As I write, I am beginning to see learning as based on hermeneutics. We learn the world by reading it. We learn about our self by turning in and listening. In all this, we observe and hopefully find meaning. It could be in the form of words, images, and is just as easily what is left out. T. S. Eliot reminds us of the challenges of learning language and finding meaning them in. We learn, unlearn, relearn all in cyclical fashion. We read the world and try to make new sense of it with each iteration as we move back and forth between the whole and the parts to make sense of either. It might seem all a waste, but perhaps it is not.
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years–
Twenty years largely wasted, the years l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attemp
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate–but there is no competition–
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us, there is only the trying, The rest is not our business.
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 