Learning and the 'Eureka' phenomenon

An image of a docile student sitting in a classroom listening attentively to the teacher is almost iconic and clichéd. Indeed the said student could in fact be seething with aggression or frustration and may with great difficulty be keeping his or her open eyes plastered on the teacher in order to almost unconsciously live up to this common clichéd perception of learning. Indeed the entire field of learning, in this case the classroom and all its constituents, is a veritable maelstrom of conflicting contradictory thoughts, emotions, mental processes and psychological phenomena all of which clearly impact the learning process and outcome.

There is an existential dichotomy as it were, in all that transpires in the hallowed portals of teaching and learning. There is a forever primal urge to unify divergent processes which constant seek to meet and create the ‘aha’ or moment for the learner and the teacher when there is a deep sense of self-worth, understanding, actual transmission of learning and a kind of conceptual rootedness. At this apogee, there is no vestige of fear and a complete absence of self-doubt. I would like to refer to this as a state of learning wholeness wherein the two divergent streams have become one.

From the preceptor’s perspective, the entire teaching exercise is a kind of preparatory, iterative, awkward ritual that is supposed to be a preamble to the actual concept clarity and proficiency in application that are intended outcomes. In the common scenario that the learner is unrevealing about his comprehension of the teaching and is mostly blank faced, the teacher is fishing for cues of learner involvement, throwing in a bait of a question or cracking a joke to be able to decipher what is going on inside the learner’s head. And all this while he has solid theory content to cover along with application questions as a staple load.

The weary learner has survived parents’ expectations. On top of this, he/she is struggling with self worth issues (am I good enough, kind of conversations) as a background noise. Superimposed on these in the classroom are the shrieks, as it were, of ‘I am not understanding this. Shit!!’ This sort of thing is compounded in the early phases of learning because there is very little prior knowledge at the disposal of the learner which could facilitate the understanding and help his/her to build bridges from what is already known to what new is being taught. This entire process is like a circular trajectory, which forms smaller and smaller circles and finally collapses or involutes to a point, at which all learning and prior knowledge suddenly fits together. There is a lightening of spirit and opening of hitherto un-traversed conceptual coves for the learner, a sort of unifying ‘gotcha’ moment.

Teachers are special birds, as Plum would have put it. May their tribe increase.