#and at other points in my life i would've been either bored stiff by this experience or terrified because Science Is Hard | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

whentherewerebicycles · 1 year

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i really and truly believe that there are only two genuine human superpowers, both of which can be actively cultivated:

the ability to find anything interesting, ie the ability to reframe and reflect on any situation or encounter, even/especially negative or boring ones, so as to make what is happening to you interesting, engaging, and personally meaningful to your human experience. this habit of mind is mostly curiosity but it's also woven through with psychological flexibility, especially the ability to regulate your own emotional reactions so that you can respond to challenging or tedious situations in more thoughtful and values-aligned ways that develop your sense of self instead of making you feel trapped or bored or fragmented

the ability to teach yourself new things. idk maybe as a teacher i am biased but i really believe that the single most transformative gift you can give any human being is a deep understanding of how people learn and improve at things. what is more hopeful, more inspiring, or more life-affirming than the realization that you can learn new things at any age, and that the new things you learn (plus the joyful process of learning itself!) can utterly transform the way you experience the world and understand yourself? what is more amazing or incredible than the realization that learning things is not a mysterious & passive process that happens to you but a reasonably consistent set of steps and tools that you can learn how to master and apply to virtually any skill or domain of human knowledge? the superpower of being able to learn/improve at anything you set your mind to… but also the superpower inherent in that quiet unwavering certainty that even if you feel stuck at various points in your life, you have within yourself the capacity to get unstuck through learning and changing and growing and experiencing new things. wowowowowowowow!!!!! what an extraordinary gift!!!!

#i did a classroom observation this week #in a mid-level environmental science research methods course #and at other points in my life i would've been either bored stiff by this experience or terrified because Science Is Hard #and I Am Humanities Person Cannot Do Science #but i actually found myself getting really fascinated by some of the stuff they were doing #i think combined with all the scientific studies i've been reading over the past six months related to fertility stuff #and i was like oh wait like #i could see myself going back and doing a bachelor's degree in a science field #like yeah this is unfamiliar to me & i have a lot of baggage around being Bad at STEM #but actually through doing lots of work with researchers & learning how research works in my own field #i think i've absorbed an understanding of some of the habits of mind science values #and i feel confident enough in my understanding of how people learn new things #that i bet i could apply that knowledge to learning disciplines that previously seemed Off Limits to me #anyway idk just #what a joy it is to be a thinking learning human in the world #how lucky are we!!!!!

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