...thanks to my teachers

Today is the "Teacher's Day... and an occasion to remember and thank those who continue to teach me...

Sometime back, somewhere else, I had written about On Being a Teacher...
...which were essentialy my musings on the dilemma about what "teaching/learning" is all about (still trying to figure that out!)

A few days later, an old student sent an invite on Orkut:
"...have attended some of ur utterly confusing n thot provokin lect."

Curious about what this meant, I wrote back:
"How can something be simultaneously utterly confusing and thought-provoking?"

...and got the response:
"there were times... when we were faced with ideas/beliefs completely opposite to what we had carried all along... so confusing because we kinda never expected that the opposite side ever existed or was appreciated.... Thought provoking because then later we end up appreciating (or at least start looking at the logic) for all sides of the argument."

That made sense to me - and I learned something about teaching/learning from her mail...

Today, among the many heart-warming mails/messages which one gets on the Teacher's Day, one which captured this teching/learning matrix, had this quote about learning/teaching in these verses from Rainer Maria Rilke:

Live the questions now
Perhaps you will then, gradually,
Without noticing it,
Live along some distant day
Into the answer.

Like him, I also "gradually, without noticing it, live... into the answer" through these myriad messages and interactions.

So this post is just to say thanks to my many teachers - many of who sat through my classes...