I was regularly confronted by the idea that my natural curiosity had to take a back seat to more important matters.

Why that struck me as strangely foreign is a conversation for another day, but too often in school, it felt like I wasn’t learning for learning’s sake. They were actually there in that specific class because they wanted to be - because they wanted to learn.

No pressure to succeed nor fear of failure.

Those people chilling in the lecture hall were auditing the class.

And I was completely beside myself at the idea that someone could appear so calm and stress-free in class when I felt so much pressure to do well.Īt some point, I finally figured out why that was. Sometimes they’d jot down some notes sometimes they wouldn’t. There were times I’d be sitting in my college classes frantically scribbling away in my notebook, hand cramping, making sure I had every note from the lecture recorded for when I’d have to study for the inevitable exam.Įvery now and again I’d look around the lecture hall and notice one or two people just sitting back, taking in the info on the PowerPoint slides and listening intently to the professor talk.

Statistics and probability khan academy