Adapted Learning Inability

I'm sitting in the doctor’s office, waiting for someone to be done with a check-up.

In the waiting room with me is a little girl.

She can't be more than eight years old.  Her hair is messy, and her clothes don't match.  She's sitting on her mother's lap with her knees up to her chin and her arms around her legs, asking questions about the things she sees on the TV screen.  The pictures, the people, the products in commercials, anything she has the slightest bit of curiosity about.

This morning, in my psychology class, my teacher said something in his welcome speech that caught my attention.

He said that he was afraid for college students. 

Picture borrowed from lifeatdrtoms.blogspot.com

He had a fear that we had lost our desire to learn, that all those years of homework in subjects we had little interest in made us loose our imagination, our curiosity to discover what we do not yet know and our excitement to find the solutions.

And he’s right to worry, you know.

How many of us open a Biology book and think, THIS is going to be FUN.

... Not many.  We look at the bolded words scattered around the pages and think damn... I have a lot of flashcards to make.  Or how long is studying for this final going to take me.

We no longer hang our papers with good scores on the fridge at home, or rush off the bus to show our parents our report cards.  A lot of us just aren’t excited about learning anymore.  Somewhere in our twelve years or general education before college we had the passion sucked right out of us.

In college, it is hard to get excited about learning a subject that doesn’t pertain to your major without thinking “this is not how I wanted to waste 2 grand or two hours of my time." But every part of the world around us really SHOULD interest us. We have the opportunity to slow down our busy lives and take a good look at the different aspects within it; be it plants, rocks, literature, art, biology, or human anatomy.  And that is rare and is something we should enjoy. 

So why do we look at learning as more of a chore as we get older?  Why do we loose our interest in gaining all the useless facts and knowledge we can?

I think it’s safest to say that college kids run on caffeine and energy drinks and usually work two or three jobs. That leaves just enough energy to do as little work in school as we can get by with doing, while still recieving passing grades.

This is the only class I have where the professor encouraged us to act half our age.

I hope there are crayons and water coloring activities involved... I’ll have to check my syllabus.