Week 2-Life Long Learning

"It takes a long time to become young."--Pablo Picasso

This quote popped into my head as I was contemplating what it means to be a "life-long learner." It is a phrase that is tossed around so often with other jargon, or "eduspeak" that I sometimes forget that it really is a very hefty concept. The tutorial on habits of life-long learners reminded me that it is much more than words in a mission statement or expected school-wide learning results. It is about passion, curiosity, committment, courage, struggle...it involves reading, daydreaming, thinking, remembering, forgetting, investigating, goal-setting, meandering, doing, watching, questioning...and playing! I was raised by an amazing mother, an autodidact who finished a book every other day or so--liberation theology, contemporary fiction, classics, political tomes, social justice issues--along with a daily newspaper, and many weekly and monthly papers and magazines. She was my role model of a life-long learner, before the term was invented.

So, certain of the habits of life-long learners mentioned in the tutorial come naturally to me. I often have a goal in mind but just as often learn just for the sheer pleasure of it. I learn when I read, when I do a crossword, when I people watch, when I ask and answer questions, when I travel, when I try a new food, or when I listen to a new band. I am a teacher, so teaching/mentoring is one of my favorite things to do. This year I have really come to believe the old adage, "If you want to learn something, teach it to someone else." I am teaching an AP English class focused on rhetoric and I have had to relearn a lot of material that used to be second nature. "Using technology to my advantage" is a challenge for me. I am determined to acquire the needed competencies for my library program and career, but I am very intimidated, and trying to see a problem as a challenge. (That is another habit of life-long learners.) I want to be more than competent. I want to use technology joyfully and enthusiastically. This blog is going to help me do that.

"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..."--Rainer Maria Rilke