I don’t know why, but throwing away/selling/giving away stuff always gets my creative writing juices flowing. This is another of those “look, I’m getting rid of X” posts.
This time, I cleared out the cupboard in my apartment in Nea Smyrni with all the books, notes and folders full of handouts I’ve kept from all the years I’d been learning English, German and Spanish. I also threw away a few notebooks full of advanced calculus exercises (or what felt like it) and cringy writeouts (were they called “expositions?” It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten what they’re called in English) that tried to sound impressive full of expressions like “it has to be said”, “society nowadays”, and “to sum up”, or their Greek equivalents.
That’s from when I was preparing for my final exams 15 years ago. You can hear how that went on our recent Easy Greek podcast, provided you can understand spoken Modern Greek.
What hit me hard enough to make me think all this warranted its own little post was the realization that all these handouts, books, notes etc. were once given to me in hopes I would learn their contents well enough to pass some exam. Today I just went through them, eyes glazed over, wondering what happened. What makes it worse is that I’ve passed every single one of those said exams. But who did? Was it me? Because right now I have no idea what these phrasal verbs in Spanish mean, or the correct forms of German nominalizations are, and those long tables of vocabulary and exhaustive lists of grammatical phenomena give me bouts of impostor syndrome. What’s happened to all this knowledge that used to be inside of me? And should I feel like a phony for claiming today that I have a C1 in German or a B2 in Spanish? Did I ever really know the tables and the lists?
And I won’t even go into the environmental cost of all this wasted paper!
Me now, throwing all this away, there’s a small voice inside of me saying: “what if you want to refresh your Spanish or German in the future? You have everything you need packed within these folders. You once spent untold hours filling in these lines, taking down notes, doing exercises, dotting i’s, crossing t’s. These hundreds of sheets of paper were once lovingly handed out to you by a teacher that cared about you, even your own mother. Throwing everything away will be shooting your future self in the foot.”
Sitting down with myself and trying to analyze my learning style and all those years spent in classrooms, I realize that even back when I was actively learning these languages, I was hardly taking the time to carefully study the handouts or learn from my mistakes. Revision is like my Achilles’ heel. It also happens to be the mother of all learning, according to the ancient Greek saying at least. Too bad modern science once again agrees with the ancients and asserts that learning something once and then forgetting about it, in time leads to just that: oblivion.
I have an unhealthy relationship with remembering and forgetting. As a teen, I would obsessively take snapshots of everything, afraid that if I didn’t, those memories would fade away. Thank God camera phones, let alone smartphones, didn’t exist back then. What I ended up with, however, are thousands of pictures of events, meetings or acquaintances I don’t really care about anymore, if I ever did, and gaping memory holes of everything I never took a picture of. Did something even happen in your life if you don’t have a picture of it?
Of course, the memories I do care about today have been strengthened somewhat by me being mindful enough at the time to grab a photo – or 100. But you rarely have the foresight to know beforehand whether a memory will prove to be precious or look quaint, irrelevant or embarrassing 15 years in the future. To make matters more complicated, sometimes the memory is precious but the photos are embarrassing. Or the other way around.
Back to repetition. I guess it’s quite popular for people to expect photography and other digital media to do the heavy lifting for them instead of doing the hard work training their brains through repetition in order to remember things. I guess I’m one of those people, but not through choice, but through weakness of character. Sure, photos of life experiences and the act of revision for learning something concrete are quite distinct things, but I’m comparing the attitudes here:
What if instead of obsessively taking pictures I tried to obsessively revise the things I never wanted to forget?
Until I learn how to properly learn, holding on to the tools themselves won’t make a difference. And along the way – I should say, even more importantly – I hope I learn how to remain dignified in forgetting, as well.
