What is Learning? by Emma-Lee

What is learning?

That’s a hard question to answer. Learning is a lot of different things, to a lot of different people. Some
say learning is knowledge that is acquired through experience, or it’s memorizing something, or maybe
it’s just changing and growing. There’s not really a right or wrong answer, just opinions. There are
scientific opinions and there are philosophical opinions.

To me, there are different kinds of learning. Like, babies learning how to breathe. That’s not something
you’re taught, or something you can figure out based on memory. So what is that then?

To me, that’s natural learning. It’s instinctual.

Then there’s things like learning to walk.

Picture this, a little kid tries to walk and falls. The child does this over and over. But then, they figure out
that they can lean on a table or something to stay up. To me, things like that is learning from experience.  

One strong example I can think of learning is when I learned to ride a bicycle. I learned to ride a
bicycle when I was seven. You’d think that learning to ride a bike would start with me getting on an actual
bike, but no. It started before that when I had a tricycle.

On the tricycle, I learned how to pedal, steer and stop. But I would usually lean to one side in order
to pedal. Then, fast forward to a few years later, and I have an actual bike with training wheels. It wasn’t
much different than a tricycle, except that I was higher off the ground and I could go faster.


Then, I got the training wheels off. I could barely even move on that bike. I had to relearn how to pedal,
figure out the brakes, and apply balance, (which I already knew but had to practice) so that I didn’t fall
off constantly.

At Blue Sky I remember one of the most frustratingly hard things I had to learn. Multiplying decimals
with decimals. Right off the bat you can probably tell that I did not enjoy it. That shows that sometimes
learning is doing things that you don’t want to.

It’s also like, when I was learning to ride a bike, I had to apply what I already knew about multiplication
and the little bit I knew about decimals in order to figure it out. The fact that before I couldn’t do it but
now I can prove that I learned something.

In conclusion, learning is relearning, repetition, and applying things that you already knew to help you do
something new, and learning is taking risks, going outside your comfort zone, and experiencing things
that are new everyday.