Personal Insight Questions

Personal Insight Questions I immediately found my people and a continual comfort of my environment which automatically equated to the feeling of being home. Home is the feeling of being comfortable with the uncertainty and uncomfortable situations. The feeling of being involved, nervous and excited all at the same time. The most important aspect about the Summer Academy was finding my people, the ones who talked about Nietzsche and Plato at lunch and had long debates and poetry slams after Seminar. Making friends was never an easy feat for me, but at the Summer Academy, I found everyone I talked to felt like we had been friends for years. ” As I think learning has its own value in itself. The ways to achieve it are numerous and depends on what one’s purpose of learning is. In my previous experience of the education system that I was given in Korea had its purpose having the value that students could grasp a great amount of knowledge at short time from teachers lecturing. Surprisingly enough I made friends within 20 minutes of being on campus. I was able to share my obsession with reading and the knowledge I gathered on any subject I put my mind to. After I came home, I knew I needed more information. I wanted to know more, I wanted to experience it myself. The summer after my Junior year I signed up for a Summer Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. I chose this story as an example of a book that I consider great and has influenced me because it showcases the fun, yet calculated, way in which Calvino relates these tales. This story and others like it inCosmicomics influence me to look at the world differently, and cause me to question things we take as fact. Calvino makes me ponder the deeper questions of the universe. Although I don’t love having a constant existential crisis, I do love reading things that push me to consider new ways of thinking. Although his writing is not easy to understand at first, I find that it’s worth the struggle. Everything Calvino writes is the perfect mixture of scientific fact and fable-like fantasy, and I’m so glad that I took my mom’s advice in that bookstore in New York. I am too used to sitting in crowded high school classes where more than half the class did not do the reading. My values in education and learning had started to collide with the ones in my school. ” the educational authorities from my school responds, “It is what it is! However my purpose was fulfilling my curiosity, rather than just memorizing other’s idea for the matter of winning or losing competition with my friends. Therefore the way I learn had to be different from the way of learning where the “efficiency”, which my school claimed, was mostly concerned. Even if nobody told them to do it, the students were eager to learn from each other, spontaneously, even in the hallway, dining room, and outside in the beauty of nature. Students were lying on the grass so peacefully reading a book yet eagerly talking with couple of friends who took same seminar and then going back to reading again. At the actual seminar at night, they sat around the big table and the exploration of ideas started to happen on the heels of each other. Above all, I was amazed how tutors and students were connected with each other. I couldn’t find any dominance or submission in the classes and everyone was truly involved in learning from each other, whether it was a tutor or student. Reading is not checking off a box or attaining a grade, but something I have chosen many times and will continue to choose for the rest of my life. In my pursuit to find a catch, I could only find nothing. Unlike other colleges with special course requirements, unstable administration, and strange traditional customs such as Freshman not being able to say the word ‘duck’, I found complete and absolute nothing. I signed up for more information; they stayed true to the image and personality of the college. I visited the Santa Fe campus and experienced classes, the campus, and the people. I made an even more intimate group of friends who I still keep in touch with because they are more than friends to me, they are family. I think that my sophomore to senior years of high school have been a great preparation for a school like St. John’s. The video represented St. John’s College as the director’s opinion of an excellent example of education. Even though I’d already known about the college, seeing video that actually filmed the raw and vivid site of St. John’s College, I was intensely excited. The spectacle of students learning from each other in the seminar free from competition was so beautiful that it made my heart warm with the fire of passion for hope to be there.