Over My Head

"The best way to graduate from beginner is to get in way over your head. Nothing makes you better faster."
--37 signals

I saw this quotation on a web site, The American Entrepreneur, and felt a spark of encouragement. I had recently jumped into a learning experience that was reminding me what it feels like to be a beginner again.

As a teacher at Point Park University, I can take an undergraduate course once in a while. On-line Journalism sounded like just what I wanted to learn--creating blogs, making web sites look nice, and writing for the web. We gather twice a week in a sunny computer classroom equipped with the latest and greatest Apples. I'm in heaven, because at home I have a computer that is so old HP won't support it anymore and no Internet. Here in the classroom, I can go anywhere in the world.

The "we" of this course is made up mostly of undergraduate students who are younger than my children. They are nice to me, very accepting of the gray-haired lady in their midst. I try to keep up, and I try not to ask too many questions; but at times they are many steps ahead of me following the directions of the professor, Heather Starr-Fiedler, while I am scribbling notes and wondering "what did she say?" In taking this course, I am learning not only new moves on the keyboard but also a new vocabulary.

On the first day, I learned what "RSS" stands for, where it is and what it can do for me! I was thrilled. Now I get daily updates from The Wall Street Journal, as well as local news outlets. I can embed an HTML code, add a slide show to my blog, play around however awkwardly with "Audacity," and create audio interviews. Our teacher is not only a professor but also a practitioner--the founder and managing director of the web site Pittsburgh Mom. I may be a beat or two behind the nimble minds of my classmates, but I am learning things that I never would have discovered if I had not gotten in way over my head.