ADULT LEARNING NEVER GROWS OLD, YOU DO

Adult learning is when you say, “I was today years old when I learned _____.?

For example, just last year I manned up and asked the Coach of Coaches the question that has haunted me for decades:

How do referees know where to put the football after a player is tackled to the ground?

Sure, I could have looked it up, but I enjoyed not knowing and complaining about ball placement all season long.

Am I happier knowing? I’m happy to pass ball placement along to those who should know, but are too embarrassed to ask.

Too often people decide to retreat from new knowledge, because we’re already smart enough, right? Even the word knowledge is a challenge.

This is why it’s important to find a way to make adult learning not sound like, “You shoulda known this all along you f#cking moron. Why didn’t you ask sooner?”

Adult Learning Channel

Do you know what else comes from trees? Books. Not so much the ink, but paper for books.

Books came into play when you saw something so intriguing on television that you wanted to know more.

Those books were encyclopedias and dictionaries for the curious.

Now it’s a phone. This is where it gets complicated.

Remember the ‘paperless society?’ This is Forbes from 2014 complaining about it.

This is me complaining about it now:

If you’re watching Fox News and one of the stars gives an order, how should you respond?

Adult Learning says you don’t respond at all. Instead, you learn more about the context of the order. In this case, the context is Fox News.

Orders are funny like that. Unless it’s coming from a superior with an established authority, question any order.

Try and avoid the mistake so many made on Jan. 6 thinking they were following lawful orders to demonstrate their customs and traditions to a wider community.

Historical reminder: Any time a speaker incites rioting by telling a crowd to, “go up there and fight like hell and I’ll be right there with you,” don’t go.

What are you, soccer hooligans? I don’t think so.

If a screen presence on a TV, phone, laptop, or tablet, gives you an order and you follow it, you’re going down that Son of Sam road.

He took his orders from a barking dog, not a barking television.

Joan Didion, Adult Learning Writer Passes The Torch

This is how it’s done:

She identified as a “shy, bookish child” who pushed herself to overcome social anxiety through acting and public speaking, and was also an avid reader. She spent her adolescence typing out Ernest Hemingway’s works to learn more about how sentence structures work.

That’s writer advice right there, find your favorite and type out their work so it works drives into the brain. It’s the same thing playing a guitar.

Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies much of what New Journalism represents as it explores the cultural values and experiences of American life in the 1960s. She included her personal feelings and memories in this first-person narrative and described the chaos of individuals and the way in which they perceived the world. Rejecting conventional journalism, she created a subjective approach to essays and a style that was her own.

I get a block when I try to read her work, but I still try.

“To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed… The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind…The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture.“

And that’s it for me.

Why I Write

Writing life looks for smoking writers?

From May, 2020?

And it’s up 1000%?

That’s go time, so I wrote another ‘writer life’ post to keep readers around.

When you’ve got a usual daily average on a post of less than one click, build that audience blogger. Those are basic rules.

Why I write, and why I believe in the value of the time involved to write, comes from the reader who feels something hopeful in one of my posts.

And no, I don’t see anyone standing on the side of a bridge reading my blog before deciding to stand down.

On the other hand, if that’s you, stand down. Please.

If you’re not on Suicide Bridge, and reading my posts, keep reading.

I write for the twelve minutes in Tigard, the minute and nine seconds in Portland; I write for thirteen minutes and two seconds in Perth (good work,) the two minute and sixteen seconds in Vaughan.

I write for a reader looking out for others, and themselves.

It’s all about adult learning when you break it down.

Get vaccinated, wear a mask. Stick around for another post.

“You were today year’s old when you learned ______.”