Spanish, PSATs, and Life

The inactivity in this blog has been horrid the last six days as the members of this blog are busy with school, work, and life in general lately. I can pretty much say that as Caitlin has the same classes as me in school, Jenifer is related to me, and Chase, well, we accidentally left him in the Bermuda Triangle. What else can I say though? School has been a stress-producing enzyme the past week alone, and with the coming two weeks it should promise to increase and digest the cell that we function upon. Damn, that biology got to my head. Anyhow, school this past week was like the following:

• Monday - Got Spanish skit assigned.
• Tuesday - Craig came over to work on Spanish skit with me. It took seven hours to look up and translate plus just creating the skit in English alone.
  
• Wednesday - Fixed errors in Spanish skit. I think we took a pop quiz this day, which I failed. Went over Carol's house with Craig, Kyle, and Darrin to do homework (math, English, and Spanish)
  
• Thursday - Spanish teacher wasn't there -- hurray! But still, we had to practice the Spanish skit, which I typed up the night before, and study it. I already had my eight lines memorized from the night before, but practice makes perfect.
• Friday - We did the skit and later received a 100 on it. Good, right? No! The teacher goes and accuses us of "punching in" the words on the computer and having the computer translate for us, as we had "a lot of grammar mistakes" and "things that we were never taught before". The two things, and the only two things, that we used to help Craig and I translate our skit was the yellow Spanish dictionary we have, and this audio CD that I bought back a long time ago at Sam's Club that had some Spanish restaurant translations in there. Oh yes, our skit was supposed to be a restaurant skit -- I forgot to mention.
  

The following week includes the following:

• An essay called "Freedom's Challenge" is due for English on Friday. This essay also has to be recorded on a voice recorder.
  
• Big, and I mean huge, Spanish test this week.
• Computer test Wednesday and Thursday.
• We'll probably get another Spanish project assigned, as we still have these upcoming assignments that she quickly mentioned in the past that we'll probably have to do: family tree, map of Spain/Mexico/South America, and Christmas cards.
  
• Reflections is due in a following week after this one. This is for English.
  
• Math homework probably everday.
• Reading chapter two of a book in SAT Prep that we'll be taking a test on next Monday.
• World cultures quiz on ancient China.

I think that summed about everything up, and I'm happy that I was able to type that up because I just realized that I really need to move my ass. That Spanish last week, that was accused of being wrongly done, clogged up my schedule for doing any of my favorite hobbies, like playing Runescape and playing catch with the football. Actually I haven't played Runescape since last weekend, and I haven't touched the game today yet, and probably won't. This may be a good thing because my addiction to Runescape just came to a hault all of a sudden, as I had no desire whatsoever to play it at all this week. If anything it may come to the point of (x.y) that I might only play Runescape once a week, like Caitlin, or just quit for a while all together. I realized that I have wasted too much of my life on a video game (about one year and five months) when I could have been advicing in my level of education by studying more and reading books. The one thing that I always question is why I did so good in school last year in the 9th grade, being first in the class, while playing Runescape a lot more than I did this year so far. Even if I had a lot of homework, I would come home from school and sit on the computer for a good hour playing Runescape and then get off and do homework and/or study. Was it the easy electives that I took last year compared to the harder ones of this year? Just maybe. Just maybe...

Even with all of this school work, I had to go to school early this chilly Saturday morning for not Saturday detention or anything of that matter, but for the PSATs. I'm not permitted to say any exact information about these standarized tests that will prepare you to take the SATs that count, but I shall make a general statement behind them. That is: it was the best guessing game I ever played. Honestly, I only knew exact answers for some of both the English, math, writing, and grammar questions of the test, but the others were just a guess, or I left them blank. With the two math sections combined, I left about 15 questions blank. Those that I left blank could've either earned me 15 points, or have made me lose 3 3/4 points if I had knew them or guessed on them. Well, that's actually a false statement because the grid problems for math are different, because if you get one wrong, you don't lose any points. Anyhow, the test isn't that easy unless you know vocabulary terms that you may have never seen before or have seen but don't know the different meanings of it, know everything about basic math, geometry, and algebra and how to apply these ways in problems that have weird wording, and can read extremely fast and interpret what you have read to the fullest when questioned about the selection you had read -- in a 25 minute limit too. Before this exam, I never realized how fast 25 minutes flew by. To prepare for the actual SATs, I'm going to start reading more in my spare time besides playing Runescape, try to go online and learn some math because math is the subject I have the most trouble with as I cannot logically think, and also buy some books and workbooks concerning different types of SAT questions. I don't know if I should be typing this to the public viewing, but thank God there was no essay on the PSAT test.

I'll be going bowling shortly with Darrin, Corey, Kyle, and the other guys (and the single girl Carol) so I'll be ending this blog entry in exactly three seconds. Three...two...one, wait! I forgot about the blog special:

Picture of the Day

Have a good one.