Quenching my thirst to learn !!

When I was growing up , I thought learning is a phase wherein we study what is in the text books for exams to secure good scores and ensure a safer future. I believed great scores would make certain I get a good job and ample money and be rich and admirable. The pedagogy that my school or college followed has entrenched it in my mind. I really never bothered to find anything that would have helped me learn from the world outside study guides. School life was fun and my school gave adequate importance to arts and sports as to academics. My school had significant presence in the inter-school competitions in the district and state level and I had been to one of such events and participated when I was in lower classes. As I moved to higher classes , my significant interest was to study what is in text books, memorize them and spew them into the answer sheets for the exams. Nothing ever triggered the thought to establish the concepts firmly. No teacher ever asked how familiar we are with the concepts or were given any practical examples to understand subjects like Physics. When we were in 7th , I remember our science teacher Bernie miss showed us the scattering of light using a glass prism which actually scattered the incident sunlight to all shades of rainbow in the wall. More such experiments would have ingrained the concepts in our brain. But the teachers were blindly following the text books, so were the students. And I thought studying or learning is something that would be required till graduation because learning never seemed like something that's enjoyable. It was more of a task. Though I was pretty good at accomplishing this task , I've found for many learning is a sisyphean task of rolling the huge stone up a hill. After I started working, I realized all my assumptions were wrong. In today's highly competitive world it is really imperative that you update your knowledge database periodically . Just reading would not suffice comprehending what you read is more important. So fortunately I came across this fantastic course "Learning how to learn" in Coursera. It's been 2 weeks and I find it really effective. Thanks to these MOCC sites. We can educate ourselves anywhere anytime and some of these are free. Absolutely wonderful isn't it. I would post a detailed summary of my learning the course in the forthcoming articles. Til then wish me Good luck.