time travel and high school. Huh?

Posted by Thom on Wednesday, January 9, 2008 in Preparing for College.

In my most vivid dreams, I am an amateur astronomer with a philosopher’s mindset. I love astronomy. No telescope, but sometimes the imagination provides more detailed lens than the naked eye for viewing the undiscovered countries of the universe. Just finished reading a book on time travel and time singularities. Is time travel possible? Theoretically. It would be fun. But where would you go if you had the chance? If I had the chance to travel back to the past, my first stop would be high school. For me, high school was a “living lab” of socio-economic forces colliding with the intimate and personal waves of human emotion. High school is a wildly hilarious time period. It can be disappointing sometimes. Perplexing other times. Yet, the things I enjoyed most about my high school experience – that still lives today in the lives of adolescents right at this moment – are the redemptive moments that re-instill our faith in others. There was a time in my IB English class when I seldom contributed to class discussions because I feared that my ideas were too idiosyncratic. Too different. I thought my comments would make me ripe for ridicule. One day – my English teacher purposely held me after class. No reason (at least to me). Had I done something wrong? I did not know. She pulled me aside and asked, “Why don’t you talk more in class?” I really didn’t have an answer. At least one that I wanted to share with her. Maybe I was scared. Maybe I thought my ideas were not intellectual enough. I dunno. My English teacher said, “James, if you are worried that people will laugh at you, you are kidding yourself. You are the best thinker in the class. You forget that I read your papers. You are more talented than you know.” Up until that moment, I was a good student, but sometimes I sat aside in my own universe – spinning in my own eddy. I think I was just slightly frightened of how good I could really be. What am I attempting to impart to you through this time-travel to high school past? Just this: do not be afraid of the good that you can do for the world or simply those around you. As cliche as it sounds, you have something unique to share with those around you. Share your ideas and thoughts with the admissions officer. Your ideas and personal thoughts about the world around you move us. Believe me when I tell you that your socio-political thoughts inspire us to greater heights of intellectualism. More than anything, your thoughts make us feel better about the world around us all.