blog.shimer

Who's great? Books decide.

            This is somewhat a response to Meg's previous post entitled "'Great Books?' Decides who?". If you haven't read it, she talks about what some unknowing minds may have to say about a great books education and then gives thought provoking responses defending the value of our degree. I agree with all of the points Meg makes in her defense of the great books education but am going to have to take her initial problem from a different angle. Aside from her question of who decides what makes a great book, the objections she summed up from people who are against receiving a great books education are as follows:

1) It's not practical in the least.
2) Everything's outdated. I mean, who reads Newton and Fourier nowadays? Their achievements are embedded into our scientific history, but no one needs their experiments anymore.
3) They don't promote the cultural diversity that's the vogue nowadays. As mentioned above, the authors are almost all of them DWM.
4) They are difficult to approach and sometimes near impossible to wade through. I dare you to read Kant without once ranting at him.

These are all seemingly valid objections to a great books education. Point by point I'd say simply the only practical undergrad degree is one that comes before a graduate or professional degree; What stand alone bachelors will earn you six figures? (and what kind of career without six figures is worth having? [except as a professor at Shimer]) Secondly just because information is outdated doesn't mean it cant be used for research, fun, criticism or as a basis for something to be proven/disproved. Third, authors shouldn't be criticized for having personal feelings that adhere with the popular view of the times; the validity or integrity of their thought isn't necessarily jeopardized by it. In some cases it is, but not all. The fourth point is true. That's what's important though. We take these difficult, wordy and confusing texts and from them gather a greater understanding of abstract concepts and important ideas.

             The content (and personal implications made by the authors) of the books isn't, in my opinion, half as important as what we do with it here at Shimer. We could be reading a playboy magazine article in place of the communist manifesto, whatever. The important part of our education is the part where we take the text and rip it apart idea by idea, implication by implication, sentence by sentence, and word by word, in a classroom filled with people who thirst for wisdom.

            We might not be reading the popular opinions of modern times. We may not be reading ideas that are still accepted. We are definitely not reading textbooks written by a composite author who does nothing more than reword and write down interpretations and opinions of the ideas in the books we are already reading. I will say one thing though: bring any modern textbook studied at any "conventional" college across the country to a Shimer classroom and it will be ripped apart faster than the court case against R. Kelly; A man who was, is, and will remain my homie.  One love. 

 

            There's a reason so many Shimer students thrive in graduate and professional schools, and it has nothing to do with the impracticality of our education, or the personal opinions and feelings of the authors we read or what year the books we've read were written.
 

Id advise you all to watch "A Christmas Story" at least once, because it's on all day on TBS. It is an absolute classic. Oh, and for all you Christmas cake fans out there, here's a simple recipe for a Shimer Christmas Cake!* :

INGREDIENTS

• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 cup milk
• Tubed Frosting
• Chocolate Shimer Tree (currently unavailable)

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9x9 inch pan or line a muffin pan with paper liners.
2. In a medium bowl, cream together the sugar and butter. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Combine flour and baking powder, add to the creamed mixture and mix well. Finally stir in the milk until batter is smooth. Pour or spoon batter into the prepared pan.
3. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes in the preheated oven. For cupcakes, bake 20 to 25 minutes. Cake is done when it springs back to the touch.
4. Use tubed frosting to write "Have a Shimer Christmas" anywhere on cake. Put chocolate Shimer tree (currently unavailable) somewhere on or around the cake. 

                                                                                                                         *Non-denominational recipes available upon request.                                              
Merry Christmas everyone!

This is Justin Lockwood, and, here's lookin' at you, America. 

"Great" Books? Decides who?

That seems to be a fairly frequently asked question, and it's one that I've wondered about myself. The stereotype is unfortunately one of Western books written by DWM ("dead white men"), and for the most part the traditional Great Books curriculum (if there even is such a thing) includes some 450 odd-works that whose authors fit that category.

I say this spurred by the interest of a book someone recently brought to my attention called A Great Idea At the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam. Now I haven't read it, yet, but I did read the reviews of it and it mentioned the two people who were instrumental in starting the Great Books program in the University of Chicago back in the 1950s: Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. Both of those names are familiar to me because Shimer still follows a large part of the Hutchins plan in its curriculum (in fact, one of our classrooms is named after him) and Mortimer J. Adler (along with Charles Van Doren) wrote a book called How to Read a Book, which I very much enjoyed. (It is an odd sort of thing to read a book about reading books, but it bears reading more than once. Sometimes older, "classical" books are frustrating because we haven't the slightest clue how to approach them. How to Read a Book gives you all that and more.)

Hutchins and Adler put 443 books they named the canon of western literature into 54 volumes, which they then published and sold door-to-door, trying to spread knowledge to the greater population outside of academia. (An interesting connection I found: my calculus teacher, from IIT this past semester, sold these volumes as a door-to-door salesman when he was younger.) A Great Idea at the Time chronicles that history and its apparent demise. Reading the review brought to my mind a great deal of arguments that have been made against pursuing the Great Books education:

1) It's not practical in the least.
2) Everything's outdated. I mean, who reads Newton and Fourier nowadays? Their achievements are embedded into our scientific history, but no one needs their experiments anymore.
3) They don't promote the cultural diversity that's the vogue nowadays. As mentioned above, the authors are almost all of them DWM.
4) They are difficult to approach and sometimes near impossible to wade through. I dare you to read Kant without once ranting at him.

My defense of what has arguably become my life in the past year and a half:

1) Practical is admittedly one of the arguments most thrown against four years of reading books. But our definitions of practicality usually align with learning the skills and facts that will enable us to get a job. Reading the Great Books, by contrast, will not help one get a job. This is not true. If you want to fight facts with facts, I could say there's a lot of studies out there that have shown that employers in the scientific and medical fields are actually looking for applicants with prior degrees in the liberal arts (going on to specialized and graduate school afterward, of course) because they know that these people are better critical thinkers, better analyzers, open-minded and aware of what's going on in the world. Or I could say that the better the books that you read, the better your writing becomes: Great Books have launched the career of many a journalist, a writer, a reporter. Others have gone on to become lawyers, teachers, business owners; just about anything you can imagine. The Great Books education is not "practical" in the narrow definition because no, it does not teach you the latest in computer science, nor does it require you to memorize the periodic table or quantum formulas. But it teaches you to see the connections between things, the evolution of ideas across the ages, and knowing this you can more easily see how our world works today. It gives you the critical eye needed to cut through a lot of the information pills that our media force-feeds us today and pay attention to what's actually going on in the world, to make your own decisions based on primary sources rather than second- or third-hand sources. And, one thing that I feel is uniquely Shimer--and I freely admit my bias here, as well as lack of experience elsewhere--it helps you to discover what it is you really want to do. Many colleges that you enter are specialized to some degree or another, and you have to choose a degree about halfway through. Shimer's education is general all the way down the line, and you don't have to choose what you want to do so quickly. Reading what I have, both in and out of Shimer's curriculum, has pointed me down a lot of avenues I might not have otherwise explored. But that's for another post.

2) Outdated, yes. Useless? No. Much of science that I was taught throughout my public school years involved memorizing formulas, with little emphasis on how the ideas actually came about. Reading the really, really old scientists, even the ones that seem ridiculous (the pre-Socratics: the world is made out of earth, air, fire and water? Hah!), allows you to trace the evolution of ideas and really know why we are where we are today in science, politics, humanities and so many other areas. I think about it in the same way I think about math: if you know how to derive a million formulas from a single base, then you really only have to remember one thing.

3) Now, while this charge is true of some Great Books curricula, it is certainly not true of Shimer's. I'll name a few authors I've read here that are definitely not D, W, M or otherwise: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Mary Wollstonecraft, W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Goodall, Ruth Benedict,  Carol Gilligan... and many others I have not yet had the chance to read. Shimer doesn't stick to the Great Books of the Western World canon outlined fifty years ago; it constantly challenges and updates itself. We read modern, female, minority authors that few, if any, other Great Books colleges include. The importance of that? The Great Books are not dead. The conversations and the writings continue still.

4) This is why we approach the books as a group. I admit, the first time I read through Jame Joyce's Ulysses I was hitting my head on the nearest wall. But when I came into class and we were all equally confused, we came out of our confusion together to some kind of understanding, and the effort it took to work through it made it seem even better: my mind was stretched, and my world expanded. I believe that the basic mentality towards many books written today is that they should be automatically intelligible to everyone, and books written a long time ago are only for smart people to read. Neither statement is true. It's the book that you struggle with before understanding that sticks with you the most, and I really think that almost anyone who puts their mind to it can, with aid, get through a lot of the classical books written centuries ago. It doesn't mean that you have to enjoy all of them (I certainly don't). But there is so much to be gotten from them that you can't simply not try.

Reading these is what brings the Shimer community together as a whole. Whatever other differences in views and opinion we might have, we've all read the same thing. That, to me, is one of the greatest aspects of Shimer's education.

Oxford and Beyond: A Photgraphic Miscellany

I've been in Oxford for almost four months now and as I wrap up Michaelmas Term, I have a chance to share with all of you some pictures from around Oxford as well as some of my travels elsewhere in Britain.

These are some photos from a trip to Cambridge, or what folks in Oxford simply call
 "The Other Place" (which is the same term Shakespeare uses to refer to Hell in Hamlet, not to say that the two Universities are competitive or anything...)

This is Saint John's College, Cambridge.

These are from Ely Cathedral, just north of Cambridge.

Here are few from a trip to the town of Warwick:

Their castle,

The view from one of its towers

and that's me.

I've also been to Bath. Here's a few from the the old Roman buildings there.


Oxford is full of rivers paths and canals that are perfect for bike-ridding. Here are some pictures:

This is the River Thames as it appears right behind my flat.

A bridge along the bike path,

These pictures are from a bike trek I  took  with my flat-mate and fellow Shimer student Matt. We rode a little too far and and ended up lost, off the bike path in a marshland where our bikes kept getting stuck in the mud, in a rain shower. We didn't make it home until after dark, cold and covered in dirt, but it was fun nonetheless.

Here's a house barge on the canal; they're all over the place,

My bike and another hot air balloon,

Matt picking some of that English mud from his bike,

And a rainbow!

Here are some more pictures from around Oxford:



 

I like England.

Thininking Theses

       

I've mentioned already that I am a junior at Shimer, however most of the other Shimerians here with me in Oxford are in their last year and are thus working on their Senior theses. The idea behind the thesis is that it affords Shimer students a culminating opportunity to really do substantive work on a project or idea that we are passionate about in a way that draws on everything we've learned while at the college. Among some of the really interesting things my comrades here are doing are theses involving research projects, recording music, or translating poetry. All of this puts me in mind to start pondering what I think I'd like to do for my own thesis next year and just this week I think I've begun to develop an idea that I am really excited about.

       I've always been really interested in vision, the visual arts and all the fertile connections there are to be made between them and philosophy. I am especially interested in the way that our ideas about seeing get used as a kind of metaphor for both knowledge and illusion. These kinds of associations can be traced back at least to Plato, who, in his famous “Allegory of the Cave” in the Republic used the play of shadows cast on a cave's wall to illustrate the deceptive world of appearances on earth and the symbol of blinding sunlight to represent the eternal truth of the forms.

But I think what I would particularly like to explore in a thesis is the way slightly more modern philosophers use the model of sight to try to understand the problems of human consciousness, or, more specifically what many 19^th and 20^th century German philosophers would begin to call 'false consciousness' or 'ideology.'

    Take, for example, Ludwig Fuerbach's musing on the eye in his book The Essence of Christianity.“The eye looks into the starry heavens [and] gazes at that light [and] sees its own nature and its own origin. Hence Man [sic] elevates himself above the earth only with the eye.” Without going into to too much detail about his philosophy, I can say that Feuerbach uses this model of the human eye, seeing it's own divine nature in the heavens, to propel an argument that challenges Christian doctrines. Not that he wants to get rid of religion, in fact, he actually places a high value on it, because he thinks it expresses, though in an inverted form, humanity's idea of its true essence. Feuerbach argues that though religion represents human creativity as if it depends on God, in reality God is just the projection of an ideal image of humanity's own capacities. Feuerbach goes back to optical metaphors to try to explain this inversion and the projection of human potential into the idea of God saying it is like “the double refraction of the rays of light.” Feuerbach thought that if he could get people to change the way they interpreted their own nature—to stop inverting their own potential through a prism of false consciousness—then many of humanities problems could be solved.

    Karl Marx, who came along shortly after Feuerbach, thought all this talk about ideals and essences was flaky. Writing about Feuerbach, Marx famously said “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” For Marx, the character of human life doesn't come from contemplation of starry abstractions; it comes from real-world activity. Marx thinks that Feuerbach makes a big mistake in trying to improve human conditions by simply getting people to think differently. In fact, for Marx putting ideas before action (or in the lingo of philosophers, theory before praxis) obscures our consciousness of our relationships to the world and each other. To summarize the disagreement more succinctly: Feuerbach thinks that abstract ideas determine human the nature of human existence; but Marx thinks human actions produce all our ideas. The problem of false consciouness as Marx see it, is that people (and I think he would include Feuerbach here) fail to see the role active production plays in the formation of our ideas. But what is so interesting to me is that Marx picks up, and even elaborates on the optical tropes used by Feuerbach to make this point. In The German Ideology Marx writes that “men [sic] are the produces of their conceptions, ideals, etc. [...] If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera-obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”

    Wouldn't it be really interesting to trace these and other strains of thought linking vision to false consciousness in relation to the development of optical technologies such as the lens or the photograph or film?

    I think this kind of thesis would raise another question: is there something fundamentally deceptive about seeing? Or on the contrary can vision, or different visual technologies, ever reveal things about our existence that are otherwise hidden? (Walter Benjamin makes a really interesting argument to this effect in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction when he claims that film can reveal an “optical unconscious”... more fodder for the thesis, I guess)

    Anyway, just in case this post isn't long enough already, Marx's mention of the camera obscura lets me segue neatly into something really cool here in Oxford: The Ashmolean Museum of Science.

They have a whole collection of neat optical devices ranging from ancient telescopes to early microscopes and primitive photographic projectors. The coolest thing they have, however, is a functioning camera obscura. 

The name is Latin for 'dark chamber,' and it's basically a way to project an image onto a surface. Lots of Renaissance artists used them as drawing aides and Aristotle used a primitive form of the principle to watch an eclipse, the old pinhole in a dixie cup from grade school. This is a more advanced application of the same idea, using lenses and mirrors (which is why in the image I show below isn't inverted in the way Marx mentions).

This is the aperture:

It looks out the window on to Broad Street.

And to see the image, you poke your head under the sheet. 

I really dig the ghostly quality of the camera obscura image. I feel like its a bit of a precursor to the appeal of sitting in a dark theater and watching a movie. If you ever get a chance to get into one, I recommend it.

Am I fashionably late?

    Hello everyone. I suppose an introduction is necessary... actually, Cassie does. My name is Justin Lockwood. This is my first year at Shimer. I come from Long Island, New York. A place where the food's good, the drinks are cold, and the jazz clubs are open so late you can't tell your todays from your tomorrows. And it didn't matter, 'cause to us, there were no tomorrows. We lived fast and dined easy and there was no two ways about it. Oh man I love the place. It's beautiful. A nice little piece of heaven for all us growin' youth to play around in and learn the ways of the world. At least the ways of our world. Anyways I'm getting off topic. So how'd a nice kid from the suburbs get mixed up in a big city at a small college? Well I'll tell ya.

    That's me and the boys at the old ball field where I grew up. We called it the sandlot, and we basically spent all of our time there until the end of the movie. That's me right up front. We had a lot of good times back on the Island. I grew up in a fairly large town called Huntington that stood in between the city on the western end and the vineyards in the east; and at only a stone's throw away from either. My childhood was relatively normal. I had friends, I played sports, I scraped knees. It was all there. In kindergarten I got suspended for fighting my current best friend over who gets the cubby space next to Kiersten Barnett's. He got suspended too. I have a stuffed dog named Poundie who has been with me since my arrival on this planet and who will remain with me until the end of days. His age takes its toll, though, and Poundie's public travel is at the moment limited to a 10 by 12 room in my parents house, although like all stuffed animals I'm sure he's still well enough to travel the world, well enough to sail the seven seas and explore the Earth's four corners from the second I turn my back on him until the moment someone's eyes are laid in his direction. 

        High school was the bees knees and I walked around wearing the cat's pajamas. That's me on the left. There isn't much to say about my high school experience. I didn't go to the best high school, it was public, and after two years I was dismissed, then allowed re-entry for my senior year. Not a lot was learned inside those walls but fun was had. College-bound kids were made. Trouble was gotten into and tests were passed, or, rather, hoops jumped through. I didn't formally play any sports in high school and I didn't belong to any clubs. For me, the less time spent with the people I considered (by default) my peers the better. All in all it was a good time. After high school I went away to a state school almost immediately and spent a year there. It wasn't for me. I thought college would provide me an academic escape from everything I hated about my high school's dynamic. This wasn't the case...It felt like being in 13th grade. So I left. I went back to Long Island and got a job working at a small brokerage firm in Westbury while attending courses at a Community College. It didn't take me very long to realize that Community College just wouldn't do as this particular one was literally the embodiment of all of the negative aspects of my particular high school. Psuedo gang members wandered around. The teachers didn't care about teaching and the students cared less about learning; it was just a bunch of people going through motions. I tried taking online courses but just wasn't getting anything out of them. The classroom experience is an important part of learning and having no classroom is about as acceptable as having an inadequate classroom experience, which was what Community College gave me. I had to get back into school and this time for real; to a place I could actually consider an institute of learning, and not just a placemark. My search began. 

        Finding the perfect school didn't prove to be as easy as I thought. The picture above illustrates my frustration. I'm the one in the red. I quit my job and began searching for the school I'd feel proud to  be attending. At first glance, Shimer was not it. I always pictured myself at a large university as opposed to a small college. Time makes fools of us all though, doesn't it? I had no idea where I wanted to go but I knew for sure I wanted a change from New York. I decided to search for potential schools based on a predetermined list of states or cities I wouldn't mind trying to live in. Keep in mind that at this time in my life I had never left the east coast and had only been on a plane once, but had always wanted to see Chicago, so I started here...

...I have to return some video tapes.

If you'll all be kind enough to excuse me, until next time.

~Justin (vanity shot included)

Where do I begin?

Hey there! Since I don't really mean that in an existential sense, I suppose I should begin with my name. I'm Brigid Strait, an early entrant, and most recently I hail from Waterloo, IA. I say "most recently" because Mom and I are always on the move. Through the years I've lost count of the number of places I've lived, but at my last reckoning the total number of schools I've attended plus the homeschooling programs I've used came to about 16.

High school was unsatisfying for me. I was appalled by the low standards, and I could be pretty vocal about that. (But honestly, if you're in high school, much less in "Advanced World Studies," you should know what Africa is even if you don't know where.) I was equally prickly in correcting the teachers, which would sometimes lead to sort-of Shimerian discussions, but those discussions had more arguing than listening. And, I didn't yet have the skills to pull off an in-depth discussion, but I was too stubborn to sit down and shut up. Made life difficult. I was not a part of the high school community; I never attended a football game, I took as many online classes as possible (they were more challenging), and I spent a lot of lunch periods alone in the library. Terribly cliche, I'm sorry. 

Assuming I don't get amnesia, I think it's safe to call this semester unforgettable. Everything I'd hoped for has come true, although not necessarily in the way I'd expected. Classes challenge me. I'm not a straight-A student! That probably shouldn't make me happy, but it's the first time I've made an effort and still not aced the class. It's more refreshing than frustrating, because I got the grade I deserved. I've made friends. I've found people who share most of my hobbies, whether it's reading Terry Pratchett or swing dancing to the Flat Cats. I room with Abby, Sloane, and Hillary, three of the most beautiful girls in the world. They're too marvelous for words, and we have a blast together. I'm pretty comfortable with all of my classmates, and there's always somebody up for an adventure. All I have to do is say "Who wants to (insert idea here)?", and chances are I'll have company in an instant.

I have to admit that being in Chicago is strange. I lived in a few legit cities when I was small, but I don't remember them. Most of my time has been spent in very, very small towns and little cities like Des Moines, so this is a big change for me. Some days everything is beautiful, and other days I wonder what on Earth I'm doing so far from home and everything I'm familiar with. I'm learning the city quite well; back home, I was hopelessly "three-directionally challenged," as my mother put it, and somehow here I'm always in charge of directions. There's always so much to do around here! So far a sampling of my 3 a.m. exploits includes going to Clark's cafe, having a snowball fight interspersed with philosophical discussions, and watching Dawson's Creek with friends. It's a pretty amazing change, a little strange to think about at times, but I couldn't be happier to be here.

Add me on Facebook if you want to talk, and hopefully I'll be seeing you around here soon!

I think I'm one of the few who actually goes to the lake

About a mile off east of campus down 31st street, there is a nice little beach right out on Lake Michigan. It is clean. You can see the skyline if you look north. But mostly I go there when I want to be out in the open air. Sometimes I do reading down there. Mostly I run and I walk by it. On this occasion I went out when it was snowing--the first snow of the season--and dark.

I was alone. It was very quiet. This is why I prefer snow to rain--its silence blankets the world just as white envelops the ground. Snow makes the world seem smaller and safer; it encloses you on all sides and puts you in a world not quite in the one you were before white flakes started falling. The sky turns a purple (if you're near any urban light source whatsoever) and everything you do seems hushed and reverent.

The lake itself was quiet on this particular occasion. The water pushed gently at the sand, and I felt like walking across it. I went out on the dock and stood by myself for a while, and Walt Whitman ran through my head:

"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

"Song of Myself" has always been one of my favorite poems, and this seemed particularly fitting. I stood in the wind and felt untamed and untranslatable. Sometimes it's only in the quiet and alone that I can feel everything without the filtering influence of others; I can remember who I am. Chicago might not seem like a place with many of those spots, but if you look hard enough (look for me under your bootsoles) you will find them.

Outside Oxford

Among the things I really love about Oxford is the fact that, although the city is an incredibly cosmopolitan and exciting place, it takes only a 15 minute walk to reach bona fide countryside. It's great to get out of the flat and away from the colleges and bookshops to take in the sights and fresh air.

The English countryside is a great place to indulge in flights of pastoral whimsy...



or bouts of Romantic melancholia if that's your thing.



*

*Note to the solo photographer: When at a really atmospheric abandoned abbey, make sure you pay attention to the length of time you set for your camera's automatic timer. If you neglect this point, you WILL ruin the picture by inopportunely pushing up your glasses like a giant poindexter. I know...   

Shimer = oxygen

If I had to describe Shimer in two words, I would put it as: my life.

Really. I've seen a lot of my friends from high school go on to college, and they view it as a means to an end: a job, or more education, or staying out of the real world, or what have you. They don't see it as any different from high school: just something to be gotten over with.

But Shimer, for me, is different. I live and breathe Shimer; it permeates everything that I do. Books I've read here pop up in just about every conversation I have. I bring books to people who haven't read them (my family is quite often a victim of my literary traverses) so I can discuss them with others. And I am continually blowing my mind with new things, each and every day.

I'm Meg, and I'm in  the middle of my second year at Shimer. I am vegan and harbor ambitions of opening a cafe sometime. I write novels and enjoy running by the lake. I nerd out with video games and role-playing, and I think Tolkien belongs in the Great Books canon. I spent a year in Mexico as an exchange student and hope to travel the world. I was not complete until I found Shimer.

And I'm not afraid to show my face on the web, either (or should I be?):

I am the not-furred one, in case you couldn't tell.

Greetings to All From the Not-So-Reclusive Recluse

Hello to all of you people!

My name is Sara Hall. I just finished my first semester at Shimer. It didn't go perfectly for me. I'm not the best at articulating my thoughts into speech. Writing is my strong suit, and really helped me to get through. But I'm not going to let the things I still need to work on get me down! 

See, I came into this knowing it would be hard. 

I come from a small family farm in Maryland. Not only do I live in a town that no one who doesn't live there knows exists, I live in the county that no one who doesn't live in it knows exists. Go figure. I went to a high school I'd consider very much below par. There was a lot of violence, and a lot of disrespect for fellow students, teachers, and pretty much everyone. Half the teachers didn't care, simply wanted to pass all their students, and jumped at the first chance they had to teach at another school. A few rare and wonderful teachers wanted to be there and stuck it out. I admire all of them, as I could barely handle four years of the place. The curriculum was outdated, which really bothered me. But worst of all, no one wanted to hear my opinion. In my high school, you weren't encouraged to think. You were encouraged to memorize and regurgitate information. If you had a unique take on something (and I remember this particularly happening in my AP English 12 class), the instructor was highly likely to shoot you down and insist on their perspective being the only right one.

Yeah, nothing like Shimer. At Shimer, you have to think. If you're like me, and unaccustomed to doing so, you're likely to have a roller coaster ride of a first semester trying to learn just how to think. I won't lie. It's stressful, crazy, harder than anything I've ever voluntarily jumped into, and probably one of the best experiences of my life. 

I came here knowing it would be hard. It's still hard, and it won't cease to be hard anytime soon. At least not for me. But hey, I'm a stubborn one, and I want to be here, so I'll stick with it. I'll try harder. One of these days, I'll surprise everyone by dominating a class discussion. That'll be the day I take over the world! Bwahahahaha!

Ahem. Anyway...

Back to introducing myself. On campus, I tend to come off as a recluse. That's usually because I sleep normal hours like a crazy person and tend to get involved in IIT things instead of sitting around at Shimer or in the dorms. I'll blog about the wonders of being on IIT's campus often enough, that's for sure. 

So ya'll will be able to identify me in a crowd, should we happen to be in one at the same time: