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Class Room Learning: Then & Now

by Anantinee ‘JHUMPA’ Mishra

Virtual learning, online classes are a thing of habit now. With the globally affecting Covid-19 in its wake, the lack of an option to proceed with the educational/professional courses would have led to disastrous consequences. Luckily, platforms like Google Meetings and Zoom Meetings have met all the necessary checks on our lists of primary concerns, namely security of the platform, web privacy, lack of internet bugs or viruses etcetera.

While they do provide convenience, there can be no denying of the fact that since the very start, we have associated the terms ‘learning’ and ‘classes’ with the occasional chatter of our friends and classmates from desks close to ours, the teacher eyeing every student from the front of the classroom, deciding which one to question.

The meetings provide the option of muting all, a quality easily appealing to all the teachers to ensure silence during s lecture. But if we really ask ourselves, the hushed whispers of gossips when the teacher wasn’t looking this way, can we forget the thrill of that?

The chat option is readily fascinating; typed private messages handling seem too irresistible to ignore. But can they really top the hastily and messily written chits of paper, passed from student to student, all the way till the student it is designated for. Or maybe the rolled and crumbled paper, right at its aim on the back of a person’s head?

The answers depend on you; but mine are all the same.

No. They really can’t.

Like Kindle can’t extinguish the exhilaration of holding a book in your hands, the smell of fresh paper in your nostrils, the online meetings can’t extinguish the exhilaration you get when everybody speaks at the same time, no matter how hard we deny it.

However, the fact that it has been an immense relief-and help-to almost every single one of us cannot be denied. Students at academically crucial stages of life like SATs, or the board examinations, cannot even afford to cut slack in the areas of learning; these stages may as well map out their entire careers in areas of interest.

To every disadvantage there is a corresponding disadvantage.

A truer sentence couldn’t have been said for the circumstances we find ourselves in. We may as well miss our routine lifestyle and the familiarity of it, but we must not forget that our life and its situations are for rent. The greatest skill we can learn is that of adaptability.

We are-or rather were-accustomed to that typical sitting in a classroom to learn sort of thing. But can’t we recognize the fact that these new advanced technologies are giving us a chance of being open minded? Of not being close, narrow minded? Of letting those old school ideologies go?

As I have stressed again and again, while these new methods can’t really diminish the hold of the previous ones, we can always learn a thing from two.

At a context, doesn’t it sound fascinating that anybody, anywhere, can learn not only individually with the help of learning apps like Toppr and Byjus, but as a group with shared effort, collaborative participation?

It totally does, to me.

It would be unrealistic and childish of me-or anybody-to narrow this E-Learning to positive or negative. Good or bad. Black or white.

There are areas to ponder, opinions and experiences to consider, and this can be taken as a whole new professional area of expertise, based on research and analysis on how this affects our psychological progress, positive or negative.

But, as a twelve year old, I can say that the fact that despite staying at home just because of technology and adaptability to new system I keep studying and learning new things.

About the Author:

Anantinee ‘JHUMPA’ Mishra is a prodigy author, poet and TED speaker. She is twelve years old studying in std.8th at Apeejay School, Saket, New Delhi.  She has published two books and many stories and articles in magazines and journals. At the age of ten, she published a 21,000 worded anthology of stories called ‘Treasure of Short Stories’. Last year her debut Novel ‘Manhattan to Munnar’ got released. Recently she has been conferred with a title ‘PRODIGY AUTHOR’ and an ‘HONORARY DIPLOMA’ by the Hon’ble Vice President of  India Sh. M Venkaiah Naidu.

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