The end of summer has left me uninspired. In desperation I am turning to the Vox Question of the Day for fodder. Yesterday’s question:

What was (or is) your favorite subject in school?

Too easy, right? Brown’s open curriculum has allowed me to take exactly what I want to take and it appears that Philosophy and Political Science (especially theory-based) are my favorite classes. More generally, my favorite subject in school is discussion. Anything that can be discussed — social sciences and humanities. I can find science, math, languages and the other technical subjects which are more about facts (at least not until the more advanced classes) are harder for me to grasp because they feel less real, in a way. Maybe relevant is a better word. I haven’t found a good way to relate to the disciplines, and so they remain both difficult and boring for me (although I think most of the reason they are boring are because I don’t really understand what is going on past a superficial level).

I’m trying to branch out a bit this semester because I feel like I am missing out. I’m taking baby steps. I know that interdisciplinary technical-type subjects like logic appeal to me. I’m going to give economics a try, and a cognitive scinece class on the evolution of human language.

In high school my favorite subjects were English, History, Programming (! but it was Visual Basic so it was nice and simple and logical, no object-orientation confusion), Photography and Humanities (closest I could get to philosophy, I suppose). My least favorite subjects were Spanish (mostly because of speaking — I enjoyed reading literature and writing about it), Math (I liked Calculus because it brought everything together, but that was it) and Science.