Writing About Learning

Today I wrote about the classroom. Life has always been a giant classroom for me (don't worry, I don't use this cliché in the essay) because I really try in my everyday life to learn everything that my experiences can teach me.

I felt a bizarre sense of déjavu while writing this because I have spent the past year writing about my love of learning to colleges and to scholarship foundations, hoping that this passion could earn me a place at a good college. I faced the temptation of abstraction, because abstract writing is often what is found in the kind of persuasive writing that I would be doing for college applications. I needed to make this essay personal rather than persuasive. It was a strange experience, writing about something that I had just written about multiple times and having to look at it through a completely different lens. This was a challenge I had not yet faced. The only way to avoid clichés and abstraction was to ground the piece with concrete details. Tom Morgan taught me that. Being a naturally concrete writer, it was strange having to focus on concreteness.

That's not to say that I wasn't a little abstract sometimes, but this emotional writing was built on the foundation of specific details. Here's a piece of the abstract part that seems strong even out of context:

"I felt a deep sense of belonging when I was in the classroom. Since as long as I could remember, I had attacked the process of learning with an intense enthusiasm. I constantly attempted to crawl out of my crib as an infant, sometimes successfully, so that I could further explore my room. I had learned the alphabet, both upper case and lower case, by the time I was eighteen months old. At three, my mother hid all the magazines and books in the house because I would cry when I read about a natural disaster. Of course learning was encouraged and fostered at home, but at the school, that passion became my purpose.

"When I say learn, I’m not speaking of memorizing or consuming facts. I’m speaking of something a lot more fundamental and sacred: expressing your gratitude for this magnificent experience of life by just being an observant and active part of it. Learning is a way of communicating with the universe. From each piece of knowledge that is revealed, several questions emerge, to which I find the answers, only to be met by several more questions. As I acquire answers, I realize that the little bits of knowledge were not separate. I recognize connections between them. Learning is my way of crossing the immense web of life."