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A Story About Humans and the Learning Paradox

Taking a long and heavy sigh he pours his Starbucks Signature Series coffee into his mug. The coffee felt surprisingly warm in his hands, for the machine was one of those rip off bistro style that one would find in a room at The Golden Nugget (after five years one would only find them in a trash can).

Unhampered he continues to sip and warm his hands while looking out onto the beautiful Pacific coast. As the weatherman strolls on over to his weather tracker then back at his own statistical analysis he almost sprays the overpriced coffee on his work.

He checks his own calculations twice over then back at the weather tracker. Odd, he says to himself, I swear that I picked up a south easterly with bright blue skies when I checked the weather tracker just two hours ago.

Dumbfounded, he takes the new weather tracker data, and with his own calculations finds out there will be A) a snow storm B) coming in from the north west rather than the south east. He knew weather patterns were most changeable but he has never encountered anything as erratic as this.

Could it be some kind of phenomenon that happens only once a century? As he skims though his almanac he sees nothing of the kind. At this point he is a bit suspicious, yet still in disbelief.

His coffee finally comes to a rest on his M.I.T. coaster so he can work not with one but with two hands, a task that he hasn't had to do in many a week. Finally, after all options have been exhausted including telephone calls he realized that he had learned something new. He stayed up all night working on what he had discovered and what he liked to call the Weatherman Theory.

A certain significance and weight dropped upon his shoulders. Something new has occurred. This knowledge, he thought, is one that needs to be spread unto people who can learn it and benefit from it. It was indeed his job to explain to others.

Refilling his coffee mug at three in the morning allowed him to see this and become humble to it for he realized that he too was a student learning from a teacher he called Earth.

The importance of this story was not in the discovery of his meteorological finding but in the fact that he did not know everything and became humbled by his knowledge. He might have gone to the prestigious M.I.T. Weather School and lives with his idea of "class" but still learns new ideas.

Like him we are all learners and teachers whether it be by job description or not. We are constantly picking up new ideas, beliefs, etc. as the days roll by. The classroom is one place where newness is brought to the table but a lot more learning and teaching goes on just by living a day in the life.

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