What I Didn’t Know I Learned — But Should Have Learned Better

I work in the K-12 education market, and I spend a lot of my time speaking to educators, listening to their stories, and reading their content. Having the opportunity to see instruction from this vantage point, I’m in awe of the work, thought, and intentionality that feeds the making of one’s education. The amount of planning, from highly strategic levels translated to daily lesson plans designed alongside prescriptive requirements and innovative pedagogy, has made me realize that an education is a wondrously complex thing. And I’m grateful for mine, more and more every day.

My professional experience prompts me to look introspectively and consider the ways in which my education brought me to this point. What made me ready?

As someone who studied Arabic and International Development Studies, I’ve taken some really strange turns to become an education marketer. While I’m not speaking Arabic at my job or producing briefs on North African political development, I can’t help but feel that my education still equipped me to launch my career.

Now, learning from educators and seeing education from a new vantage point, I’m starting to understand how my learning experience was less about the content but the underlying skills I had unknowingly developed as a student and that I now understand are critical to my professional life.

Here are three things I didn’t know I learned but wish I would have learned better.

1. The Ability to Solve Problems I Don’t Yet Understand

Like most students, I was faced with big and challenging problems I didn’t know how to answer right away; and I now realize that was their purpose. Rather than a test to regurgitate facts and formulas, these assignments were a call to grapple with ambiguity, build strategies to decompose and assess problems’ intricacies, and develop answers that were not necessarily right or wrong but effective, judicious, and creative.

If I had understood this, I would have honored the problems and embraced the complexity. But the challenge is that education so often takes the position of right-wrong or yes-no. As a student, I cared more about the accuracy of an answer, not the process by which I arrived at it. And I didn’t know to accept an inaccurate answer if it meant learning how to improve and iterate on the problem-solving process.

2. To Communicate Succinctly and Intentionally

Especially in liberal arts, so much of my learning experience involved communicating research and perspectives. I had to digest mass amounts of reading and then contrast and synthesize their information into well-composed papers.

While I still employ these research skills today, my style of writing and how I communicate information has changed. I can’t deliver 30-page papers for projects — nobody has time to read that, not even me.

Instead, I’ve had to learn how to share my answer, insight, takeaway, or recommendation without loads of extraneous details justifying it, defending it, or cushioning it to reach a word count.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to make informed points, but I had to develop confidence in my concision, whether in a presentation or message.

To practice this, I’ve found myself surprisingly drawing on my experience of learning another language to hone my communication skills. Especially when I lived abroad, I had to speak and write with brevity and intentionality because I often lacked all the necessary words in my limited vocabulary to be evocative and expressive (or wordy and long-winded). This cemented the importance of simplicity when grappling with how to say what I needed to say.

Now, I’m learning to apply these lessons in my own language, but it is something I wish I would have recognized earlier: to marry research and analysis with linguistic limitations or to offer clarity in conjunction with brevity.

3. To Learn for the Sake of Learning

Taking the plunge into the workforce felt a lot like drinking from multiple fire hoses. Suddenly a GPA that had defined me since I was a child didn’t matter, there wasn’t a syllabus telling me what to do and expect, and success was undefined and far more ambiguous.

While things have calmed down, arriving here was a process of realizing that I’m not done learning and never will be.

I am consistently faced with opportunities and expectations to acquire new skills and knowledge. But what makes this learning different is that it is often self-prompted, self-guided, and self-assessed — oh, and also done while holding down a full-time job plus all the other adulting things. It’s a lot of pressure, but it also pushes expediency and quality.

While I can draw on my education experience balancing multiple classes and developing research and study skills and the ability to think critically and problem solve, I did so under the guidance of a curriculum and an instructor who accompanied me along a path to understanding.

Succeeding in this current environment comes down to learning how to learn and being able to teach myself through it. And that is what brings me back to my work in education in which I’ve been afforded the opportunity to study approaches to pedagogy and learning science. This sort of instructional design and strategy is something I think is so critical for our professional success.

If we taught students how to learn, to build learning experiences, and to track their growth, they would be better positioned to operate in a fast-paced work environment, set career goals, and implement a framework to achieve them. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to truly put this into practice, but it’s changing the way I think about my career, conceptualize success and growth, and pursue a greater depth of skills.

From my vantage point now, I’m entirely reconstructing how I think about education and make sense of my education more specifically.

By the time I graduated, I desperately wanted a change of pace. I loathed assigned readings, scrupulous notetaking, and final papers, but I also excessively stressed about them in the face of a GPA that I thought defined me and therefore meticulously maintained. If I had been able to see education from a different perspective then, I wonder how I would have felt.