Postulating Theorems, Formulating Equations

A comment left on the previous post has me thinking about learning. How do we learn best? The comment involved learning from television, specifically sitcoms and cartoons. Is that such a bad thing?

We know that there are a number of different learning styles as well as multiple intelligences. I would imagine that there are quite a few studies out there that describe how these theories interact; however, I am too lazy to find them so I will just have to stick with pondering out loud.

I stopped and thought about where I learned the story of the tigers and the strawberry. In that case, I learned about it from my mother who learned it while studying environmental science in college while I was in elementary school. She loved the story and repeated it often, taking the strawberry as a personal symbol of contentedness. In other words, I grew up with the story. It's hard to remember not knowing it.

But what about things that were not taught to me by parents or teachers? I have an armchair fascination with philosophy. Why? Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Philosophers Song. Here were five or six men standing around singing about philosophers drinking beer. I had no idea who any of the philosophers mentioned in the song were when I first heard it. But I started looking into them. I started reading some of those philosopher's writings. Did I understand most of it? Hardly. But I kept at it and after taking a couple of college courses and reading on my own, I know a little bit about a few of them, specifically Kant who wrote quite a bit about beauty and the nature of the sublime.



I am not a Renaissance man by any stretch of the imagination. I have no interest in learning so many bits of trivia that I can out-remember someone on a quiz show. To me, the process is far more interesting than the outcome. After all, if I start exploring a subject and find it boring, is there any reason to continue? If I start a project that requires learning new information but fail, was my attempt a failure or did I at least learn something from the experience that I can take along in the future?

I guess what I'm trying to say in this giant ramble is that learning from sitcoms and cartoons isn't necessarily a bad thing if we take some time to find how the things we learn are interconnected and then explore those connections. If we do that, we'll never stop learning. In the end, I believe that if we take that idea far enough, we'll somehow arrive at Kevin Bacon.