I realized today that three of the most formative classes I've ever taken have been English classes. There was AP Lit in high school that gave me validation and the confidence to continue, then my dystopian literature class in Ohio that taught me not to be a snob, and now, there's my wonderful honors class on Nabokov and cognitive science that has opened my mind and stretched my brain in all sorts of amazing ways. Why is that? Is there a particular reason that I feel most alive in an English classroom? Linguistics gives me the spine tingle too, and I could never give it up, because at this point, linguistics is me– our integration is total and I wouldn't want it to be any other way, but I feel so strangely invigorated when I'm analyzing literature. No, more than that– I feel smart. I feel capable. If it's done right, it's right at that proximal zone between too hard and too easy, and it's just. So indescribable. I don't know if I will ever take another English class in my life, but the ones I've taken up til now have done so much in changing the way my mind works, and making me (hopefully) more open to the world. This is why I'm always so salty about schools cutting funding from the humanities. Sure, math and science might get us to the moon, but literature and philosophy make us human. This isn't any shade on STEM, by the way– I love STEM. I do cognitive science and computer science for goodness' sakes– and just wait til you hear my proposal on the subject of integrating math and linguistics– it's a doozy. But don't you see the distinction? I've learned so much about the world we live in, and even who I am as a person just by taking these too-few literature classes, things that I frankly could never have learned in my freshman physics lab (for example). And so, I'm always going to be grateful for these opportunities that I had to stretch my wings and grow. It seems like whenever I hit a wall in my life, whenever it came to a point where I just wasn't good enough, a lovely opportunity for one of these classes presented itself, and I took it and saw that maybe I could be good for something after all. Vacuous positive reinforcement? Maybe. But I'd like to think of it in slightly more pedantic terms. Literary critic Joshua Landy describes some works of fiction as "formative"; that is, they can help us to grow and learn even as we read through them. I think my experiences in the literature classrooms have been formative. I've learned innumerable things from innumerable sources, and I deeply treasure all my experiences, but these classes, these forays into the world of literature and analysis, these have been the backbone of my intellectual development, and I would despair for anyone who never had the chance to engage in such experiences as these.