The Word Is "experience":

Definitions can point to meaning and lead to understanding 

                Synonyms for the earliest usage "experience" include: attempt, trial, try, and test. It looks like each of these synonyms is about the purposeful action of a learner. Each seems to be about a person initiating a process. The action continues with an intention in mine.

                    Each of these early synonyms may be seen as a name for the type of process initiated. An attempt an intention to try something tempting. A trial could begin with the intention to try try something that might test the limits of one's ability or capacity. A try could be an intent to separate or sift some ideas, materials, or abilities to better understand that particular set of things, capacities, or ideas. A test could be the intent to simplify or purify something to better understand it.

                    So a happening isn't much of an experience unless we are paying attention to it and giving it some thought.

                    From its beginnings "experience" has been about learning, about finding out for oneself, checking it out, about awareness with hope of understanding.

                    My red dictionary first defines "experience" as apprehension or perception of an object, thought, emotion, or event through the senses or the mind. So a happening in our life may not be an experience until we have identified it and thought about it. The definition that I am looking at now says that the way to experience is through the mind or through the senses. I find that interesting. Mor directly it says that apprehension and perception are through the senses or the mind. I wonder how one might perceive or apprehend without the mind.

                    The compilers of my red dictionary believed that we can experience in our minds without concurrent uses of our senses. That seems right. But could not experience be sensual without conscious awareness. Could our body possible learn from an experience that did not reach the conscious mind? Sometimes it is difficult to draw an exact line between doings or happenings.

                    We have a lot to learn about the mind. We can learn more of value about learning. We may be called on to relearn where to buy good ice-cream. 

                    The same red dictionary also calls experience, active participation in events or activities leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill. That sounds right to me. I do notice that wisdom is not mentioned. I suspect that our awareness must be engaged during "the active participation" mentioned.

                    My blue dictionary calls experience "the usually conscious perception or apprehension of reality of an external, a bodily, or psychic event." Reality seems to be important here. I may have to check the definitions of "perception" and "apprehension" to see if they are mutually exclusive. A psychic event is a mental happening. It is beginning to look as though experience is really a big deal.

                    Experience may be necessary to learning and not just helpful! It also seems that we can get some experience just by thinking! There seems to be a difference between an experience and a learning event, but I am not very sure of the nature of that diference. I seem to remember hearing someone say that "learning entails movement and experience entails action," but that does not help me. Could an experience and a learning event be the same happening? Could any learning event be an experience? Doesn't it appear that an experience, or a learning event can both include one's thought and that perhaps it must?

                    Can perception and apprehension get us from sensing to approaching reality? Could they also lead us astray? Luckily we can compare one experience with other experiences.

                    My Dictionaries and the internet all refer to perception and apprehension in  their definitions of experience. In psychology, education and elsewhere there are books devoted to each of these terms. It sometimes seems difficult to keep things simple. Let me try for a simple understanding that retains much of its power. We might call both perception and apprehension both ''a taking a hold of an event" or as "taking a snapshot of a process." This makes both terms the noting and registering of a sight, sound or other sensing How about as describing the progression of a process? I give up the idea of simplicity for now, but I have been giving these two words and their relationship some consideration. It would be nice to say I have seen the reality, the whole reality, and nothing but the reality. 

                    I do suspect that you now have a better understanding of  "experience" than you may believe.

                    My blue dictionary also simply calls "experience" "direct participation in events." The quality of that participation including your awareness of seems important.

                    A synonym for "apprehend" is "understand." As that is true, it is also true that to truly experience we need an understanding of that which is going on or has happened. So, to experience, and hopefully to really learn, we need to consciously in the doing and happening, note some of the sequence or order of action, and to remember some of that order or sequence related to that event or sequence of events. We probably ought to have the intent to discover pattern, order, and sequence.

                    We are better able to approach truth and reality with our mind than with our eyes. When you get dizzy consider relaxing for a while. 

                    We may say that we are experiencing while we are acting on our intention to actively and consciously participate in a happening or doing and allowing ourselves to understand that which is occurring. Experience be a beginning to learning and a way to meaning and knowledge. We may also say that our understanding is growing as we observe similar patterns in similar events.

                    Our experience can be our powerful teacher. It is an activity we best do in active awareness. It can be a process which we consciously carry out. We participate in the action and note its pattern or order.

                    Oh! Its fair to learn from the experience of another. In doing so you may be helped by your realistic imagination.

                    Observation, and its quality, is a powerful aid to the quality of your experience. Good philosophers and scientists tell us that observation is an important part of the participation needed in gaining powerful experience.

                    We can learn to be appropriately relaxed in our experiencing. There are degrees of participation, degrees of awareness, degrees of understanding and we do not always benefit from being fully engaged. A relaxed experience can be a very good one. 

                    Experiencing is a process. We can get some useful understanding  by standing under the bull. We might learn more of bovine sex from our observation of a field of cattle. Still we can learn while standing under the bull. And if it is a cow we stand under, that's no bull. Even so such standing may be more like taking a snapshot than it is like filming a process. Observing the process is often the more useful experience.

                    Observation is an excellent first step, but often the better part of an experience takes place in our mind. We benefit much by thinking over that which we have observed. We can reach out with our senses and our mobility, but our grasp on learning, understanding, and knowing is mental, psychic. Think it over can move us closer to the power of reality.

                    Has reading this been an experience? 

                    Thank you for reading and congratulations!       

             

                                                                                                        rcs  

How to Take Quality Notes

How to give those quality notes more value:

            Watch this video, listen, and briefly note that which you understand. Flesh out your notes before the day is over.

                    rcs

Way of Learning

 RCS Posts: Learning/teaching/culture. Learning Activity

 

                A teacher's activity and the activity of a student both have esoteric facets. Nevertheless, most of us have important understandings of both learning and teaching.

                A teacher arranges data, facts, information, and knowledge for students to do the same for themselves and for others. Also a teacher aims aims to avoid damaging a student's motivation. It's the transmission of culture.

                A teacher helps students to use logic, definitions, and analysis to their benefit and the benefit of their world. Who was it that said teaching is easy?

                Good teacher's words are often like tiny seeds which may be held in many different hands and are pregnant with meaning. A simple utterance, like "The beginning is half of the whole." may confuse one for a time, but later help that one through difficult times. 

                A teacher's words may be powerful and impart power, and being so, also be dangerous. A good teacher offers them as tiny, easily controlled sparks which may, in time, spark a productive fire which makes a smith's fire seem small.

                To be a truly good learner or disciple, is to be heard by the teacher. Too be heard the pupil must speak. The teacher is a reacher. A teacher wants to extend himself or herself to the learner. Good teachers and good students must both be good listeners. Good listening is not easy. That good teacher wants to be prompt to hear, to listen, and to understand. A hard job, a difficult one. But, first the disciple must speak; often not an easy task. Even so it is best that the disciple speak well. Disciple and master desire to retain and preserve in memory the better part of that which is heard and to understand it. Each interprets and probably reinterprets.

                A good student dismisses nothing which is taught until the the rudiments are mastered. It can sometimes seem much to swallow. But one does well to first try to ingest or create a kind of framework for those rudiments. It's okay to swallow a bit of framework; try it you may like it. I once thought of it as a set of hooks that I could hang stuff on and not let it just fall out of my mind. It an organizing feature early on. I could hang similar stuff on the same hook or on near hooks. They were there for me to use, check out, and from time to time to say something like, "Ah, I see!  

                Sometimes just one interesting fact or piece of information may be held as a kind of magnet for related information until some organization emerges. That organization can be the beginning of one of a student's frameworks. That framework as a student owns it, ought to be kept flexible. A student may come  to love a "framework" that has proven useful in her life only to find she has to let go of it and to replace it with one more realistic. Learning can be difficult and relearning no easier. 

                As life goes on, a learner may find that he has made useful places to hang, some say attach, new information and new understandings of a similar or corresponding nature. He may find hat he has created a place to do analysis.

                As one observes one's learning one may see something like the above happening much on its own. Co-operating with that happening can often be a productive practice.

                The good teacher may offer a ready-made framework as part of a lesson on, say, analysis. The good student is grateful.

                Thank you for reading.

                                                                        rcs