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In my freshman year, I asked my immature self-righteous self, "Why am I in school?" The first thing that crept into my permeable, adolescent mind was that I attended school because the repressive authority figures (whom I felt were infringing on my rights) put me there. I concluded that teachers served only to imprint evil ideas into the minds of youth, consequently sucking every inkling of creativity from our brains. I thought it was a cleverly concealed, numerical system based on the number five. In literature class I learned about five paragraph essays, and in gym I was forced to run five laps a day. In math class, however, I discovered my idea was erroneous because I learned that five plus five is not five, but ten. Other justifications for the existence of school flashed through my mind. I thought of an alien plot to convert teenagers to doing their bidding, and tobacco industries' schemes to lure children into buying their products. Nothing fit. I decided just to go along with it until I could make it make sense.

One day it finally hit me. We were studying Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in my freshman honors writing class. I had always thought of the tragedy as a story about two youths who happen to fall in an immature, self-destructive love. Each of us was assigned to groups to reenact a scene from the play, and I jokingly asked to play the nurse. How the kids responded intrigued me. The fact that they thought I, a guy, couldn't play the nurse sparked a wick, and I decided I was going to be the best nurse ever to explode on the stage of the freshmen honors writing class. That fateful week, I imprinted the lines of the supportive, motherly nurse in my head: they seemed to permeate my mind as easily as my prior anti-school sentiment. On the day of the performance, I walked onto the stage, dressed in my grandmother's authentic Italian ensemble, and poured my heart and soul into the scene. The look of awe on my peers' faces was all I needed to...