Confusion
There are many ways to learn. Probably the worst way would be to sit and endure somebody trying to fill your head with facts and concepts you struggle to feel are relevant. As a Maths Teacher, I understood that all too well. As a Geography student, a couple of decades too young to appreciate the subject, ditto.
As a word, ‘confuse’ comes from the same place as ‘confound,’ which has to do with mixing things up into indistinguishable bits so you couldn’t tell them apart. Sort of like ‘scramble.’
As a state of mind, it means much the same with your brain (metaphorically), your thoughts and your perception.
There can be a couple of responses to a confused state of mind:
- We could remain in that state and go on in blissful ignorance, agitation or some other non-productive condition.
- We could employ our intellect and set about unscrambling or un-confounding things, untangling the mental threads, laying out the mental Scrabble tiles into intelligible words, untying the mental knots, whatever it takes to gain order from chaos.
The latter endeavour turns our confusion into a puzzle to be solved, and who doesn’t enjoy a good puzzle?
Furthermore, the joy and relief of solving your own puzzle is so much more rewarding than being told the solution or reading it at the back of the book. The answer is more likely to stay with you, because it’s your answer.
Embrace your confusion, then de-confuse. Even a failed attempt will teach you more than passively taking what is fed to you, because you have idea of what might not be the solution.