The Process of Learning

    Hi!

    Today, I want to talk about learning.

    I know what you might be thinking. Oh, yay! Learning. So exciting. With a hefty dose of sarcasm.

    If that's what's going through your head right now, I don't blame you. I'd probably think the same thing. But I think this is an important topic, and while I don't feel quite as strongly about it as I do about modern body image issues, I've had this one stored up in my files for a while, and am only now adapting it to the blog.

    I initially came up with this idea when I was heading into my second semester of Calculus, prepping for the AP Calculus test. Now, I've never liked math, and I hate making mistakes in math because it's long meant I have to redo the problem I missed. But I learned some valuable lessons from my Calculus experience, and they had nothing to do with the actual math of it.

    Rather, they had to do with exponential graphs.

    Maybe you've seen these graphs, where your line starts super close to the x-axis and shoots up sky-high. Of course, there's also negative graphs, where the line starts sky-high and drops down close to the x-axis before x gets the chance to equal more than 1 or 2. And my spiel about learning has to do with these negative graphs.

    All right. So, to go into math terms, let's say that x (in our negative graph equation) relates to time, while y relates to the number of mistakes we make.

    Now, we're not counting zero on this graph. x cannot equal zero, because in the grand scheme of things, there is no such thing as time-zero. Time is without beginning or end. That's what the Scriptures say. But, despite the nonexistence of zero in this equation, we already have a relationship between x and y at the beginning of our graph. At the lowest of the x values, y is absolutely sky-high. In other words, when we're first starting out on our journey of progression, we make so many mistakes! Tons of them! Millions, billions, trillions, infinities of mistakes.

    But as time goes on and we start learning, the number of mistakes we make drops like a rock. The longer we go, the fewer mistakes we make as we learn, and depending on our individual negative exponential graph, the slope (or derivative, if you're still in Calculus) of the graph after the first few x-values is a little different from everyone else's. You might learn faster than I do, later on, or maybe a bit slower. That's okay; it's just how things are. You have your own unique equation, and you're on your own unique journey, and it's okay if you don't seem to be progressing as fast as someone else in one area or another. I guarantee they have their own progression issues in a different area. No comparing your graph to someone else's.

    So how do we learn, anyway?

    Well, it's pretty simple. We perform an action. That action has consequences, which we experience. If those consequences are pleasant, we experience something called positive reinforcement, which makes us want to perform that action again. If the consequences are unpleasant, we get negative reinforcement, which makes us regret our action and determine not to perform it again. Simple as that.

    Every action has a consequence--or, if you're Sir Isaac Newton, an equal and opposite reaction. If I throw a ball, it's going to fall. If I throw a ball at someone, and my aim is good and they don't move, the ball is going to hit them, and the consequence may be that they get mad at me for throwing the ball at them. If I eat too much sugar and junk food, the consequence is that I don't feel very good afterward, or have to be extra careful about brushing my teeth or else risk getting cavities.

    Sometimes, we don't know what the consequences of our actions will be before we perform those actions. For example, a small child doesn't necessarily know that the stove is hot. What they do know is that there's something above the stove that they want, and so they perform an action: that of trying to climb onto the stove to get that thing. In the process, their action has a consequence: they burn their hands the moment they get close to the burner, and that hurts a lot.

    As a consequence of being in pain, the small child starts screaming, and as a consequence of the screaming, an adult comes rushing into the kitchen to see what the problem is.

    We are all that small child on many occasions during our lives, even after we reach adulthood. We do something, and we have reasons for doing it, but there are unanticipated consequences of our actions, frequently negative ones. Those negative consequences hurt us in some way, be it emotional, physical, mental, social, or spiritual. Sometimes, they hurt us in more than one area.

    As a result of the pain resulting from those consequences, we cry out to God. Why does it hurt? We ask. Why did You let/make this happen to me? We complain to Him, because our mortal, childlike minds don't understand.

    And God rushes in to help us. He can't stop the consequences from occurring, but through the Atonement and His infinite, everlasting love, He helps mitigate those consequences, like a gentle parent administering aloe or ointment to their child's burned hands.

    But the thing is, God's timing is so often not the same as ours. In many cases, He seems to be coming oh so slowly, and it hurts, and we're crying at Him, begging Him to come take the pain away. It feels like forever before the pain finally subsides.

    Children do this. Take any (well, almost any; exceptions exist) small, hungry child, sit them down at the table, and ask them what they want for lunch. They'll tell you they want something, and you'll go off to make it for them, but about ten seconds later they start crying because it didn't appear in front of them instantly. Why?

    Kids have a massive tendency toward hyperbole. To their minds, even ten seconds' delay before they get what they want can feel like forever. It's not that the time is actually that long, but to their perception of things, they've been waiting for hours already, and why are you moving so slow?

    This is what's happening when the consequences of our actions strike us and we start crying to God. He is working on our problem, trying to solve it for us as fast as He can. However, to our mortal perception of things, God's timing is slower than cold molasses. It's easy to go from complaining to Him to rejecting Him fully, because 'He didn't answer my prayers.'

    He is answering your prayers. The answer may not be what you want, nor will it necessarily come when you want. But He is working to answer your prayers, and He knows you exist, and He loves you. It must pain Him so much when one of his children grows impatient and leaves Him behind for other sources of peace and comfort--and fleeting sources, at that--because He's doing all He can to help them.

    And yes, God's timing is sometimes really quick. Theoretically, it could be fast every time, which is why we tend to get so mad at Him when things seem to be moving slowly. What we've got to understand is that we can't learn anything without consequences.

    In The Giver, a book by Lois Lowry, the society the main character lives in is one without pain of any kind. If you get hurt, you walk across the room, hit a button, and get pain meds. You take the pain meds, your hurt goes away, and the wound heals really, really fast. But does this teach you anything? Not really. When the main character finally has to experience pain for the first time, really experience pain, without medications to take it away from him, that's when he starts to learn what life is really about. That's when he starts to learn about all the experiences he's been missing out on over the course of his life. Before, there were no consequences. He did as he was told, and there were no consequences, and he never really learned anything. But now, with real experiences in hand, he realizes that he's got a tough choice to make, and he ultimately makes it, because he's now got the moral grounds to realize that what his society stands for is wrong. He would never have learned any of that without pain, which is so often a consequence of dumb decisions.

    So, yes, I think that, while God is definitely working on helping us solve our problems, He is also going to let us experience our consequences for a while sometimes. He wants us to learn, to grow, to develop and understand. We can't do that without pain. In my psychology class this semester, my professor showed us a video about a girl who literally cannot feel pain. This sounds great, right? Except it's not; this girl lives a life of constant danger, because without pain to teach her, she has no concept of how badly the risks she takes could hurt her. She could break bones and never know it. She actually managed to scratch up the retina (I think? Maybe the cornea; it was something important, at any rate) of one eye and destroy it completely because she couldn't feel the pain, and that situation could have escalated into an infection bad enough to kill her, if her parents hadn't noticed it in time. She has to be so careful with herself or risk severe, even life-threatening injuries--but without the ability to feel pain, how is it ever going to sink in that she needs to be cautious? Why not keep taking risks? It doesn't hurt.

    After watching that video, I can confidently say that I've never been so grateful to feel pain in my life. Pain keeps us alive, because it gives us a reason to change our behaviors. Changing our behaviors eventually changes our opinions and beliefs, and that is how we learn. That is how we grow and develop. That is the reason why the higher x-values on our exponential graphs correlate to lower y-values.