Fin

This is a column I wrote for English (the third of three). I won't be sharing the other two here for various reasons. If something is unclear or you disagree with it, it might be that I didn't state it as well as I could have. This is an unedited draft.

The end of school has always come early for me, at least much earlier than for everyone else. In fact, throughout my four years at TJ, I will have experienced the magical month known as June for no more than a handful of days. I have already said my goodbye to the school building as a high school student for the last time, and I have mixed feelings.

High school as a whole was definitely a positive experience, especially being at TJ. I doubt I would have been as well prepared for the rest of my life at any other school. The common sentiments about the school are all true. The teachers here are amazing compared to those elsewhere. The community is something unparalleled across the nation. The sheer amount of technology that we have access to is astounding. And the amount of work that everyone puts in is great to look at.

But I'm not sorry to leave. Senior year has been a trip from distaste to being downright sick of the school. Maybe it was a bad sense of planning; I had saved the requirements I really didn't want to do until senior year. But I don't think so. I spent the academics fair last year browsing the choices for my fourth history credit, and hit on History of Science and Ideas. Back then it struck me as an amazing concept, and indeed it turned out to be one of my favorite classes throughout the year.

So what is it that leaves such a bad taste in my mouth? It was the atmosphere of the place. Throughout my first three years of attending TJ, I saw a student body of people who diligently applied themselves to everything that they did. Maybe the seniors did a little bit less work, but what they did do they did with a passion that I could admire. This year I haven't seen that.

After college applications were submitted, I saw something that made me lose respect for many people at this school. Left and right, students were dropping the extracurriculars that they had worked hard to build up for the past three years. I realized that no, they were not actually passionate about the endeavors, but were just doing it as a way to add another line to their college application. That thought sickened me.

A friend of mine told me that he decided against a college because it was too much like TJ. The daily routine was wake up, go to class, do problem sets, go to sleep. Honestly, I couldn't agree more. Here at TJ, I don't see anybody thinking to themselves, “This would be a great project, let's work on it together!” In the past, I know it's happened. That kind of thinking is what created TjBash, Kings of Chaos, Intranet and many other great projects that we still enjoy today. Where is the entrepreneurial spirit that drove TJ students of yore? All I see now is “Ugh, time to do this dumb project for English.”

Ender's Game

Ender's Game has been one of my favorite books for a long time. Card's book, with its hypothetical bugger wars, struck home with me, but it wasn't until recently that I thought about why. I picked it up again earlier this year and read it through in a couple days. Then I read the introduction.

They just don't talk like that, she said. They don't think like that.

A guidance counselor for gifted children doesn't believe Card's presentation. When I read this part of the introduction at the beginning of this year, it made me wonder. How can anyone not believe it?

Skip ahead to English class a few months in the future, where Mrs. Colglazier poses a question to the class, "How many of you will admit to liking trashy literature when you were a kid?" Practically everyone raises their hand and starts discussing series: Magic Tree House, Pee Wee Scouts, and so on. Then Mrs. Colglazier continues, "What about Ender's Game?" Immediately I wanted to speak out in the book's defense. Having read Ender's Game only a few months earlier, I had found extremely deep meaning that had not yet been paralleled anywhere.

So what is it that makes people not only not connect with Ender's Game, but hate it? Why is it considered "trashy"? How can so many people be unwilling to accept something that is simply true?

People's views of the world are inherently tied to their experiences. One will often project onto others feelings that he or she has had. The problem, of course, comes when the other has had entirely different experiences. Subtleties are lost, bad inferences are drawn, everything goes haywire. So, to avoid this, many people, I think, just assume that everyone operates exactly as they do and refuse to accept otherwise.

That was deep enough for me to consider Ender's game a meaningful book. But then I realized there's even more.

What made Ender into an Ender? Obviously his genes played a role, but genes alone do not create an Ender. The circumstances must have driven him to grow so strong that nothing could keep him from doing what he had to do. But what circumstances were those? The answer is loneliness. What Ender had going for him was that he didn't have many friends, so he needed to train, needed to improve, needed to show the rest of Battle School that he was the one they should look up at. As Card put it, he needed to become so good at what he does that the rest of the school would have no choice but to notice him. And so he did.

I used to envy the people who went to Haycock and Longfellow because they pretty much have always had friends that were as interested and as talented in math as them. Now I'm not sure envy is the right emotion at all. I had noticed for a long time that the extremely strong math team members at Thomas Jefferson did not come from Longfellow as often as one would think. Instead they come from seemingly random schools. So rather than be envious of the Longfellow students, I wonder if I should be grateful that I went to Frost.

And yet no matter how skilled an individual is, it's nearly impossible to actually accomplish anything without a group of highly skilled friends. Ender simply could not have defeated the Buggers without his crew, no matter how long he trained. At some point, friendships have to be formed, loneliness has to be abandoned, but what is that point?

When I look at our math team, I wonder how many of them would become Enders in another situation. How many of them could rise to be a force to be reckoned with, but don't because they know that they have friends no matter how good or bad they are. And now I wonder, is high school too early? Magnet schools provide great opportunities for very bright students to interact with other very bright students, an experience that I know is extremely useful, but there's something that you lose when you do that. You lose the ability to produce an Ender.