Student Paper -- Part IV

Here is the ending of the student memoir I have been posting this week (See prior posts for the first parts of this paper. Enjoy . . .

A few days ago I asked a fellow student what his major was. When he said Biochemistry, I asked, “Pre-med?”
“Pre-dent,” he said. “You?”
“I’m pre-med, but I’m not a science major.” I hesitated. “I’m actually majoring in English.”
I waited for the usual response: the startled look, the assurance that I must be insane. It’s the same reaction I get from English majors when I tell them I’m pre-med. But he just sort of shrugged, as if this were not such a big deal.
“I like to read and write,” he told me. “By the end of the week I’m tired of using the analytical side of my brain, so I write crazy poetry.”
As I walked away, I wondered what had happened to all the well-rounded people in America. It may be one of the greatest flaws in our education system. For some reason we grow up thinking that we need only appreciate one subject, understand one thing. The two poles are usually the humanities at one end and math and science at the other. Why the separation? They’re all just as much the same as they are different. Each discipline needs another. If everyone were to recognize this, I think they would find learning more enjoyable. It’s part of the rediscovery process. The less we appreciate, the more we lose.
I’m not sure how much of our second sight we can get back. I keep searching for it, only to find that most of the time, I’ve struck it unawares, glimpsing that other world for a priceless fragment of a second. But I’ve made progress. Sometimes, now, there are days I can look at the undulating peaks and valleys of the sine function and see in it the same spark of life I perceived, at age five, in a paperclip.