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Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Living-Learning and Teaching

This is a deeper dig into the list that I had created for my article titled: Do Something Every Day. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/11/living-do-something-everyday.html

Ever since I was young, my parents and my culture had instilled a sense of respect for learning. Even though the dominant pedagogical philosophy in Taiwan was of the cram and memorize in school, I learned more by asking Why? What if? And How? questions. In fact, when my family moved to Honduras, one of the new family friends there would shake his head at how often Why? came out of my mouth.

It was a natural habit that follows me today, although the persistent question asking has been tempered by circumspection and patience.

The joy of learning and the pride in knowing is a part of my genetics, it is my raison d’etre. I realized this fact about myself late in life, much after I had set my life on a path which was expected of me: to chase after the brass ring.  Our society does not hold the idea of knowledge for the sake of knowledge in high regard. My pursuit of broad knowledge is considered by society as living as a jack of all trades but master of none, which is considered a pejorative in our society because  of society’s need for its workers to specialize and concentrate on narrow bailiwicks and serve as replaceable cogs in the production machine supersedes society’s desire to have people who knew knowledge for the sake of knowledge.   

I have instead started telling people that I am a polymath in training because I felt I needed to disguise my joy in pursuing my catholic span of interests. Saying that you are training to become a polymath is slightly more respectable than being a jack of all trades; at the least the term polymath will send people off to Google before they can denigrate the idea. As I became fascinated with the idea of the polymath, I have come to appreciate the implications of being a polymath. There is even a book espousing the many merits of a polymath (Ahmed 2019), or in David Epstein’s book on generalist.  (Epstein 2019)

It may have started out as a snarky retort, but this has become my purpose in life and my destiny: to know something about everything and everything about something.

In the ever-pragmatic reality in which we exist, the societal norm is to treat knowledge as salable commodities. This attitude narrowly define knowledge as either being  immediately applicable or as the basis for creating new knowledge from the foundation of the old knowledge. All to advance human progress. This was especially true in my chosen profession of engineering. We were judged as either as applied, real-world engineers; or as theoretical and impractical researchers.

Teaching is an obvious third option, but it is held as a very non-glamourous, non-celebrated third option. Society views teaching as necessary but non-value-added proposition for passing on the knowledge to the future workforce. Even though many researchers inhabit the hallowed hall of academia, their worth is determined narrowly by their originality and ability to break new grounds in their niche subjects.  The teaching part of their profession has rarely been celebrated as a standalone achievement, only as a companion, a complementary function that is secondary to the innovation and creative endeavors of the researcher. There have been good, if not great teachers amongst the great innovators, but the brilliance of their pedagogical prowess are seen merely as a bonus rather than as a primary endeavor.

As I worked my way through the usual career of an engineer with a doctorate, I found myself drawn to the teaching function as I got older. My gift, I realized, was not in applying the knowledge, or creating new knowledge; instead, my gift was in my ability to communicate knowledge to others. As I look back at my career as an engineer, I was never happier than when I was doing research, to learn, and then to teach.  I did get a thrill while applying my knowledge, at witnessing a design evolve into a product, or investigating the unexplored territories of engineering, creating something new and heretofore unknown; it is just that the thrill of connecting with another human while sparking their minds gave me bigger and more thrilling thrills.

I decided to make the learning something new every day and teaching someone something every day the central tenets in my daily list of habits. Habits that I hope to internalize. Habits that will  be my wu-wei behavior: doing without knowing, action without thought, impulse rather than intent. Make learning and teaching a deeply integrated part of my being. So it is that I train myself to do it everyday.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Waqas. The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility. New York City: John Wiley, 2019.

Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

 

 

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