The Potters of the Unknown
Sensations and memories are sometimes unexpected and welcome guests, like the taste of a dish that brings back the shiver on your skin from contact with the sea water, or a song that escapes from a random window in the middle of the night and takes you back to a beloved place. These days, because just started the courses of the Associate’s degree in Artificial Intelligence (UFRN) with Supervised Machine Learning. I’ve returned to the Python programming language. Well, the first time I wrote something in this language was a years ago, back when I was just starting to learn how to program. So, these past few days, I’ve been working on small programs like someone trying to draw with a pen long forgotten at the bottom of a drawer. I’ve gone back to the path of the apprentice.
Between tests and searches for the exercises, I remembered how everything seemed hazy back then. Today, even though I don’t master the language, I have a more solid foundation and can grasp the basics of what to do in each situation. Before, as is typical of someone just starting out, the challenge was often not just making something work, but understanding why it worked or didn’t. Between one line of code and the next, I’d risk a new option and get a red error on the screen. Then I’d ask more experienced friends or search online for a solution and adapt the varied answers to what I intended to do. Key concepts for understanding the context and how everything worked were still forming, so every step was uncertain.
Learning is the challenge of shaping the unknown, like a potter making a jar from clay. Depending on your age, you might be thinking of that classic scene from the movie Ghost (1990) with the couple making a crooked clay pot together, but I’m serious. Learning isn’t simply accumulating theoretical and practical knowledge in a shopping bag; it’s refining the technique through which we organize and use what we know. And it’s certain that there’s no stopping point in this art of learning; there’s always something new to discover and test. Not to stray from the topic, it’s worth remembering an anecdote about Pablo Picasso. When he was older, he visited potters in the small French town of Vallauris. The painter was so captivated by the clay, the potter’s wheel, and the colors on the ceramics that he lived in the town for seven years and produced thousands of pieces over twenty years. In two decades, his hands as a painter and draftsman gained the strength and skill of refined potters who pull forms from clay that previously only existed in the world of ideas. For that to happen, of course, there was an uncountable number of vases, plates, sculptures, and other pieces that his hands distorted, clumps of clay that were ruined as he learned or invented new forms.
Among the first courses I took, Python for Zombies by the competent and good-humored professor Fernando Masanori caught my attention. The focus is on introducing new people to the world of programming, which was exactly what I was looking for at the time. Throughout the videos, in various situations of a screen error after a command, he’d let out one of his mantras: “I am happy; I will learn more.” Beyond the discontent we all feel when we make a mistake, Masanori points out that getting it wrong gives us the opportunity to expand our knowledge. His perspective is that of someone who knows what learning is all about, of someone who seeks to understand the mistake to get around it, refining their technique and adjusting their course. The joy with which he says this might sound naive and unrealistic at first. At the time, I myself looked at the screen and weighed my situation: thirty years old, eleven years studying History, just a few months away from becoming a father, over 300 students’ exams to correct, and this guy tells me to be happy for making a mistake. Honestly, I must have thought a bad word and maybe moved the mouse pointer to close the window. But something there captured me; the page stayed open.
Months passed, I finished that introductory course, then another, and I kept changing technologies as I was introduced to them. I continued to share what I was learning with people close to me, also on social media and in blog posts. One of my friends, Brenno, asked me at some point what it was like to explore something totally outside of what I knew. I don’t know exactly what words I said at the time, but the feeling was a mix of satisfaction and curiosity that we get with new discoveries. With several years of teaching and various degrees stored in a folder, I was once again experiencing the joy of not knowing, of being able to make mistakes freely and gradually discovering the world. Of being hit by the comprehension of a concept while taking a shower, of waking up early to work on a solution to problem X at my fingertips, of discovering something and commenting to myself: “Wow, that was there the whole time.” Going back to the Python exercises reminded me of the happiness of the apprentice that I experienced a few years before, that the sparkle in our eyes from discoveries is not just a right for children and teenagers, but for all those willing to learn.
Image: “Free person making handmade pottery”. Open Verse, Creative Commons 1.0