch. Some chick smoked way too much weed at lunch then had a panic attack and you had to call for an administrator.

    I was sitting next to her and I found joy in that. Makes me laugh over 20 years later.

  2. Somehow that moment has been lost in a blur of similar moments.

    Unfortunately, that’s not quite the kind of joy I was hoping for when I began teaching.

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