All new learning looks at first like chaos.
Interpretation
New learning often feels overwhelming and confusing at first.
This quote by Adrienne Rich emphasizes that the process of learning something new can initially seem chaotic and disordered. It suggests that the confusion and struggle that accompany new knowledge are a natural part of the learning journey, and that through perseverance, clarity and understanding will eventually emerge.
In practice
Motivating students during the first days of a challenging course.
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'β
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.
I can teach many sports, but obviously, tennis is the one. When you do other sports, you see things from different perspectives: different footwork drills, body positions, angles and geometry. All that stuff is helpful, and so when I do other sports, I can see things, because once you know one sport, then the other sport becomes more clear.
I learn something new every game. Every game is always different, no matter how you try and think about it beforehand.
Any man is educated who knows where to get knowledge when he needs it, and how to organize that knowledge into definite plans of action.
Formal education must change. It needs to be brought into closer alignment with the world as it actually is, into closer harmony with the way human beings actually learn and thrive.
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