Meet Shahruz Ghaemi

I'm 16 years old, and my name is Shahruz Ghaemi. My father came from Iran, and my mother came from China. I speak some Chinese, I understand some Farsi, and, recently, I've started to study Spanish.

I attend one of the most competitive schools in the city, if not the country. The educational system is validly criticized as being broken and dysfunctional. The primary goal should be, like the internet, as a great leveler. It ought to be able to provide everybody in America with opportunity, but an administrative culture that focuses on standardized testing does us no good at all because there is a difference between knowledge and understanding.

My jazz piano teacher has really shown me new ways of thinking about learning. Jazz really required me to use a different set of skills than I'd been using for classical piano because I had to infuse music with my own touches. It's one thing to regurgitate a fancy maneuver you've learned, but it's another thing to be able to improvise a harmonically stable piece by yourself.

And, if you truly understand something, it's far more important to you. It's more likely to be retained, it's far more likely to have some sort of meaning to you.