Real knowledge

Anya is very interested in the natural sciences, whether it's insects or fish, planets or kitchen chemistry. I find that I'm learning quite a lot, myself. What's more intriguing is that the new knowledge is completely different than the old schooly, memorized knowledge.

I knew what larvae were, and about larvae forming coccoons and turning into winged insects. But I've still been staring at these white cottony patches at the corners of our back porch and thinking "Damn those spiders." A few days ago it finally dawned on me that they were coccoons, thus the problem was some sort of insect. It finally dawned on me, because I finally paid attention, I finally got a real grasp of insects vs. spiders vs. other bugs. Probably that's because Anya and I haven't used any textbooks, we've only looked things up online as the questions occurred to us, in our own order, on our own schedule, using our own mental map for understanding this new information.

I have been able to recite "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter...." for years. But I never realized that the planets consist of four small rocks near the sun, four enormous gas giants farther out, and one or two anomalous planetoid objects which may or may not, in fact, actually turn out to be planets. Or that the little rocks aren't likely to have many moons (a combined total of 3, in fact) because they don't have much gravity and they're so close to the sun that most small objects will "miss" the orbit window and fly right into the star. Gas giants, on the other hand, are farther away from the sun's pull and have more gravity due to their mass, so they, of course, have dozens of moons. This just makes sense to me now, it's not a matter of cramming the information into my brain to be regurgitated on a test.

Or, to take another example: Insects are a lot smarter than other bugs. You might read in a science book that insects are highly evolved, but when you've been examining ladybugs for weeks and you come across a pill-bug, that pill-bug strikes you as so dumb you can hardly believe it's living. The difference in intelligence between insects and creepy-crawlies strikes me as huge, probably analogous to the difference between mammals and fish. Furthermore, some ladybugs are a lot smarter than other ladybugs. And yes, I'm "anthropomorphizing" to some extent, but some ladybugs have a whole range of behaviors and others species sit like lumps on their chunk of orange and do little else. Unfortunately, the invasive species (7-spotted and Southern) are much smarter than native species, which does not bode well for the native ladybugs.

I've learned these things like I've learned cooking, or how to change a light fixture, or how to get stains out of clothes. If you have to strain your brain and use mnemonic devices and onerous repetition to remember something, maybe you're being asked to learn in an unnatural way. Is it more important to know whether Jupiter or Saturn is closer to the sun? How does that inform daily life? On the other hand, if you have a sense of four little rocks and four giant, moon-encircled balls of gas, well, at least that's an image. At least, when you're gazing at a night sky, it gives you some sense of the solar system.

The more time goes on, the less I feel like I truly learned in school.