“You went to a parochial school, didn’t you?” I’ll ask. 95% of the time they confirm it, and look at me in questioning surprise. “Your handwriting,” I say, “it’s evident in your penmanship.” From second grade on, we shall forevermore write with the rounded flowing script of the nuns.
Some things are taught and learned, some are pointed out and discovered, and most are continually changing and growing in knowledge with time. I do not have the patience and willingness to share required of a teacher. I do hold my own as a student, however, and while obedient to learning what was offered, with age have grown more selective about what is studied and retained. But it is amazing what is absorbed despite ourselves, whether lack of interest, memory or concentration, it enters into our short term memory in a classroom, then travels into the long term storage closet to settle on a shelf just in case.
What struck me today is that as dedicated as I may be to reading and writing, as much as I’ve supposedly learned and understood, while it most certainly has infiltrated my creative moments, it is almost as if I’d forgotten the lesson itself, but do it by rote. This is good, I am sure, that is, that it has affected and changed me. But must not it be frustrating as well to the professor, when the scholar performs well without consciously calling to mind what is learned, and often does not know how or why? Is it something, perhaps, like knowing without stopping to think, that the answer is “four” to the question of “how much is two plus two?”