Logic vs. Debate, Part 3: Learning Curves
I must admit, finishing this logic class has been difficult for me. Of course, I didn’t expect going back to college to be easy. I just never know exactly how the difficulty will land. As I discussed in my last post, there was shame around writing in terms that were familiar because I debated in high school. It was also difficult to motivate myself to finish my assignments because education itself is such unfamiliar territory for me.
The older I get, the more I realize how terribly neglected I was in the education department. I’ve written here about how I wrote my own high school transcript, making up my grades. Science and history were a devotional and historical fiction for children, read aloud while we used crayons on coloring books. I was expected to spend my teen years teaching my younger siblings basic math that I barely grasped myself. I was ashamed of my own math levels compared to kids in other homeschool families.
These days I refer to myself as having been uneducated and indoctrinated. I think most people envision “homeschooling” or even “unschooling” as something different than what I remember experiencing in my childhood. What I knew was far more about how to change diapers and soothe crying babies than anything else.
I wasn’t merely neglected in learning science. I was taught falsehoods about science.
I once went to a science museum on a “field trip” with other homeschooled kids. But instead of exploring, we were guided by a “creation scientist” who spent his time criticizing what the museum had to say. We read the plaques in front of the displays, and he quoted Bible verses to contradict them. We believed that the rest of the world was being lied to about how things work, and we knew the truth: god created the world in seven days, evolution was a lie of the devil, and the great flood explained many phenomena of fossils and rock layering.
Another aspect of my educational neglect is that I don’t know what I don’t know. This is why I’ve taken so long to put the pieces together. A decade ago, I wrote about the more obvious aspects of abuse in my upbringing. The physical and emotional abuse was something I could directly identify as I saw through the gaslighting about it. Neglect, however, is harder to see. It is an absence of something, and for a long time, I didn’t know what had been missing. I’m sure there is still more that I don’t know.
I remember trying to get feedback on my educational attempts. I’d ask my mom to give me books to read so I could write book reports. She would, but months later, I would find my short handwritten book reports, unread and ungraded, in piles of papers near her bible. I get that she was overwhelmed, and probably couldn’t find time and energy to give me feedback. Still, I learned not to try anymore. I could teach myself with no guidance or feedback, or learn nothing at all. It made no difference.
At the same time, I learned a kind of perfectionism that lies in fantasy. Perhaps if I regularly had education with grades, I would have known how difficult it actually is to put in the work for a strong grade point average. When I first did college, still living with my parents and having no time to study without also supervising a handful of children, my grades suffered.
I didn’t know how to study, and I didn’t have the freedom to focus on it anyway. Even though it was an impossible situation, I once revealed to a sibling at the dinner table that I’d gotten a C on a French test, and the whole table got quiet while my dad shamed me about it.
Now it is hard to fight that perfectionism, because I never really had a chance to try and fail and learn. The concept of a learning curve was abstract to me. I had no practice with building up my writing skills in an academic setting. I hadn’t learned how to follow prompts and instructions. I only knew how to write personal reflections, like I do here on this blog.
Writing here is easy enough. It flows because I have been practicing this type of writing for many years now. But there are many types of writing. Writing my papers for this logic course was difficult, and the most difficult part was getting out of my own head about it. These memories surfaced to interrupt me and make me doubt myself. They clouded my head so much that I couldn’t focus on the tasks before me. When I was finally clear enough to write, the words that surfaced were the terms I’d used in debate. I was caught between different shades of shame.
Learning is hard. Learning to learn is a lesson in itself. Learning to learn while unlearning the lies of the past…that is a real challenge. I am proud of myself for continuing to press on.