Paideia Moments by Henna

Paideia Moments by Henna - April 2019 Scholarship Essay

I seek not the narrow focus of a singular subject, but instead an all encompassing education, and deeper understanding of the world as a whole. Rather than devoting myself to a particular discipline, I instead wish to enhance the very way I think, gaining a higher understanding though connective insights. The Greeks have a word for this: paideia. They use it when referring to the education of the ideal citizen who is well versed in the arts, humanities, and sciences thereby creating an enlightened outlook born of the ability to see things from multiple perspectives. I understand this and experience it as making connections between different ways of knowing and understanding complex issues. It is through these connections, which I have grown to categorize as “paideia moments”, that I have been able to overcome academic obstacles and ultimately further my understanding of different subjects.

I have always loved the simplicity of math. From the basic additive properties to the elegant proofs of geometry, mathematics was a constant in my life of uncertainty. My junior year calculus class was a joy, and I was delighted by the effortlessness is took me to understand the different derivatives and integrals we studied. It was because of this class that I decided to take multivariable calculus, a daunting subject that I would have been too scared to touch if it hadn’t been for the encouragement of my calculus teacher. While I thought making the decision to take the class was hard, little did I know the true obstacles that lay before me.
Walking into class on my first day of multivariable was frightening in itself, as the small class was made up of what I could only classify as geniuses: the smartest kids in school who never studied a day in their life, but simply understood everything. I was not one of those kids. Sitting down at a desk, I soon realized I was in over my head. As the first few weeks progressed, I remained terrified both of my classmates and the material we studied. There I was in three dimensions, climbing gradients and integrating surfaces, no salvation in sight. However, it was when I was struggling to grasp onto a structure that I realized: I were no longer in the realm of the AABBA limericks and three line haikus, but instead the daunting world of free verse, a land without rules. In my paideia moment, I realized mathematics is poetry in its purest form, a culmination of numbers coming together to create an extraordinary equation.

It is through this paideia moment that I was able to redirect my mind, and approach this class with a whole new mentality. I let go of the rigid boundaries I had set for the world of mathematics, and opened it up to the endless possibilities found in poetry. I was able to look at equations and take the creative approach that my teacher had been trying so desperately to instill in me, and within a few weeks everything began clicking together. Suddenly, the three dimensional integrals I struggled with weren’t an incoherent set of numbers, but a line of poetry that I simply needed to decipher in order to solve. With this realization, my entire attitude towards the class and the subject changed, and I found myself once again, completely in love with mathematics.