Philosophy on Facebook # 17 - Learning experiences

So I just got back from the RYLA Leadership Camp and it was AMAZING!!!! I learned a lot of new things and met a lot of new people and it inspired me to write this next note about learning experiences.

We as humans use our brains every second that we are alive and the brain allows us to function and do amazing things. Learning is defined as the cognitive process of acquiring skill our knowledge. The skill part implies that we use our brains to control the functions of our body allowing us to do new things like when riding a bike you use you brain to help you balance just right and pedal with your feet. Knowledge as you guys know is the information we gain through experiences. You gain both skills and knowledge by using your senses and taking in the different aspects of the environment that surrounds you. If you smell a fresh made cherry pie you use your nose to allow you to gain the knowledge of what it smells like.

Because everybody is different it is only natural that people also have unique ways of learning. There are 3 learning types that people generally agree are the main ways people learn. They are Kinesthetic which involves being physically involved in order to learn, Visual which is using your sight to learn, and auditory which is using you hearing to learn. As with most things, there arent too many extremists that rely solely on one type of learning as basically everybody falls within the grey area between these 3. The learning styles for individuals can be based upon limitations on you. If youre blind then you obviously arent a very heavy visual learner. The way we learn is also based upon pure preference and what the person feels most comfortable doing in order to achieve the maximum level of learning.

There is so much learning involved in a single day that we cant remember it all. But just because you cant remember something doesnt mean it hasnt affected your life and has allowed you to progress into what you are now. The learning experiences are so numerous because the world around us is so complex that there is basically infinite amounts or knowledge or skills that we can gain from it.

Your learning experiences arent only limited to your external factors however, as you yourself are a great place for learning. As you grow you not only learn things about others but you learn about yourself. These internal and external learning sources constantly affect each other everyday like when you are given a challenge you learn how you handle it based upon what you know so far. This could be when you are faced with ethical issues. Say you catch a mother stealing baby formula from the store you work at to appease her crying children. When you come up with a decision for this situation you go through the past experiences that you have learned from like when you were taught that stealing is wrong. Your ethics come into play when you are exposed to the crying children that the mother could be stealing for because she didnt have the financial resources to pay. (I was challenged to think about this situation at RYLA) When you figure out how you would have handled that event, you learned something about yourself that was based upon how the external factors that you grew up with affected you. Self discovery is a very prominent way you can learn.

The learning experiences that happen in your everyday life build upon the previous things that youve learned allowing you to continual grow as a person. In careers and when you progress through life you keep learning more and more about a particular subject, that allows you to become more successful and more proficient at that subject. When you start learning addition in subtraction in elementary school, that basically sets the stage for you future in math and allows you to continue down a path that you couldnt have otherwise. You wouldnt be able to know how to do sigma notation if you couldnt add or subtract or do other basic things. This leads me to my next point about building the foundation for your future learning. Your first experience to something is paramount because it is this initial exposure that allows you to progress and build upon what you already are. This is what I call your collective being because everything you have learned in the past has helped you become the person you are today. Your collective being is made possible from the learning experiences you have in your everyday life.

-Allan Nicholas