Its High Time We Killed The College Admissions Essay

It’s High Time We Killed The College Admissions Essay Rowling’s incorporation of Latin, the foundation of many modern languages, lends the spells more universality (who wants spells in English, anyway?) and adds to the realism of the series. Surreal Numbers follows a couple on vacation on an island. They find a rock with inscriptions written in Hebrew. After some rough translation and a lot of thought, they realize the slab talks about the logic process of classifying numbers. Neither of the two are mathematicians but they take upon the task and try to glean everything they can from the inscriptions. St. John’s is appealing because I will get to read some of my favorite texts for a second time, as well as many new works. My favorite aspect of studying at St. John’s was the environment of free discussion. I love that teachers and students alike go by the simple formal address. This practice helps to foster an atmosphere of respect and equality in the classroom, giving students the confidence to take intellectual risks. The students’ intellectual freedom lived on outside the classroom, inspiring our discussions of the readings over breakfast, during our afternoon free period, and during our evening group meetings. I know too many people who are content with limited knowledge and are discontent with limited possessions. I want to expose myself to as many ideas and viewpoints as possible, and I want to be more than a consumer. An easy focus of Rowling’s accessible wordplay are the spells. Usually a crafted mix of Latin and English, their verbalization sounds “magical” but still allows readers to suss out a guess as to the spell’s purpose. As a high school Latin student, I find this especially impressive. I know too many people who want to silence their opponents instead of understanding them. I want a safe space for inquiry, not a safe space for ignorance. At school I would have despised the lesson about water displacement but when I was given the actual works by Archimedes and had to follow the logic on my own it made sense. During the tutorial I loved how the tutor went line by line asking questions for us to discuss and I loved drawing out the diagrams. St John’s advertises itself as the school for readers and thinkers, people who want more than a degree. I know too many people whose only hope for college is to earn a diploma, and if they can do it without learning or growing, even better. I want to spend the rest of my life learning as much I can, because getting a diploma without expanding your mind is like saving a receipt for something you don’t own. So you would start off with 0, and then you could get -1 and 1 by using 0 in the left or right set, and then it builds that way forever in both directions. When I think about my principles, I think about how I aspire to the humility of Helen Burns and the resolution of Jane Eyre and the stoicism of St. John. What excites me about St. John’s the most is that I have some previous exposure and that familiarity will improve both my understanding of these texts as well as my ability to discuss them. I have already read some of the books in the curriculum once, and so now I will be able to ‘read a book,’ during my second round of reading and discussion at St. John’s. My junior year in particular was my most interesting round of humanities. It focused entirely on Greek works, starting with Homer and the playwrights, transitioning into Thucydides, and then on to Plato and Aristotle. I enjoyed reading and discussing these works very much. At seven o’clock the first evening, I was treated to my first seminar, and I fell in love with the school as well as its location. We discussed Herodotus’s description of the Battle of Thermopylae. Our tutor, Ms. Shukla, posed the question, “Is bravery reasonable? Somehow, I found the way this scenario was presented to be engaging and allowed me to be drawn into the story. Their first simple conclusion was that any number is the pair of sets to the left and right of that number. The inscription stated that any element of the left set is not greater than or equal to an element of the right setâ€"a very simple idea upon which to build a number system. It proceeds logically, then showing the recursive nature of numbers and how they build upon previous numbers. The beauty of this notion of sets is this idea that 0 is the origin of numbers. Specifically, let’s imagine that there were no elements in either the left or right set. Then the statement above about left elements and right elements would still be true as long as one of the sets has nothing. ” My fellow students and I talked more quickly than I could jot down notes, and I left the classroom feeling more energized and awake than I had two hours before. On our way back to Murchison, my dorm mates and I compared notes on what we had discussed in our different seminars and talked about Leonidas and the Spartans until lights-out. When I went to the Summer Academy program last summer in Santa Fe, I found myself most looking forward to the math and science tutorials. While some others groaned that it was time to do our Archimedes reading for the next day, I excitedly isolated myself in the back of the library. I loved reading so closely and spending the time discovering Archimedes’ theories.