virtual classroom : a journey of many downs

 As I sat in front of my screen once again staring blankly at the zoom's icon it brings back so many memories of an uncertain time...

As I look back at my academic years, it's a trauma I can't process. It's a struggle I can't pen. It's a curse I can't get rid of. When I look back and trust me I don't often, but if I have to, just for the sake of this writing piece, for the greatness of art if I let myself back in those dark thoughts and let my heart bleed, I might be able to recall a memory of despair. Last year was academically the death of the student inside me. 

I survived with so many other vigilant seekers of knowledge. If we are asked even we don't know how we did it. We won't discuss it, we won't voice it. But the terrors of it has scared us for the rest of our lives. Fallen heroes of a battalion. We waged a war silently and internally. From the fear of extermination, we couldn't voice the truth. When we wake up and look in the mirror it's a word starting from the third alphabet that comes to mind, a word that's opposite to valour and bravery and valiant. It's a word we don't want to associate with but are in the end.

No, it wasn't that bad, it's me and my forever obsession with tragedy. But rest assured, it was hard. If I have to put it plainly and simply. But truth has never been that, and experiences are subjective. So what to do? 

Virtual classrooms: a Shakespearean tragedy, a haunting lover, a rotten curse. 

Education, no longer a necessity for survival, but a burden that needs to be reminded daily. Education, which was supposed to enlighten us and take us on glorious self-discovery pathways has just led us to the end of the cliff. In post-corona/ current-corona time, education is the evil twin, the wicked witch, the stepsister making life a living hell. Oh no! it's not an exaggeration. It's the truth, plain and simple.

From muting our teachers not because we don't want to answer, but what do you say at the end of a long sound that you can't make any sense of? what if I take the vocabulary from your memory books and set it on fire and then ask you to respond, will you be able to do so? So what do you say to what you don't understand, to what you are incapable to grasp? You mute the sound and wait for God's miracle...

To teaching ourselves the words we didn't know, and the matters we couldn't understand. Desperate times, we seek refuge in tutorials, past experiences, and a little self-help. Reminding that it's not the first time... it's never the first time... Picking our sorrows and drowning them in an ocean of tears that we shed the previous night. Because it's important to mourn the difficulties of a past day before jumping into today's list of miseries.

No pre corona wasn't any exception it's just that between laughter and voices we drown the shortcomings. It's just that before the accessibility wasn't a problem. Now it is. And its heightening day by day. As we sit down daily to regret the degrees we started so enthusiastically, a piece dies inside us. We are at the point where struggle seems meaningless and the outcome unbothered. No, we weren't always like that, something changed inside us. And even we are unable to pinpoint it...