My name is Sydney Gardner, and I love learning.
From the dawn of time, or maybe just SAT/ACT testing, students in America have learned to hate learning. Whether it be writing DBQ after DBQ for AP tests in high school or trying to remember something, anything, about your required biology prerequisite your freshman year of college, students are conditioned to dread learning something new. After years of struggling for a perfect GPA — something that I can look back and be glad to have failed at — I have learned that grades are irrelevant compared to the real value of learning something new. As a I prepare to enter my senior year of college, I can't help but regret all the time I spent hating that I didn't know something, rather than embracing it.
I've always been a teacher's pet and a perfectionist when it comes to school, but that never meant that I always enjoyed school. In high school, it was always more important to me that I got the grade instead of getting the value out of the lessons I was taught. There were classes I loved, but the classes I hated always were the ones I couldn't be the best at. Now, I look back and wish that I would've embraced the not knowing. Knowing everything makes life boring.
As I write out the final classes I need to graduate, I can't help but be sad at the thought of never being able to take a class just for the sake of learning something new. My favorite college classes have been the ones where I had no idea what I was getting into. My sophomore year, I took a World War I class that had five required textbooks, six kids in the class and a professor that was the smartest person I've ever met. I had no idea what he was talking about 80 percent of the time, but that made it all the better. I struggled through every paper and every chapter of reading, but I would do it all over again. I will never forget that class, or the 20 percent of information that I actually retained.
Next year, wherever I am, I know I will miss Athens more than I can even comprehend in this moment. Beyond that, I will miss the freedom to learn any and everything that I want to. Never again will I be able to learn about young adult literature in the morning, hominids in the afternoon and spend the evening getting lost in a Web design lesson. Wherever you are in life, when you discover that you don't know something, don't be disappointed. Be grateful for the opportunity learn. Knowing everything is cool, but discovering what you don't know is more fun.
