Why do my friends have to be so smart? Anne and Molly are being interviewed this week to try out for the Truman Scholarship, Molly and Meghan just got accepted into the Academy exchange program, and over spring break I found out that Leah turned down a full ride to Princeton so that she could come here instead. Josh says he knew his square roots when he was four, last year Beth got the CS cookie tray (not the real name of the award), and Meghan recieved the history award. Both those awards go to the top person in those classes out of everyone in in our grade for the whole year. Then there's me who's just happy to have only 2 C's at 10 week grades.

What really gets me is that they all seem to be really good at learning for the sake of gaining an understanding and applying the material while thinking on their own. All my life I've been used to being spoon fed material, regurgttating it on a test, and then expeling it from my mind after having put no real thought into it on my own. I did not come to this realization until this past year, more specifically this past semester. Now I'm left wondering if I actually have any ability to think on my own and am almost envious of the natural ease at which they assertain things and put their own thoughts into it instead of just quoting verbatim what someone else has already discovered and concluded. They have the ability to think on a higher level and actually use that ability, whereas a lot of people see it as a wast of time and energy and conclude that the actual thinking should be left to other people while we cram for the next test so that we can just dump all of the information after it's over. Perhaps that is why I'm in college. So that I can learn to think.