I remember back when I was in high school thinking I was smarter than some of my teachers. Looking back, my first reaction is, of course I wasn’t as smart as them, I was just a smartass, obnoxious teenager. Though the youth I meet these days are pretty smart, smart enough that makes me wonder just how much we actually learn between high school and the bitter end.
I think the learning becomes more granular, more precise, with finer shades of meaning using new connections in our networked brain. We learn more subtle relationships that teenagers don’t, and don’t even recognize. Sometimes it’s just learning to appreciate these subtle relationships; taking to a poem in a personal way that years ago didn’t affect me at all.