if you are mining and don't know what is happening when you mine. then you did not learn something thats right.
and yours answers to my questions show me that you can learn something while mining.
mining is more than just downloading a client and type e.g. ./minerd -a cryptonight -o stratum+tcp:// in terminal.
Then tell me what is there to be learned by mining as a process specifically? The only thing that I can think of is tuning the settings, which is research and trial-and-error based on your hardware. I'm not arguing that there isn't anything to learn - I just want to understand what there is, since I cannot think of anything myself and I couldn't find a definitive answer as of yet.