Academic Tourism

It hit me like a freight train. This idea that without assigned academic writing in any given course we are all mere tourists. We are given an overview of what we are supposed to learn, but get this, never actually learn it. Take myself for example, I super suck at math, hence my chosen major. I have always sucked at anything mathematical until I reached college. I took a theories of mathematical thought course, where we had to answer a whole lot of questions that any math scholar would have deemed trivial, but to someone like myself, the questions were designed to create more questions, which in turn lit a fire under my booty to go out and find those answers for myself. I had a pure sense of my own curiosity in the field of math (blehh!) that I had never had or conceived I would have. And at the end of the day I was asking my own questions from my own interest, not regurgitating answers from questions designed by the lecture, or furthermore, what the teacher thought I should be curious about.