Wellness Calendar: Tuesday 21 October

Bad learning experiences

It might be obvious to say that whenever we turn our mind to the art of learning, we’re using whatever learning skills we’ve picked up along the way. Some of these skills will be perfect for helping us do some good work on our wellness, while others won’t be helpful at all.

If we’ve learned to be passive when it comes to knowledge, to merely soak up what someone is saying, then the opportunities for us to expand our world will be limited. Similarly, if we’ve had a bad experience of schooling, we might even resent the whole idea of learning in the first place. Moreover, if we struggle with any learning impediments, we might be embarrassed and recoil from participation.

Thankfully there are lots of things we can do to overcome such hurdles. If we have access to the internet, we can explore pretty much any subject we want to, when we want to. We can follow our noses and see what areas interest us. We can please ourselves with our learning, rather than our teachers or our parents; we can rest assured that we won’t be judged, measured or evaluated.

We can enter into supportive learning environments, where there’s an emphasis on creating a safe place to learn. In these spaces we can look to overcome some of the obstructions to learning, be it learning to read, write or something else.

Finally, if we take the time to drill down into the nuts and bolts of what made our bad experiences so bad, we might be able to either heal this raw area or work around it.

Let’s leave the last word to Gemma:

“My art teacher killed my passion stone-dead when he humiliated my work in front of the whole class. I was eleven years old. Me and art separated company on that day. I made sure to keep it at arm’s length for the next thirty years. But then I arrived in a new city and made a brand-new friend at work. She was so youthful and up for all sorts of activities, booking us both onto evening classes that we’d never done before. I was swept up by her enthusiasm. Together we did pottery for the sheer fun of it, jewellery, and then life-drawing. By which time I realised that I had fallen back in love with art.”

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