I wanted to attend St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., after graduating high school. But my admission application was rejected, and attendance costs would have been too high, regardless. But I tried. Mine is a “don’t give up” attitude, until there is no other choice. The school specializes in a classical education in the truest sense: Learning from and thinking like dead Greeks or Renaissance-era Europeans, among others.

“Through close engagement with the works of some of the world’s greatest writers and thinkers—from Homer, Plato, and Euclid to Nietzsche, Einstein, and Woolf—students at St. John’s College grapple with fundamental questions that confront us as human beings”, the school’s website explains. “As they participate in lively discussions and throw themselves into the activity of translating, writing, demonstrating, conducting experiments, and analyzing musical compositions, St. John’s students learn to speak articulately, read attentively, reason effectively, and think creatively”.

Maybe attending the school would have prevented thinking myself so clever today—only to be rightly, and smartly, corrected later on. Live and learn, eh?