Lectures aren't kindling the fire

Let the record show, I am not a drop-out.
Yet.
But I’m thinking about it.
A few years back, when I was on the board at John Jay Center for Learning, I stumbled upon Coursera and thought it was a game-changer when it came to adult education.
Coursera is a MOOC, a massive open online course, website And at the time MOOCs first appeared, they were ground-breaking.
Dozens and dozens of top universities signed up to offer free, online courses to whoever in the great internet universe wanted to take them. Nobody had figured out how to make any money doing this, but that didn’t seem to matter. (Much like the era when newspapers thought it made sense to give away news content for free and never thought about the consequences.)
At any rate, the thought of MOOCs excited me.
After all, some folks say that the brain is a muscle. Use it or lose it. The best way for someone my age to stave off inevitable senility is probably to keep learning something new every day. Brain cells will still nod off now and then, but if I’m learning new stuff or new skills or a new language, maybe I could slow the process.
So I did what seemed to make sense: I signed up for a course.
It was free, so there wasn’t much to lose.
(Note: Many if not most MOOCs are no longer free. Some are free but want to sell you a certificate of completion. Some charge a fee from the outset. But back in the day, not too many years ago, they were free.)
So what did I sign up for? Astrobiology.
Of course. What made more sense for an aging English major who avoided the hard sciences and had trouble finding anything other than Orion in the night sky than astrobiology? Nothing.
Truth is, I wanted to challenge myself. And I was indeed challenged.
The course, a series of illustrated lectures, was taught by a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. And it was excellent.
Eric Daugherty in our composing room took the course at the same time, and we had all these weird discussions about the chemistry needed for the spark of life that had other newspaper employees wondering if we’d lost our minds.
The tests were hard, but I completed the course and actually have a certificate from the University of Edinburgh attesting to that fact.
That should have been the end of the story, but I never seem to leave well enough alone.
About a week ago, I got the itch. I’d received an email from Coursera suggesting several courses they thought might help prevent my brain from turning into bean dip.
One caught my eye: The Ancient Greeks.
Sure, I’d studied this stuff in high school and in college. But I figured a refresher wouldn’t hurt. So I signed up.
And about two minutes later, I had second thoughts.
The first lecture was kind of boring. The professor seemed nervous and kept looking off to his right as if getting cues from someone. But it was about Crete and Minos, favorite topics, so I stayed awake.
Not so with lecture number two. At some point I must have dozed off.
At least that’s my excuse for flunking the quiz — after lectures three and four — that came at the end of the first week.
But Coursera doesn’t like to have you flunk out.
Though I was prepared to walk away from the whole thing at that point, I kept getting nagging emails. “Don’t give up!” they urged. And sometimes nagging works.
I went back, listened to the lecture I had slept through the first time, and took the quiz again. Result: My score was lower than before.
It took a third try to get through the first week of work, and there’s much more ahead.
Homework reading with Aristotle and Plutarch? I think the lawn needs mowing.
It won’t prevent Alzheimer’s, but it will get my blood moving.
Aristotle and Plutarch will still be around when the grass has been cut.