Thrill of Learning Out-of-Box
Alok Raj
(Author is a students of class Xth and associated with the Interactive Online Mentoring Sessions (IOMS) since last 1-1/2 years)
“Learning is the name of the process which helped humans to become human”. The primitive and most important discovery of man was fire; from there now human race has traversed journey of thousands of years when we are talking about AI (Artificial Intelligence) to teach machines to think like us. But, we reached here only because of our ‘ability to think beyond and willingness to learn out-of-box’. Had Aryabhata, Newton, Tesla, Einstein, and a long series of scientists remained confined to what was written in their books and accept rest as miracle, they would never have discovered anything. They did so because they had experienced a thrill in learning out-of-box.
When we read our text books, the most peculiar sentence is ‘we will read more about it next year’. When you get interested to know more about a topic, there they write we will study more in next class. This limits the thinking process in students’ mind, they think that we cannot understand more and this ends the curiosity in many minds. But, it is also true that everything cannot be taught in one academic year. Here starts the adventure of learning out-of-box. We keep our question ignited and try to find a person who can give us satisfying answer. We try to read next year books and also try to find answer to our questions wherever we can, including internet. We stretch out to person who could guide us until we get some information about it. In this process of exploration, we may not understand the information that we receive. Here, again next adventure starts and it goes on until we get satisfactory explanation to our curiosity. This gives us a feeling that we have achieved something which initially appeared to either impossible or a misadventure. This feeling increase our confidence and we get curious on the path of learning more knowledge and concepts.
This is the thrill of learning out-of-box. This removes the blinders and enables us to think beyond and of-course it is the first step towards a new discovery. As man loves to discover more, he loves to learn more and without it man cannot live. Albert Einstein had rightly said, “Once you stop learning, you start dying”.
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