Direct TV Scholarship

The internet is an amazing thing as it enables one to communicate with more than a hundred thousand in a matter of seconds. However the development of social media and apples group messaging are not the things that have had a great (if significant at all) impact on my life. The true acceleration that has occurred with these developments is the capability to access information. At the push of a button one could be on a Chilean website that explains their current events in spanish, and with another click that page could be translated to English, French, or Japanese. For me being able to take classes online during the school year, and being given the access to several textbooks on my online high school site literally gave me the capability to explore the history of our world and our government. Websites like www.codecademy.com and www.brilliant.org have also given tremendous insite into how the world works, through logic and patterns. Exploring the world through shows like Earth have also been utilized by the world today, but simply watching life is not equal to the understanding which is given by reading about behaviors and learning about history. The internet gives us a link to an unfathomable amount of information and information is exploration.

What Maths Really IS!

Mathematics is not adding, subtracting, dividing or multiplying. In grade school I remember their was too great an emphasis on this sort of stuff, it was boring and nobody really liked it. As I grew up however I began to realize that it is A LOT more than just simple functions, more than trigonometry, more than geometry, more than algebra, and more than calculus. It is the study of observation. It is the ability to make connections about the things around you and assign values to them and understand how these things will react quantitatively. Real Math is fun! The books that we get and read in school are not Mathematics, though they may help us learn how to observe the world around them their contents, being a bunch of exercises in not real Mathematics (for you english majors that are catching onto the capitalized "M" in Mathematics I will tell you now that Mathematics is more of a language than verbal language will ever be). To all of you that are just beginning to participate in Math classes (or even those of you that have PhD's in several Mathematics concepts) understand that Math lives, breaths, and should not ever be given up on. A fundamental understanding of Mathematics is a entire understanding of the ways in which our observable world can be viewed. Never look at things one way or the way that a teacher tell you to. Discover! Be willing to try things that you think may work! And if your answer doesn't make sense take it to a teacher, then reflect. What prevented it from working? What law or rule was broken? If no rule was broken than it isn't likely that your answer is wrong. And never forget that the greatest Mathematics is discovered when new rules are made, rules that flow the laws of observation, such as Riemann's and Newton's great discoveries of Calculus. If you aren't having fun doing Math then you very simply are not doing it right.