Having experienced both the teacher and the student roles in the traditional classrooms for years and also brief stints with conventional distance education programs,very recently I hopped onto a new mode- MOCC(Massive Open Online Courses) at
Coursera .
The apprehensions of relearning and unlearning were huge but so was the anticipation of going back to academics after so long.As most of my close friends would know me and technology don't function well in each other's company this was a real challenge.
For me being a learner is not difficult ,that is my mode most of the times even when as an adult and especially a parent to an equally curious pre-schooler I pretend to have all the answers.
There are no final answers always was one of the lessons poetry taught me long back,and there is more meaning in every meaning that we perceive is what I have always believed.
In a class of of thousands of people across nationalities,age-groups and even purposes of coming to a poetry class I kind of got back in touch with a very subtle part of me that had gone missing as an adult- the thrill of sharpening a new pencil and writing in a new notebook,the expectation of discovering something new with a teacher and peers.The adrenaline rush of deadlines,the hurried joy of being on schedule for a class.
I have always been a literature student and I believe that literature just doesn't stop where the poem or the text ends,that is where it begins for the reader.We can't learn poetry like arithmetic but poetry helps us to learn life,to see things from another point of view or to see different things from the same point of view.
Similarly I believe every new experience is not just that it might be just another piece in your puzzle,it might be overwhelming,taxing or plain confusing sometimes even disappointing but its worth taking just to know the difference.
