Stuart Watkinson

Teaching myself to be a student again

For the last 10 years, I've been learning to be a teacher. I've been learning content to teach it. Learning skills to assess, evaluate, and guide young people in their learning. I have taught classes that focused on academic stretch where the intent was to help our most accomplished students find challenge. I've also taught teenagers with almost zero literacy skills where we analysed the basics of reading and writing. My most favourite things to teach have been ancient and modern history, geography, and media studies. Media Studies was an actual dream. Where I felt like my work was not working at all. Where I just got to nerd out about film making, computer games, internet culture, and news media.

I've had a strange feeling building in the back of mind lately. A hollowness. A feeling that I am always the content. I am always outputting information and not bringing in the things I want to learn. The craving that I had as a university student is still there and it is starved.

I feel it is time to turn my teaching practice towards myself.

A long time ago I read How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett. There was a lot in there that really only connected to single men, with no children, and plenty of time and money... However, there were a few excellent nuggets that I took away.

  1. There are only 24 hours a day, but there is a fresh set of 24 when I wake up again.
  2. Applying oneself to an exploration of learning in the evenings can have enormous benefits to life.
  3. My attention is important and I should be careful where I put it.
  4. Living without intent is not living.

There is just so much to consume now. Every week there is another 10 episode TV show that looks incredible. There are video games with 100s of hours of content. There are books, my god the books I want to read. YouTube and its endlessness. And of course, the void of social media. All of which compete for my attention, our attention, all of our attention, aggressively. It is so easy to sit down at the end of the day and let yourself be drawn into the abyss of content.

I actually think it's good to do this sometimes. I love getting lost in YouTube and think it's an amazing source of information and ideas. Social media less so, although for a while I found it an excellent source of humour, though more recently it's been too over run with grifters. Video games have taken a sad turn in my life recently. I've lost all interest. Something that was so pivotal for me no long gives any sense of enjoyment. I'm hoping that I'll get the urge to play something again, but I am OK with one less thing drawing me in for now.

However, I am taking a little more control of my time to read, write, and learn something new. There's a bunch of stuff I've been interested in learning over the years, but haven't given them the time they need. They're things I want to research for projects I have in mind for the future. Some of these topics include, but are not limited to:

I imagine that some of the post here will be in relation to these topics over the coming months.

Or they won't.

And I'll just start selling online courses.

Long days and pleasant nights.