The Most Powerful Card on Earth?

If knowledge is power, a library card is the most valuable tool in the quest for a powerful mind.

This idea reminds me of a line from Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon's character Will is a brilliant, but impoverished, kid from Southie in Boston. After a heated discussion with a Harvard grad student in a bar, in which the student quotes a text and tries to pass it off as his own original thought, Will calls him out on the plagiarism and states:

"See, the sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you're gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own and you're going to come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life: one, don't do that, and two, you dropped 150 grand on a f***in' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library."

Back to the Basics

Talk about a trip down memory lane--this morning I discovered my old textbooks from my very first Spanish courses in college. As I thumbed through the colorful pages filled to the brim with words, structures, stories and pictures, I realized what a journey I've taken in learning the language and becoming immersed in it. The process of learning a language is interesting because it's so fluid and can be approached in such a variety of ways. For example, textbooks are helpful because they present vocabulary, expressions, and explain grammatical structures so that a student can better understand why the language behaves as it does. On the other hand, being immersed in a culture and learning the language through active listening and talking is essential. One can capture a language in leaps and bounds through living it, and many aspects of grammar and expressions are absorbed unconsciously as the ear becomes more attuned to what sounds "correct" and "not quite right". In reviewing my texts this morning it became clear that while my abilities reached unforeseen levels while living abroad, texts and formal classes set the stage for more advanced language learning and provide a physical, conceptual reference that can serve a student of language for the rest of their life.