By ZACHARY BAYLESS
Sheridan High School Student
Editor’s Note: The Sheridan Student Column is brought to readers by Sheridan High School’s 10th grade English class, taught by Abby Williams.
When we were young children, we rarely asked ourselves questions such as, “Why am I not able to understand what others understand quite easily?” When we were so young that reading and talking were difficult, we didn’t realize that we were learning at a tremendous rate, nor looking back can we acknowledge what it was like not to be able to read or speak.
When you sit down and examine the books which you are currently reading compared to the simplicity of books you may have read in say, elementary school, you may question why you failed to comprehend the simplicity behind those books and might question why you could not then comprehend books at your current level.
When you think about the conversations you overheard from your parents, you might realize that you cannot recall exactly what they were talking about at the time. How is it that as an adult these concepts seem like basic knowledge but are absolutely incomprehensible to a child?
When I sit and recall reading as a child, I remember the first book that truly made sense to me. At the age of five, the first ever book I could even read was this book on ABCs and memorizing the alphabet. When I dwell on the difficulty of reading such a simple book at the time, I ask myself, “How could I be so stupid as to not be able to read something so easy?” Yet no matter how much I think about it, the fact still remains that it took me about 15 minutes to figure out that C is for cat. Now I read actual books and can comprehend quite well that Z is indeed for zebra, so why was it that 10 years ago that was something that brought me so much strife?
Often when I look back to when I was really young, it seems like I go from not being able to understand some simple things at all to them becoming basic knowledge.
I believe that one of a child’s greatest abilities is the ability to rapidly assimilate knowledge at an extraordinary pace. This ability, which makes us learn so rapidly, is probably why it is so weird to look back to when we were children and notice how things that didn’t really make sense at the time, like counting and reading, seem so easy and are considered basic knowledge to us a short while later in life. We overlook how difficult these concepts are to learn at the time and thus don’t understand how they did not make sense in the first place.
When I attempt to memorize things now or learn something new that can prove to be difficult (such as another language), I find that it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort and can have diminishing returns if I don’t constantly go over the material that I am trying to learn.
Yet, when a young child is often in contact with foreign languages, due to factors such as the cultural areas in which they grew up or because of their parents, then they are able to pick up that language, often without trying. Due to this ability, children are able to learn and grow at a rapid pace so that they can be prepared for the future and are able to adapt to their surroundings when they are older.
So when I truly sit back and ask myself, “How is it that as an adult these concepts seem like basic knowledge but are absolutely incomprehensible to a child?” I find that the answer lies within a lack of understanding of the difficulty of the concepts that the child is still trying to grasp and understand. When you are a child, you learn quickly things that would be difficult for adults to learn and it can undermine the difficulty of the things you are learning and the rate at which you are able to absorb the knowledge.
The things that we do not know as a child are only unknown to us because we have yet to learn them. Our ability to adapt and understand complex concepts such as reading and writing is due solely to the fact that we were able to learn them so quickly as a child.
When we look back at our youth, we should not be surprised at what we didn’t know, but amazed at the things we knew at the time.