Kelcie Blogga

“It’s time for dinner!” my dad called down to the basement.  I looked over to where my baby cousin Bradley was crawling walked over and picked him up.  I walked up the stairs to my kitchen and I saw my uncle mixing together some pasta for Bradley.  As we sat down at the dinning room table my uncle began to feed Bradley, with every spoonful I became nervous of him choking.  Many of you will probably think that I am overreacting and I would have to agree with you.  I know he will not choke but I can’t help but be nervous that he will.  After Bradley finished his pasta, my mom gave him a cookie, again I got nervous and every few seconds I was nervous that he may choke on the cookie.   It was very obvious to everyone who was with us that I was nervous about him eating and that was made clear when my mom stated that she had also been nervous about my younger brother and me eating when we were very young.  Had I subconsciously learned from my mom to be nervous when babies are eating?

As it was said in Laura’s Log, a lot of what we learn and believe is from our parents.  As we grow older we learn our parents’ opinions and beliefs and we claim them as our own.  Is it possible that we can also learn our parents’ habits from when we were too young to even have any clear memories?  When we were babies or toddlers were are young enough and naïve enough for our thoughts and feelings to be “molded”.  This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it just means that a lot of who we are today reflects what we saw when we were younger and what we were exposed to.  Do I have the fear of my baby cousin choking from eating because that’s what I was exposed to when I was just a little baby?  Although I was too young to have any memories now of when I was a baby, could it be possible that my brain “stores” the information that I learned from that age?  So many teens act a lot like their parents do, could this be the reason?  I am open to opinions on my thoughts and I would love to hear what you think, does anyone else have experiences like this?

Earlier today, as I was sitting in math class, my teacher started going over the names of shapes with different number of sides.  He went through the simple ones, triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, but before I knew it we were at a nine sided figure.  He called it a nonagon, I had never heard of that before.  Everyone knows that a polygon with three sides is called a triangle, but personally, I never knew what a nine sided polygon was called off the top of my head.  Finding a polygon with nine sides isn’t as common as finding one with three sides, so it can be argued that the reason that I find it effortless to remember that a three sided polygon is a triangle is because it is so common.  But then why is it that I am able to remember that an octagon has eight sides?  Finding a polygon with eight sides is just as rare as finding one with nine sides so that makes me wonder, why am I able to remember one over the other?  I obviously don’t have more of an interest in octagons than I do in nonagons.  So what is it about certain words, such as octagons, that make them easier to remember?

I believe that a reason we remember things is because of interest, if we have an interest in something, we will easily remember it.  But, a reason aside from interest that helps in remembering things is memory aides.  From a young age we have been associating things such as octagons with things that are more common such as octopi. Octopi have eight “arms” and from an early age we have known that; its a fact that we have come to learn.  From early on we learned to associate the root ‘Octa-’, which is in octagon, as eight because of the relation to octopus.  Once we are able to relate things to topics that we already know, it makes it easier to remember the new ideas or facts.

This also works when we are learning other languages.  For example, Spanish.  Many Spanish words sound and look like the word they mean in English.  Because of the similarity of the Spanish and English words, it’s easy to associate them together.  Even if people have never spoken or even heard Spanish, there are many words that they would be able to understand if they heard or read the language for the first time.

As I said in my last post, interest plays a big part in how easily you learn something.  It’s hard to learn things when you don’t have any interest in it.  But, I also believe that memory aides and associating words or facts with more common, well-known words helps people to remember things easier.  Please let me know if you have anything to share that would help support my theory or even to disprove it.  I’m open to all ideas and I’d love to hear what you are thinking!

Learning can be thought of as such a simple thing- you learn new things every day, through teachers, through homework, through your parents, through your friends, even through strangers.  As simple as learning may seem, it really is quite complicated when you get down to thinking about how learning really happens.  Almost everyone has had the experience where they can not seem to process what they are learning one day in class no matter how much they concentrate, but later when they are talking with their friends they are able to ramble on about all the useless facts of celebrities or who is dating who.  So how does our brain “choose” what to remember, to learn?  What is it about the gossip that some are able to remember so easily?  Is it that we take more of an interest in it making it easier to stick in our heads?  Or is it that we can relate to it?  Or is it even that gossip is a lot less complicated, making it process a lot easier in our heads? I believe that it is a mixture of all of these things, but I believe that the main reason we remember the things that we do is because we take an interest in the things that we remember easiest.  Honestly, if you don’t care about the topic you are learning it is going to be A LOT harder to actually concentrate on it and really learn and understand it.  Are there other reasons that people learn and remember different things better then other people?  Does it necessarily mean that a person is smarter just because they are able to remember all the facts that they learn in every class?  No matter what the reason is, everyone learns differently and because of that I think it can be agreed that learning is a very complicated process.

So as we are reading Grendel, we are supposed to answer one of two questions and I decided to answer:

“What do the men learn about Grendel? How do they learn about him?”

When Grendel is wandering the outside world, he gets caught in a tree.  After being attacked by a bull, he falls asleep.  When he wakes up he sees a group of men.  At first the men think that Grendel is just a growth on the tree, then they begin to believe that he is a tree spirit.  When Grendel tries to tell him that he likes pig, they misunderstood him and they get worried that he is angry.  The king tries to protect everyone by having everyone attack Grendel.  The attacking of Grendel angers his mother and she comes in to save him.

From this encounter with Grendel, the men come to believe that Grendel is a horrible monster that needs to be stopped.  They only saw him as a monster and didn’t see him as someone with feelings, which he seems to be.

English class is almost over for the day and I still have so much to do for this blog.  I am a little nervous about the experience that is ahead of me but I’m very excited.  There are so many options to choose from and I have no idea where to start.  I have chosen a theme (I hope everyone likes it )  and I’m learning how to blog.  Thinking of all the different projects we can do with these netbooks excites me.  I look forward to keeping you updated on all the new experiences I will have.    I hope I get better at navigating my page along the way.  Visit my blog again soon to see what I have learned.

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