End of Semester!

Current Mood/Status: Woo.(!)
Currently Doing: loafing
Song of the Day: Smile Lines, Incubus

...So this is my obligatory post stating that the semester is, effectively, over. That is, for likely the first time this semester, I did some work before the last minute! Yes! That just goes to show that I can, in fact, do work even when it's not absolutely required of me.

Well...let's see. In updating a few things (being the hypocritically mainstream freak that I am), I keep, out of force of habit, when typing in my DePauw classes for next semester, hitting "mat" to get to the mathematics department in dropdown toolbars, then "lat"...

I think that I'm going to post one of my essays in hopes of...something happening in the way of critique before I turn in my common apps.

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9. Sharing intellectual interests is an important aspect of university life. Describe an idea or experience that you find intellectually exciting, and explain why.

Knowledge is a means. Facts, statistics, information, data; they all represent things, occasionally the same, often different, but that is all they are: representations, numbers, and concepts. They are a means to ideas, the very key, hand, and force that open the door to insight. Without direction, without perspective, simply learning and comprehending things is not distinguishing; when one can realize the significance of a text, discern the implications and effects of an event, and connect schools of beliefs, further synthesize multiple fields of study, one creates universities of understanding and dynamic webs of thought. That is nigh inexpressibly exciting.
I have been taken several years of Latin in high school and am just now finishing my third semester of it at DePauw University. My courses covered general prose, poetry, then the prose of history. It is interesting to read and see what ancient Roman writers thought was important, to read personal letters to see precisely how similar people thousands of years ago were to us now, how the only apparent difference is technological and cultural, barely at all ideological and hardly intellectual.
Yet, even more, it is incredible to see how the individuals thought. Their language is very organized; every noun, adjective, and verb having strict rules which it must follow and certain precise forms for specific meanings and connotations. The sentence structure is much like a math equation. There are the big parts that may determine the gist of the thing, the general idea–perhaps the main factor of a function or the subject and action of a sentence–as well as small bits and pieces–coefficients stretching and pulling a graph; different moods, word placement. Every little bit has its part: adjectives can be scattered all across the sentence apart from their nouns to exhibit disarray or many short conjunctions and adverbs can be interposed between nouns to emphasize the distance or break between things. Not only is it fascinating to draw such parallels, but it also helps in comprehension, such as how the order of dependent clauses is drastically simplified by simply thinking in terms of mathematical parentheses, with larger ones enclosing smaller ones, but no two ever cross each other without one ending before the second begins.
A large part of education comes from the teachers, who have to draw their curricula and lessons in a way easiest for their pupils to learn. But the students themselves have a significant responsibility, too: they must figure out what it all really means on a wider scope. That is the greatest part of learning: comprehension and cross-application. It makes everything in the world make more sense, gives reasons for why things happen. That is my passion: to make something of everything.