The frustration of learning
My reading of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma has done for me much of what I expected, provoking a consideration of how and why we eat as we do. I feel thrust into the weird, dare I say scary, space between old ideas and new ones, a movement I’m coming to recognize as a sign that real learning is taking place. I remember encountering that sensation in my college political theory courses. We plunged ourselves into readings of Marx, Havel, Locke, and King. We mulled over questions of power, nonviolence, and the good society. I remember those discussions as a brilliantly confusing mess of ideas. Sometimes I left class frustrated. And usually I was frustrated not for a lack of learning, but precisely because I HAD learned. Understanding changes you, right? It ought to rub against the grain of your old habits, producing that uncomfortable feeling of being slightly out-of-sync.
The book I’ve currently got open is doing exactly that. Of course, there’s the issue of eating, which yes, I’ve had to consider. However, the question of how one ought to live in the global economy looms in the background as the broader theme. In Pollen’s case, he wants readers to think about the consequences of eating via an industrial food chain (versus the benefits of alternative, particularly local, food chains). And I suppose the same logic can ask us to examine our role as consumers at-large, as people who have grown largely disconnected from the production of the things we buy, whether they’re iPods or sofas. I suppose there’s nothing particularly new about this question for me; we studied it in those same college political theory courses. But now, as a high school economics teacher, I find myself wondering about the lessons my curriculum is telling me to teach. We learn that trade creates wealth, lowers costs, and increases jobs. And yet, what is lost when we make transactions thousands of miles apart, never seeing the face of the person who made the good we’re buying? Is that cost quantifiable?
I’m not sure that, 5 years removed from my college days, whether I’m more or less comfortable with the awkward tension that real learning offers. Back then I was really thirsty for concrete answers to the questions we raised in our discussions. I wanted the prof to say “Here is how you resolve the tension between these ideas.” Today, I feel a bit more okay not having all the answers. Like getting into frigid water, I feel like I can tolerate it more than I used to. At the same time, I wonder if the impetus to actually change how I teach and do life has decreased. The college years were ripe for change, for acting out the new ideas you encountered. You had nothing to lose. Now, have I grown more comfortable, willing to tolerate the freezing water so much that I become numb? I hope, for my sake and the sake of my students, that I haven’t.
