To Learn Is To Live by Neela

To Learn Is To Live by Neela - January 2025 Scholarship Essay

“Why are we even learning this?” Three years ago, I uttered the six forbidden words that should never EVER be said to any teacher, let alone my math teacher. The day was cold and cloudy, and the sun was unwilling to shine its warm rays into the classroom. It was a gloomy day for the hardships of math. My class had just been introduced to mathematical proofs—deductive arguments for a mathematical statement—and as usual, it did not make sense. It took less than a second for me to notice that my outburst should have been instead swallowed and forgotten. The room fell into a hush as my teacher abruptly ceased teaching and slowly turned towards me.
“We are not here just to memorize and forget; math is logic, everything we do is logic—math is here to expand our knowledge, guiding us to use our brains and understand the world.” And with that, he turned back around and began teaching once more.
I never once asked him that question again, but the eye-opening sentence stubbornly stuck to me. It tickled my brain that we were not at school just to learn but rather to develop our minds in order to understand life around us. How was that possible? How were we to go about and use proofs, of all things, to understand the world? A couple of years later, I realized what my teacher had been trying to say.
Our world is complex and it produces complex problems. Math is one of the many subjects that gives us the skills to keep innovation running in our society, expanding our ideas into something more and creating real-life impacts. Glancing down at a list of mathematical problems, we might automatically see a grueling process of numbers and equations, but, if we look more closely, we might discover how one can find the rate of the spread of infectious diseases, or how exactly one should construct a building to avoid a natural disaster. Examining math–and any school subject—in this manner provides a more meaningful way to learn. It becomes more applicable to students who question the point of learning as I did.
Today, I happily accept every challenging exam thrown at me as it brings me one step closer to my goal of impacting the world and helping others. With only a few words, my math teacher changed my entire journey of learning; through him, I realized that there is no limit of knowledge an individual can consume, and we can use it to our advantage in changing the world; we can use our acquired skills to innovate and create real-life impacts; we can learn so that we can live.