On Relearning

As part of my summer prep for grad school, I took it upon myself (at the recommendation of my program) to do some catch-up on my college math. I struggled immensely with math in undergrad. I retook Calc III after getting a D, and just barely squeaked by in linear algebra. I love math, but at the breakneck pace it was presented to me in school I feel like I barely managed to soak any of it in. After graduating, the skillsets I felt like I had developed seemingly evaporated overnight. Concepts like an integral or a linear transformation seemed abstract and strange to me the first time I was taught them, and over the course of my semesters they solidified into ideas I felt like I could understand in a tangible way. Then they fell away, to the backrooms of my memory where I figured the clerical workers who ran my mind would eventually chuck them away for good after a mandated waiting period.

But learning feels different the second time you do it. No matter how long something goes by, no matter how overgrown with brain-matter-ivory a concept may seem, the synapses might still be there. Perhaps tangled up, or covered in debris, but not ephemeral. Relearning an idea feels like realizing something obvious, or even mundane.

This can easily become a source of frustration, especially when the realization seems so obvious. Why does taking a month off from a language seemingly lose me my embedded syntactical skills, and why am I forced to feel stupid when I inevitably give up the game to go find the answer in someone else’s documentation? Why can I never remember the makeup of an acronym which I’ve referenced in emails a half a dozen times this year? Why do I still feel like I can’t write Python, even though it was my first programming language and I started writing code more than 12 years ago?

It’s easy to get caught up in the feedback loop, and shame craves emittance from an internal frustration. But there’s reasons why all of the above are really the case. I don’t remember that acronym because I’ve internalized the meaning into something else that makes sense to me, leaving the original definition to fade into oblivion. I feel like I still don’t know Python because I’ve never actually written Python code in production as part of my career, so my only exposure has been brief personal projects or small scripts (that I struggle to write every time). The sad, makes-you-think-you’re-dumb truth to it is is that anything you’re not constantly hammering into your head has no real reason to stick around.

I try and find comfort in knowing that there’s probably very little I truly know anything at all about in a given moment. The fun part comes from rediscovering the things I’ve already learned, whenever I want, with an ease that never came the first time. It can be meaningful to turn a “Huh?” into a “Duh.”