Now that the school year is happily drawing to an end, I would like to applaud and even express my gratitude to the geniuses that set up the sophomore curriculum.

Why? Well, in addition to the fact that I obviously learned a ton of interesting stuff this year, I would just like to point out that this was really the first year where all my classes … well, kind of connected I guess.

My memories of last year are somewhat scattered, but I can still remember English lessons on the impact of Chinese history on Chinese literature, various theorems on triangles and other geometric shapes in geometry, and attempting to draw pictures of jawless fish and decapods in biology. These were all interesting, but they don’t really have anything to do with one another.

This year was a totally different story.

A lecture on the Romantics in history class would be followed up next period with a lesson on literature from that same period. A chemistry class with ellipses would follow a frustrating and somewhat confusing math class on that dreaded conic section. Then perhaps we would learn the next day about Renaissance science that incidentally involved ellipses again.

Links such as these existed primarily between our English and history classes. I even had these two classes back to back, so that after reading a significant poem in a history slideshow, the discussion on the same poem the next period in English would be easier to get engaged in. I could thus remember the circumstances for which the poem was written with a type of understanding that only a history class could provide.

Besides making classes a bit more interesting, these connections just made lessons easier to pay attention to.

Colonialist literature was just a lot easier to appreciate after a lesson about the Europeans' policies and actions during the colonization of Africa. Ellipses even proved kind of interesting after I actually got and remembered the equation for them and learned how they actually applied to real-life stuff.

I think that having these connections made the year a whole lot more enjoyable. On those days where I didn’t feel like listening or making any effort, these connections were the only thing that really registered in my brain. When I was working hard and paying attention, these links made my interest grow, and thus created a feedback cycle.

So thank you to whoever planned out the sophomore curriculum for making learning things this year as enjoyable as they can get.