Perception

This piece was written on 31st Aug 2014

I sat in the class for the lecture of the most important topic “Perception”,  that any special educator working with children with Learning Difficulty, should be well versed with. Right from the beginning, we were told this is one of the most important topics and it should be really on our tips to come out of flying colours in our exam and most importantly to be an efficient special educator or rather an efficient educator. You need to master it to diagnose the problem, to plan Individualized Education Plan (IEP), to plan remediation, to plan strategies, to design your lesson plan and your teaching method and tools- in nutshell everything that you need to do as a special educator. I sat attentively throughout the enlightening lecture trying to grasp every bit of information. An interactive and lively classroom – a key feature of our course made it even more interesting. Twenty five brains of working teachers and parents along with our coordinators and lecturer contributed to the brain storming each week in the class making us go deep into each topic, relate to our experiences at our work and to learn from the experiences of others in the room. After four hours of class, we got the assignment to write whatever we learnt from the class in our own words in just 3 sides of A4 sheet.

After returning home, my Saturday evening went in going for walk, cooking, helping my daughters with their studies, dinner, and reading to my children and putting them to bed. Throughout my mind was preoccupied with my assignment and I kept planning it in my head. I sat late in the night to write it down or at least jolt the points down. I did not want any important point to slip out of my memory owing to my ageing brain or rather a multitasking brain of a mother, a homemaker and a teacher.

I started it with the definition of perception-“Perception is the act of giving meaning to our sensation (the reception of sensory information through our sensory receptors or organs).” Learning Difficulty/Disability is actually a perception based difficulty.

This one line kept resonating in my mind –“It is a perception based difficulty”. Many thoughts kept coming to my mind and I had to really brush them aside and stay focused to finish my assignment. After an input of two hours I got a satisfactory assignment and went to sleep. But the line kept echoing –“It is a perception based difficulty”.  Finally, I had to sit down next morning ,after my breakfast to write down this piece.

“It is a perception based difficulty”- Is it not true about any difficulty in our life?

All the major issues around the globe or the minor ones that affect us in our daily lives,  arise out of perception. Even the way we handle it, deal with it, try to solve it or blow it out of proportion- all depends on how we perceive it.  

Our joys and our sorrows and their degrees also are decided by our perception. A right perspective can help you sail through the worst of the tides and take it as a learning experience, an experience for personal and spiritual enrichment. And so can a wrong perception change the brightest experience into a doomed one.

And adding to the interesting twist, how you decide the right and wrong and admire the subtlety of discrimination between the two, is also dependent on your perception.

Harmony exist if there is respect and acceptance for different perceptions from different people around us and conflicts and chaos arise when there is a hindrance and reluctance to see others perception in the right context.

Experiences come by sharing your perceptions. You remain ignorant if you are confined to walls of your own and become enlightened once you melt the barrier and peep in to other’s perspective around you.

You get a heart change by changing one of those perception, which was hard bound and deep routed in you and becoming open to conceive other one. All your spiritual gurus and motivational speaker try to convert your wall of perception, from being rigid to a more fluid one, allowing passages of various perceptions with less hindrance. You are more adaptable if you are more flexible.

Perception! Perception! Perception! ………..myriad thoughts are sailing across my mind around this word. If I sit to pen them all down I might end up writing a series of books on the same. But my other roles in life are calling me up and I have to end this piece here by saying-“In a nutshell, all the nuances of life and relationship is woven around PERCEPTION. You need it as much as you need oxygen to live”.