Lesson 21 From English Notebook

It was the winter of 1993. Yerevan was covered with a white freezing blanket of snow. It was serene and peaceful outside, no cars, no people, nothing. Just the snow… and the occasional smoke emanating from a makeshift tin exhaust vent built into the kitchen or living room window, a pipe on a wall made black by whatever people had been burning to stay warm. No power, no gas, no phone, no water. It was almost as cold inside as it was outside. My father would joke that the only utility still operational was the sewer system. No school, no work, nothing… just staying alive. The reality was unacceptable, unimaginable, and unforgettable. I had to get out of that frozen hell known as the Fatherland, or the Mother Armenia. I cannot even imagine what my parents must have felt in those days because for me life was easier… reading, writing, talking, laughing and dreaming, and of course, buying the daily bread ration, chopping wood for the stove, and bringing water from the nearby houses to our fifth floor apartment.

Every day for hours, I would do English exercises, copy down chapters of books in English, listen to the the Voice of America and the BBC on our short-wave radio, and dream big dreams. Perhaps learning the language was all I could do because the dream was too far, too impossible. My family was happy but we were not wealthy or well connected. I could see no other way to reach a dream than to do what I could do and hope for the rest.

Months later, in our room where we had the tiny ten inch TV running on a car battery, during the evening news broadcast I heard about a program that was recruiting exchange students for a one-year visit to America. There was no other option. I had to apply. The process was unclear but I had to write an essay and submit for consideration. After writing the best essay I could write in a language I had just barely learned and taking it to the embassy with my friend, all I could do was wait, and continue dreaming. Little did I know that over fifteen hundred others had also submitted their essays. I’m not sure how many had re-written their essay at least a dozen times to make sure the writing and the spelling were perfect and had written over the same text on the final version to make sure every letter was perfectly traced to fix the poor job of the cheap pen.

Days or maybe a week or two later, I heard that the results were back and names would be announced at the embassy. I went there alone as I could not bother my parents or anyone else to come along for a non-event. Everything was rigged in those days. Why would this be any different? Others had attended expensive private English lessons or had gone to English schools. Their parents had money and connections. I had little chance but deep down there was a glimmer of hope that maybe by divine intervention, my name would also come up. So, I went to the embassy alone and discovered a huge noisy crowd. Some time later, a man came out of the embassy, stood on the fence holding onto the wrought iron railing and began to announce names into a loudspeaker. I think mine was the first name announced. All I could do is stand there in complete shock thinking maybe I had wanted to hear my name so much that it was all an illusion. I asked the people next to me if they had heard my name but they were too busy listening for names they cared about and did not know for sure.

I had passed the first gate. The holes of the giant sifter were too small for me to fall through this time, but I knew that at each of the next stages, they would come with an even smaller sifter with bigger holes and would shake the applicant pool some more to see who would remain in the human sifter.

Curiosity by ~azurecorsair

School habits are essential for proper development of our children. A couple weeks ago I re-started a project to learn a completely new subject. It could be driven by endless curiosity but continuous learning has become an important part of my life. We all learn something new every day but I’m talking about picking up a subject and devoting enough time to it to at least have an introductory understanding. As a result of this continuous learning, I catch myself constantly drawing parallels between different events, topics, theories and trying to better understand the world around me.

Let me give you an example. I have worked with complex computer systems for over a decade now. These systems once implemented should undergo periodic changes to reflect newer realities or requirements. Introduce too much change and you risk destabilizing the entire system. Many of the principles that govern in computer systems also apply in government. The gradual incremental minor changes in laws are required to keep up with changing realities but introduce too much change at once and risk facing enormous unintended consequences. Examples are abundant of principles in one discipline also applying in another.

I consider my education and development the cornerstone of how I perceive the world but how do I learn? What school habits am I hoping to see forming in my little ones?

1. Discipline is absolutely essential. Learning cannot happen without significant ongoing time devoted to it but that requires commitment. Discipline or the regimen that develops or improves a skill is simply a habit. As parents, we need to help our children form this habit.
2. Focus on the task at hand is also critical. It bothers me immensely how in the past decade the word multitasking has made its way from computer lexicon into our daily lives with a positive connotation of one being more effective when performing multiple tasks at once. We are not built to learn math, physics, and English at once. We are not built to solve three math problems at once. We are not built to read three different sentences at once. We are not built to listen to music while learning (unless we’re learning music). Helping our children focus on their work is simple because they come built that way. The key is not to let our busy lives or bad habits get in their way of focusing on their project or exercise.
3. Love of reading is another critical school habit. We typically communicate knowledge with words and can receive the words either through listening or reading. People who do not like reading are unfortunately at a major disadvantage. First, you can only listen as fast as the speaker speaks. Second, even the best speakers are unable to edit their speech many times as written text can be edited. Third, learning by talking to others, asking questions, requires other interactions unrelated to the questions (“how are you today?”). Reading is simply a faster method of processing the volumes of available knowledge. To be sure not everything is found in written text but the love of reading is nonetheless an essential school habit.
4. Curiosity is also important but I have not figured out how this can be developed in children. I looked up at least ten words while typing the above because I was curious what all their meanings were. However, I have noticed that many simply lack this interest to go beyond the task at hand. Could it be societal changes or simply human nature, I don’t know but I know that without fostering curiosity we simply cannot raise children with good learning habits.

I’m sure there are other important school habits. What has been important for your learning? What habits do you consider essential for learning and becoming a contributing member of civilization?

Another expression that I thought of yesterday, also in Armenian, was “մայրենի լեզու” which literally means “mother tongue.” This represents the first language of a child, which in my case is Armenian. Why is the language of a child represented as the mother’s language? Why not father’s language or the village language? Seeing my children grow up in a country where English is the first language I now fully understand this expression. My wife speaks Western Armenian while I speak Eastern Armenian. Even though my son understands both languages very well (they are not so different), he speaks his mother’s Western Armenian. In addition, he speaks Armenian vs. English almost in the same proportion as his mother. Having observed others, the same is roughly true for many other children. Of course, the time we spend with them is what causes this to happen. So, if I were to be a full-time stay-at-home Mr. Mom, they would probably speak what I speak. But time aside, given life the way we have it, I finally understand why generations have called the first/primary language the “mother tongue” rather than anything else.

The third expression that does not leave me alone is “giving someone the benefit of the doubt.” I do not know whether this has anything to do with the Jury system or the standard of being certain “beyond any reasonable doubt” but for me that’s exactly what this expression represented. While sitting in the Jury room, all I did was give someone the benefit of the doubt of the facts until I could no longer doubt the facts.

Having thought of these three, I am now looking forward to other words that stick out in daily conversation because of some special unique meaning.

Seventeen years ago, with no electricity and little heat in the middle of a cold winter under candlelight, I started learning the English language. I copied down every word and sentence in hundreds of pages until I could write almost without spelling errors. I used a dictionary to translate thousands of words. I made up sentences using these words so I could understand (or at least imagine) how to use them. I even wrote a few short essays to try out my new language skills.

At the time, I could not have imagined how critical my knowledge of English would become later in life. Far too often, the subject we study has little to do with our current circumstances and is only required knowledge years later in ways we would have never considered while learning.

Our lives are so packed with activities and demands placed on our time that it is convenient and even almost excusable to postpone daily learning until some other time when we are “free.” I want to urge you to make a concerted effort to learn daily or weekly or on a schedule that works best for you. Attend a class, get a new degree, try out something you have never done before, and spend time learning new disciplines.

In this global economy, we are rewarded for being narrowly specialized in our field of expertise. I would argue that in order to increase expertise in our fields we must venture outside into other fields and learn how others deal with their work and their lives. This learning not only enriches our current experiences but also has the ability to pay dividends in later years in unexpected ways.

People learn in different ways. For some daily methodical study is the best way, for others reading books works best and yet for some learning from people or trials and errors is best. Whatever works best depends on your preferences and upbringing and perhaps other factors. Any method is fine as long as you are learning something new and different.

Do not put off learning something new today! You may not know yet the ways in which this newly acquired knowledge or skill will become useful tomorrow.