The Learning Process You can learn from painful experiences and end up seeing life differently. Learning is a process of acquiring knowledge through experiences. In the learning process pain is often necessary when it helps people build strong personalities. In “Discovery,” Liann Sumner realizes she takes everything in her surroundings for granted without realizing how effective they are until she visits her home country of India. Sometimes you have to be in a painful situation to learn the lesson. Dick Gregory in "Shame" didn't know the meaning of the word shame until the classroom incident where a teacher humiliated him in front of his classmates. Many learn by experiencing pain while others learn by seeing someone's sadness. In “I Ask My Mother to Sing,” Li-Young Lee feels pain in her heart when she hears her mother and grandmother singing and longing for their home country. As you can see, pain can only be the necessary ingredient in the learning process if it contributes to your success. Many can learn to be grateful for small things through the experience of discomfort. One way to teach a valuable lesson is to remove things that are around us and whose presence we don't even appreciate such as air, waste and public works. Without air the creatures cannot survive even for five minutes. Air is free and essential to the life of creatures, but most of the time we are not grateful for it. When tourists travel to underdeveloped countries where public services such as traffic lights and crosswalks are not provided as conveniently as in the United States, they realize how useful they are and how much they also secure their lives. Sumner was shocked as she was leaving on a trip from the United States to India to see that there is no patte... middle of paper... important in teaching us new truths about ourselves and allowing us to see our world in a different way. When things that are around and whose presence we don't even appreciate, like air, water and traffic signs, are not provided to comfort our lives, that's when we realize the importance of those. Another time to learn a lesson can be when you see the pain of others. Some people are motivated to try to understand topics that don't concern them by experiencing someone's pain. Many people often don't realize what shame is until they endure it through humiliation. Suffering in the learning process can make us mature. Bibliography: Divakaruni, Chitra B. Multitude: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers 2nd Edition 1997 Gregory, Dick. "Shame." Chitra 255-59Lee, Li-Young. "I ask my mother to sing." Chitra 279-80Sumner, Lilian. "Discovery." Chitra 281-84