The pandemic should not be a farewell to traditional education in favor of innovative alternatives, but rather a temporary turn to the high-tech; from the pandemic, we can garner even more appreciation for the traditional educational methods that we will hopefully be returning to soon.
In an effort to comprehend the exponential growth and the resulting large numbers associated with coronavirus, I have furnished some heuristic analogies that I hope will help display the full expanse of the disease more concretely. If we take the time to comprehend the intuition-defying numbers of confirmed and new cases of the coronavirus, these numbers, while terribly disheartening, should become more manageable.
With examinations, the pressures of job applications or graduate schools, and our own internal wills to maintain high GPAs looming over each semester, we often forget that learning can be fun. The coronavirus, while wreaking havoc in almost all aspects of our lives, can — if we make the most of the opportunity it has provided us — bring back the joys associated with being curious.
Both mechanical pencils and standard pencils require a certain degree of maintenance; while the regular sharpening of standard pencils is certainly more frequent than lead replacement in mechanical pencils, replacing lead is significantly less cathartic of an activity as grinding down a pencil.
This planted a doubt in my mind about my educational philosophy: in an age where technology makes school work more and more convenient, why do I even use pencil and paper to take notes at all?
My great discovery of my first semester of college, thus, has been that nothing should impede learning for the sake of learning, not even finals.
Realizing that not everyone at Princeton concerned themselves with looking proper and that such concern would waste valuable time considering ever-important essays and problem sets have now fully validated my personal decision to no longer care about fashion.
We hear often of ways to lessen the college transition — perhaps the best way to do so is not to acknowledge the differences between past and future lives, rather to minimize those differences.
