Gel Pen Learning

Without really realizing it, we’ve normalized the expectation that we should know everything before we begin.

Before we read a book, we want to know what it’s about. We want the spoilers (to an extent), the trigger warnings, the questionable content we may encounter. We want to know if we are represented by the main character, what they suffer, and what their suffering means to us before we even open the first page.

We do this with almost everything now. We preview. We pre-decide. We pre-interpret.

And in the process, we’ve lost something important.

Modern life has made information instantly accessible. We don’t have to search for answers, hunt for context, or sit with uncertainty. Everything is labeled, summarized, and explained in advance. Even meaning is handed to us instead of discovered.

But learning has never worked that way.

Learning requires entering the unknown. It requires curiosity without guarantees. It requires the willingness to not fully understand what you’re getting into, and to stay anyway.

When everything is pre-explained, there’s no room left for wonder. And when you’re no longer searching for meaning, you’re no longer learning either.

What Entering the Unknown Actually Looks Like

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I was today years old (42) the first time I read Crime and Punishment.

I didn’t grow up reading Russian literature. I grew up in Missouri. I was required to read Mark Twain. Big books always felt intimidating, not because I can’t read them, but because they’re a commitment. And in a world of responsibilities and faster dopamine hits, it’s easy to ask: why would I sit and suffer through college-level required reading?

So when I finally picked it up, I didn’t read the back because I was buddy reading with my 8th grader who picked this book up on her own for school. I didn’t know the themes. I didn’t check the summaries. I knew nothing going in.

And that’s exactly why I’m enjoying it so much.

Meeting Raskolnikov without context, noticing his arrogance, his smirks at the wrong moments, and the way he sees himself, have been genuinely engaging. I didn’t know what kind of character he was. I didn’t know where the story was going. I wasn’t reading toward a conclusion I already understood.

I was discovering it.

Honestly, the fact that I managed to reach my forties without having Crime and Punishment spoiled for me probably says something about modern life. We’re surrounded by information, but rarely encounter anything without a filter anymore.

How This Shows Up in Homeschooling

I hear versions of the same problem from my kids all the time.

“I’m bad at this.”

“Well,” I usually tell them, “yes, because you don’t know what you’re doing yet.”

That’s not an insult. That’s the point.

One of my biggest objections to overemphasizing grades, especially in homeschooling, is that they often claim to measure something they aren’t actually measuring. When you learn something new, of course you’re not good at it. If you already knew it, you wouldn’t be learning it. You’d be mastering it.

Learning, by definition, starts with not knowing.

Grades can be useful for assessing mastery, but they’re often misused to communicate something else entirely: early struggle is failure, rather than a necessary part of the process. Even homeschoolers fall into the trap. We forget that the whole purpose of learning is to identify gaps and then fill them.

You don’t enter a subject to perform well.

You enter it to understand what you don’t know yet.

Why This Matters

When we expect certainty before we begin, we rob learning of its function. We teach kids, and ourselves, that discomfort means something is wrong, instead of recognizing it as evidence that learning is actually happening.

Entering the unknown isn’t a flaw in the process. It is the process.

And if we want curious, resilient learners (not just compliant ones), we have to stop treating not knowing as a problem to be avoided.

Let’s Chat

You probably have thoughts, and I would love to hear them! Let me know what you’re thinking in the comments below!