The Process of Learning

As many of you know, I love to research things that interest me. However, I've made an important realization literally overnight--I'm, for the most part, a "surface-skimmer," when it comes to writing about complex subjects as war or politics.

Growing up in Florida, I was fortunate enough to always live in a house with a pool. Since my father worked a stressful full-time job, the task of cleaning the pool fell to me and my two brothers. And my two brothers, unfortunately, didn't like to swim as much as I did. As a young tomboy, the goal of every summer day was to be in that pool, either with my friends or alone.

And a dirty pool was no fun, so I took on the responsibility for keeping the pool clean. Now, our pool was screened in, so there wasn't really a lot of stuff to skim off the top. Maybe a few insects, a frog or two, sometimes a snake, or some pine needles that had somehow made it through the small holes in the screen.

The majority of work lay on the bottom of the pool, and was harder to clean than simply skimming the surface.

Research is like that. To get it right, you can't just "skim the surface." You have to vacuum up everything at the bottom, too.

Yesterday, when writing my post about the 442nd, I was inspired by a Ted Talk by George Takei, and a few lesson plans for teachers online. I skimmed a few other articles about Pearl Harbor and the Japanese Internment Camps.

I thought I had a pretty good handle on the subject, and I thought my first draft of the post was pretty accurate.

But now, I realize I had only "skimmed the surface," of something much more intricately complicated than I had imagined.

I had gathered information from limited points of view. I thought I'd done good research by looking at both sides of the proverbial coin. I had considered how both a Japanese American child and an Anglo-Saxon American child would describe the events around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack and the beginning of WWII.

But I didn't fully research the general mood of the American people at the time, or the demographics of the population, or the economy, or taken into consideration that the America of 1941-42 is much different than the America we live in today.

What I failed to realize, was that subjects as complex as war, are not your typical "coins," with just two sides. In reality, those kinds of subjects are more like a die from Dungeons and Dragons.

There are many viewpoints beyond how the children felt, and many complexities that can't be accurately portrayed by just "skimming the surface." I'm not even sure I could do the subject proper justice, because it happened long before my time. To portray the events accurately, I realized I would have at least needed to interview people who lived through it, and not just a few, but many different people from all walks of life, from all races, from all demographics.

The message I was trying to convey was a simple one--that we should not judge anyone based on outward appearances, and that prejudice is a still a very real problem today. I wanted to convey that everyone is a unique mind, and the color of their skin or the country they come from shouldn't cause them to be lumped into an often inaccurate stereotype.

I thought about taking down my post from yesterday, but I'm going to leave it up, as an incentive to me to dig deeper in my research, to consider every point of view, to dig up the information sitting on the bottom, and not just "skim the surface."