It first hit me in the July after high school graduation--I had lost my learning about Algebra III. A whole semester, mostly gone.
Of course, I told myself, I never really actually "learned" any of that stuff in the first place. So maybe I didn't actually lose that learning.
But in college, there were other warning signs. I was an English major, so I didn't take science courses, and all of my high school science stuff started to dribble away, leaking slowly out of the brain-tank where learning is stored. And I had actually understood some of that stuff; but soon, there was nothing left but some mental images of Julius Sumner Miller flinging a bucket around, and I'm pretty sure those are stored in the giggles tank, not the learning one.
It may be because so little of college is spent in an actual classroom as compared to K-12, but learning loss was accelerating. And not just in classes like German, where I was not adding any new learning because I was not actually paying attention. And then I graduated.
Well, you know how it is. If you aren't sitting in a classroom located in a school building, you just lose learning, right and left. Plop. Out of your head.
In the canned fruit aisle at the grocery store. Plop! There goes a whole semester of Spanish. Taking communion at the rail of the First United Methodist Church. Plop! No more tenth grade English CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: My Battle With Learning Loss