What are you here to learn?
When you do your own writing,
You learn who you are
And what you stand for
And what you stand against
And what you love
And what you makes you feel alive.
When you have someone or something write for you,
You learn to lie.
You learn to cheat.
And you lose all its benefits.
(See above.)
When you do your own reading,
You drink in ideas, experiences, characters, stories.
You feel them down to the roots of your hair,
And in the goosebumps you get
When the words are magic.
You inhale the sounds and
Patterns and
Qualities of great writing
To emulate in your own writing.
You are molded as a person by what you read
By what moves you
And by what you refuse to be moved by.
Reading gives you life experiences
That can’t be had in real life
And life lessons without the pain
Of living them.
Reading deepens you,
Teaches you how to be a better human.
But when you only pretend to read,
When you read the summaries
And jot down pretend-notes,
All you learn is to cheat.
You lose all the benefits of reading.
(See above.)
I listen as you sit discussing
What you were supposed to have read
And wonder how much of your talk is real
And how much of it is just so much
Excrement.
You go through the motions
But none of it means anything.
All you are learning is how to fling B.S.
Back and forth.
When you view learning as transactional,
You turn in counterfeit product
To get a grade
To get a credential someday
To get on to the next thing,
It may seem like a bargain
To get something for nothing.
All the result, none of the effort.
But in the end,
You get a hollow reward.
You become, by counterfeiting,
A counterfeit person.
A fraud.
A liar.
A cheat.
A surface person.
All show, no substance.
A Sedgewick Bell.
Education has made it all transactional
When maybe it should be transformational.
It isn’t really supposed to be about
Points and grades and GPAs.
Learning isn’t just ticking off the boxes.
Learning should deepen you,
Take you outside your comfort zone,
Make you more human.
More yourself.
Anyone can cheat.
Only you can write your words.
Only you can meet an author
On the pages
And have an interaction
Between just you two.
No one else can do it.
If you don’t do it,
No one else in the entire universe
Can have that interaction.
It will never exist.
When you cheat,
When you cynically think it doesn’t matter,
You are murdering the learning
That might have transformed you
And the person you might have become
Will never exist.