Coming to Phillips Exeter Academy, many pleasant and unpleasant surprises were waiting for me. I came from a small international school in Japan where we had a textbook system of math to follow. It was a MYP system that included presentations and papers about math. I consistently scored full scores in every criterion and was at the top of my school for math. Yet, I felt through then the lack of self-involvement and self-guided learning in the class. It felt like the teachers had everything planned for us, and all we had to do was sit there and wait to be fed the steps. It was much easier to consistently score higher grades because, with an absence of self-directed learning, passive learning becomes increasingly trivial.