Yes, a lot of subjects in school sound boring. Math, science, language arts: they are all just uninteresting. But there is an interesting subject: social studies. That is one subject I love to learn about. I will freely read books and watch documentaries on the world’s history, geography, culture, and government systems. If you ask anybody in my grade what subject I like, they would respond the same thing: he just will not shut up in social studies. They say I go on rants talking about history, so much so that the teacher has to stop me from talking. It has been that way since I was little.

When I was very young (I think three) I got a globe for a holiday (I have no idea which one, I just know it was a holiday). I then started memorizing spots on the globe and looking at it. I even beat my aunt at finding where Argentina was on the map. One reason I think I liked it so much was being able to travel. It also made me want to go to other places to know the geography of the area. So I started looking at more about geography and learned several countries, their place on the map, their flag, and some capitals.

One thing that also came from my love of travel and geography was history. A few years after I got the globe, I started learning more and more about World War II history. Now I know all leaders, countries, ships, planes, battles, and heroes of World War II. After starting World War II history, I learned more about the Cold War by going to Washington DC to see the spy museum and learning about the Berlin Wall. Every day of my trip to DC, we would have a different Cold War country food. One day we had Korean, another Chinese, another Russian, another Vietnamese, and we had American (I do not care if the countries are Communist or Democratic, their food tastes really good!). I then started loving going to museums on trips.

When I went to London many years later, it just happened to be the anniversary of Britain entering World War I. At the Imperial War Museum, they had an exhibit about World War I to honor the anniversary. I started learning about its history: the start of industrial warfare. Ironically enough, we went to France on the anniversary of Verdun (no, I am not joking). At the Musee de l’Armee I found out more about the first World War and started to learn about Napoleon and his conquests.

I have started expanding the area of history to include a lot more medieval and ancient histories. Some I learned from school (yes I can learn at school), others I learned from books at home. I learned about the Hunnic and Mongolian conquests, and the glories of the Egyptian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Spanish, British, and Japanese empires. I also learned about the early civilizations like the Sumer to later ones like the Russians and the early American civilizations. Knowing more history also made me interested in the governments throughout the ages.

More recently (in the last year), I have started to learn about modern politics and what is happening right now. It is a complete mess. With terror attacks, nuclear weapons, diseases like Ebola and Zika, crime, wars going on with the terrorists in the Middle East, messes with countries like what happened in Crimea and what is happening in North Korea, it’s very concerning.

I think it is important to know what happened in the past, what is happening now, where other countries are and what they are like because you will need it to help the world. You can help the world now by knowing what worked and did not in the past. You need to know where they are and what they are like to do that. Social studies might not be able to help you like math, language arts, or science, but it is still just as important in my mind. You can save the world with social studies too; you just have to start learning geography, history, and the world’s culture.