everything i need to know i learned in kindergarten… or so i thought
I learned to read, write and (if I follow the logic that reading and writing skills come with thinking processes) think in kindergarten. So on came the next twenty years on my life with me contentedly reading almost everything I could get my hands on. I didn’t write much until I started blogging but even then that was just thinking aloud or should I say, thinking in print. I talk a lot and typing what I’m thinking is just me talking when no one is around. There wasn’t any structure and the main purpose was usually just to let out steam.
I remember having some problems in my final integration paper for my undergraduate course. The team had decided to write in Filipino (as to bring the material closer to the people, make it more reachable and not too highfaluting) and I was lost in translation. Most of our material was in English plus Word autocorrects and my brain processes in English so there’s a slight delay every time I had to translate. Also details have to be written in a manner that will facilitate ease of reading and small nuances have to be placed creatively to make it a more meaningful read.
Now I find out that not only can I not write, neither can I read properly at least not critically. And even the stuff I learned in kindergarten i.e. Dr. Seuss, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Puff the Magic Dragon did not mean what I thought they meant when I was reading them. Not that I completely misread them, it’s just that there is lot more to the material than I originally thought there was.
For my humanities subjects, although I did pretty well in them, I had a bit of a problem with over reading literature. Yes, I thought some of the stuff was being over read. I mean to say, a lot of the literature was being given more value that what the authors probably meant them to have like Puff. I wonder what was wrong with actually taking things at face value. However, if I give more credit to the authors and they actually mean all those other things that the words in their ambiguity could mean. Then I might actually learn more and experience more from the things I read.
In studying law, it seems I need to learn how to read, write and ultimately think differently. Originally I thought it takes all the fun out of reading (something I really love to do but now don’t have time for, reading assignments not counted) but on the other hand, it opens up a whole new world. Sort of like a different dimension to everything I was reading before. It’s like falling into a rabbit hole or going through the looking glass. It makes me wonder what I missed out on in all those material I read the last twenty years.
