Today in my Lit. class the teacher read Plato's Allegory of the Cave. It was so neat because it made me think about the Academy and what was going through my head when I left. I don't know if many other people had as hard of time going back into "normal society" as I did, but this story really would have helped me I think.

I was also really affected (i cried) by Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach.


Anyway, my question is did going to the Academy profoundly affect your literary tastes or has any particular work reminded you strongly of times at the Academy?

Wow, such interesting timing...
I *just* got back from my math class at which my professor went on a little tangent (ha, no pun intended) about infinite and trans-finite numbers. Not really part of the class, but just to do something different I guess.
At MSA I was in the class "Perfect and Pathological Mathematics" and in it we talked about those numbers a lot, like C and Aleph naught.
This really brought me back today.

:w00t: I agree with the Allegory of a Cave idea!!!!!!! It's so cool that you said that because I thought the same thing! We used it earlier this year to compare to Grendel or something like that and i ended up using it in lists of "significant literary works" on some applications bc it reminded me of MSA. That's crazy, haha, I'm glad you said that!
One day in calculus we got an answer "three is less than/equal to X less than/equal to three" and a couple of us tried to prove to our teacher that there was a number between three and three... one of the most exciting days in calc. :geek, lol, it also reminded me of the good ol days a little.

YES, that's awesome! :lol:

RICHARD BACH!!!! SCORE!!!

Ok, I'm just psyched that someone else has read R. Bach. His books (of which JLS, as hard as it is to believe, isn't even the best) are amazing...I've read all of them except maybe one or two of the more obscure and hard-to-find ones. If you're interested in reading more of his awesome epiphanic awesomeness [sic], you should try The Bridge Across Forever, Illusions (there was a quote from this book in the candlelight ceremony program from my year, which made me cry even more at the time, as it was just so appropriate and beautiful), and One to get the full Richard Bach experience. His thoughts are utterly beautiful...

Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," "The Matrix," The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Ayn Rand's works, Orson Scott Card's Ender's series, Dostoevskii's Notes from the Underground (originally picked up in my Russian history-type major class), 1984, Brave New World (bought for me by Jason's parents at the Waldenbooks in Columbia Mall on Parents Day at my MSA—Jason being the guy I went out with at MSA), Richard Matheson's What Dreams May Come, Asimov's I, Robot (read for the book discussion I never actually went to), the play "Talley's Folly," Edgar Lee Masters' poem from Spoon River Anthology "George Gray," any and all Richard Bach books, "Ghost in the Shell," "Grave of the Fireflies," books by J.G. Ballard, and Siddhartha all influenced my thought during and after the Academy and to this day remind me of MSA, whether because I discussed them there or (in the case of the movies) saw them there or because I read them later and was struck by pure diamond laser beams of MSA-related epiphany...mmm, MSA-books...

Yeah, MSA really got me started on this whole renaissance of thought, so to speak, which was quite dramatic for me at the time, especially considering that my "reintegration" into normal society was so strange after being among like-minded people at MSA. Something just clicked and I thought, "Hot damn, I'm smart! I get it!" and then proceeded to distance myself a bit from being the silly, flirty girl I'd thought I was prior to that point. After that, I read dozens of books recommended by other scholars or stemming from things I'd read about while at MSA, etc.—I spent pretty much the rest of that summer reading a whole lot and trying to get to the library to get more books and talk to various scholars online.

The book that I've currently lent out to a friend of mine (for about a year now, so I should probably start thinking about getting it back from her), Michio Kaku's Visions, which deals with predictions about quantum mechanics' role and applications in technology up until about 2050, is something I picked up at a Waldenbooks on the spur of the moment later on in my junior year, as I got interested in it in my physics minor at MSA. I started reading Richard Feynman's autobiographical works later that summer, too, after hearing about him in my physics class and from another scholar from my high school, and last year, continuing in that same vein, I took a physics-for-poets type class here that provided a fairly in-depth overview (is that an oxymoron, or what?) of physics principles like relativity and quantum mechanics.

So yeah, no kiddin', MSA influenced my literary progress incredibly much. I'd always read a lot before that, anyway, picking up every random thing we had in our cluttered house (which I think must have literally thousands of books and magazines in various places), but never really with a purpose in mind. MSA really got me kicked into high gear as far as reading was concerned, giving me the sense that I was on a mission to become as erudite as possible as quickly as possible.

Ah...MSA...

:D

[[feels inspired]]

While we're on MSA-discussion, I saw Brett Dockery and Loranne Nassir at the Conference Academic Bowl on Tuesday. And today the St. Louis Post Dispatch was open on my teacher's desk, and there was a picture of Sutton Laseter modeling jeans on the Everyday page.

I saw Hannah and Will at Rolla nerd bowl!

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I never see anyone! :( :( :( :@

are you guys thinkin you'll go to the alum day this year? ( I know it's early, but I haven't seen anyone since then last year!!!) Yes, I jacked the topic.

We did an activity in AP LA today that reminded me slightly of msa. Talking about classification we all were given ribbons of different colors and eventually found out that they denoted how our teacher (student teacher) was going to treat us all hour. I was ignored, lol, stupid blue ribbon. But then he related it to other hasty classifications in society and that reminded me of scholar discussions though no discussion followed and no one seemed to quite take the point to heart.

Heh...we did an activity like that one time in jr. high on my team (a group of about 70? kids who have all their classes together with the same set of 5 or 6 teachers). The teachers got us all together in the common team room and then without warning started treating kids differently according to a couple rough categories, essentially "smart kids" and "dumb kids." The kids dubbed "smart" got to do a whole lot of goofing off and reading, whereas the "dumb" kids had to do the smart kids' bidding and do remedial work while the teachers continually called them names and told them to act better, like the smart kids. I got to be one of the "smart" kids, oddly enough ;), and had a great day.

The whole point of the exercise, of course, was to subtly get people pissed off about the idea of discrimination—and eventually we students, including those of us who were getting better treatment, proposed a mutiny, lashing out at the teachers a bit, even though the actual smart ones among us got the idea pretty quickly that we were being manipulated. It was pretty fun to shout about revolution, anyway, and it was fun when I got to boss around the "dumb" ones, so all in all I had a great day with that.

Wow! I would really like to do an activity like that in my gifted class! I am one of only 3 seniors in a class of freshmen (around 11 of them)! I wish I could teach that class actually because the seniors get stuck doing all the work on the student lit. magazine! :angry: Do anyone know a teachers resource or model I could point my teacher to so we could do that one day?

Wow this is really off the subject.

Last week (parents day), I went to wal-mart to buy a rubik's cube for my major. After being at MSA for two weeks, it seemed like everyone there was brain dead.

Any tips or advice for my "post msa" period that begins next saturday?

Please please please get your friends this URL... for several months (at least) after MSA, you'll go through withdrawal if you don't have a constant infusion of smartness, which not many people you normally come in contact with can provide. Plus, it's so great to have new people bringing new topics to the table, new points of view to the conversation. Try to keep in touch, even if not through here. Some of the best friends I have, I made at MSA.

Rubix Cube!! :lol: My mom bought me one a few weeks after MSA when I was feeling blue and it totally changed my entire week! Yeah for you!

Post-MSA is gonna stink. Wait... it already does... I love everyone I met there! I've been givin' out this URL and hopefully some of my buddies will join. I dont know what I'd do if I totally lost contact with them!

Am I like the only one at MSA who hasn't solved the Rubix cube yet? o_o I really need to get my hands on one of those...

I've never solved on either but I've never really tried-

The closest thing I've felt to MSA since leaving was Cornerstone music festival this summer. It was while I was at an impromptu Joy Electric dance party, watching fireworks and scaring P.O.D. fans, that I realized: There are people in the world who will dance to Joy Electric with me.

It was rather similar to walking back from a program on I-don't-even-remember-what and discussing quantum physics with some random guy and thinking: There are people in the world who will talk about parallel universes with me.

Ah, how I crave that feeling....