Jan. 22, 2004 - 20:37 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Learn Early

One thing I ran into as a young kid was the idea of "seeking the source." It started with me when I would ask Mom or Dad what a certain word meant. My pronunciation was straightened out by one or the other of them, but was told to go to the dictionary to find out the meaning of the word. Quite some time later the realization that I had been going from word to word to word in the dictionary for ages, forgetting I originally was reading something and had run into a word that often I could not pronounce nor knew its meaning.

Little success it was to me in school. My fault, but there was something missing in my make up or too much ? Early on all that stuff was being forced on me and I would also be graded on it, went down the wrong pipe and choked me, it might be said. Along the line I had a teacher or two who made learning the most fascinating thing in the world to me. But next teacher would chill my fire.

It would have helped to have Mom at home when I came in from school, but she had to be working. That was life.

In our Junior High School there was a huge dictionary on a pedestal in the library. I would spend a lot of my spare time chasing words on a never ending trail. See one and it would lead to another. Math and figures, hah, that was a different story. My "whys" got in the way. "Because it is so," didn't satisfy me. In Junior High School I met one teacher, he was a substitute for my math teacher. In one afterschool session I learned more from him that I ever had from math teachers before. He had the patience to understand my "whys" and explain how it was. The really peculiar thing is that I missed some of the basic grammer when I was out of school for a year. That and math were things I never really caught up on.

When I started to work details were often explained and made clear in printed instructions and elucidating the procedure of routines existing at that place. A gold mine. Later my jobs here and there would entail reading tech publications on the equipment at that place. Learned a lot, I did. Sometimes my poring over a tech manual my understanding was enlarged by taking the spare time to really get into it.

I think my first love is my main one now, words, meanings and how they are strung together to perfectly indicate what is actually meant. I am not at present studying a foreign language, I don't get out and around enough for it to be sensible. Same on other lines. But I am in them midst of trying to sift the news from the horse-puckey that is published. Looking for the missing figures and unmentioned words that would actually show whether what they were saying was true or that the media said was tilting the table to mean what they wanted it to mean.

So the habit of learning came early to me, grossly interrupted by school, coming later into my life when I needed it. So I think it pays to Learn Early . . . . . . . . .

Blog