Busy, Busy

I know, I bet you all probably miss me dearly since I haven't posted in about two weeks, but here I am, reporting back to you my life, rants, and experiences. And what reason can be used this time against my inactivity? School. Yes, during the summer I had unreasonable excuses such as spending hours playing a computer game or staying outside long and getting tired, but when you have four things for homework and two to three tests to study for all in one night, then that is the best excuse in the world. It's not even an excuse but more of a limit. Honestly, if you've been writing for six hours in school, taking notes, doing homework, taking an essay test, etc. then I doubt you would feel like coming home and after all that homework and studying write a blog entry. However, not a lot of high school students have their own blog either and if they do, it's not updated regularly. Actually, most of the blogs owned by high schoolers can probably be found on the popular website of MySpace. But back to not wanting to write after writing all day long -- there's only so much you can take until you need a break from it and need time to relax. If you just write all day and then have a website which should be more of a recreational hobby for you, you would probably push off any production on that site and more or less do another activity. That's like going to football practice all day and then going for a jog to keep in shape afterwards -- some can do it, some may, but in general, there's only so much you can take. I hope this made some sense...I'm just rambling on illogical thoughts.

School is, what can I call it? -- challenging. Compared to tenth grade, eleventh grade is like comparing a freshman year in college to seventh grade; it just feels like a huge step up even though it's only one year up on the ladder. I have to say that we got away with murder last year. Besides Spanish and SAT Prep (Grammar/Writing), my subjects last year rarely presented any problems or challenges. Sure, the biology tests were sometimes near impossible and we had to write a few research papers in world cultures, but those former and rare difficulties would be a common day-to-day challenge this year. For example, next week in AP Chem I have a lab report due, a long list of vocabulary to define, and a formal five paragraph essay to construct as well as about six diagrams to draw along with it. And then probably after all that, the following week looks like a test in that class already. AP Chem doesn't give you time to relax. You feel like you're finally on top of things and then you're presented with more problems. And people wonder why I'm so stressed out. I honestly envy the people who do sports, have a job, and/or do some other activity that involves school or church or the community and still be able to succeed well in school. These are the people who deserve the attention and I think are technically the smart ones as they can adapt to their schedule and still know what's going on in their education. But of course, I can rarely find people like this. If people are involved in too much sports or activities, their grades may drop in school, or if they're worried more about school than that activity, then their performance may lack in that activity (however I too find this to be rare).

But back to the initial point that I was making (I tend to get very offtrack), this school year is hammering us with work whereas last year was somewhat of a joke. And I have to somewhat blame the curriculum for this. School should be like a tower of Lego blocks, and gradually you'll add one block at a time to the tower. The blocks represent your intelligence levels and everything that you do in school builds up that intelligence. Adding one block at a time prevents the tower from falling over, however adding multiple blocks at once interrupts the balance and down goes the tower. Well, the curriculum at my school, Lakeland, should be helping us add that one block at a time to our tower -- our overall intelligence. But when you have a period of time like when I went from ninth to tenth grade, blocks were barely added to the tower at a fast rate, but they were added slowly one at a time. This means that the learning curve in both grades wasn't very different. But when you're going from tenth grade to eleventh grade, you're just piling on twenty blocks at a time at a fast rate, and then the tower falls over. Your intelligence can't take in all the information at once and you lose it. What I'm trying to say is that the school goes from babying us to treating us like college students out of nowhere, and we can't adjust to that change. The school should be constructed so that we shouldn't feel that change, and that the blocks are added to our intelligence tower without us knowing about it and feeling the stress. We should be able to write essays and research papers without bursting a blood vessel in our brain at this point in our education, but still for many of the students including myself it creates problems. We don't know where to start, we don't know how to properly create a transition from paragraph three to four, etc. -- it's huge problems for us that kids at other schools probably don't have to ponder too much about. And the school wonders why our scores on standardized tests like the PSSA are going down. But of course, they throw "At The Bells" and other stupid programs into our classes now that barely help at all, and they're avoiding the problem in being able to transit students from one grade to another without a major change occurring in the way the student has to work and perform. Yes, eleventh grade should be harder than tenth, maybe by a far margin as it's really starting to prepare us for college with the introduction of our first AP courses as well as major tests like the SAT and the PSSA, but we shouldn't be totally loss and confused in our courses either. I'm having an extremely hard time trying to explain myself (I'm going to do good in peer tutoring; note the sarcasm) so if you can actually take anything useful from the bundle of text, then wow, you deserve an award.

I would probably go on about a lot of other topics, such as Jonathan Coulton, more school, World of Warcraft, etc. but I guess I'll save those for other days, hopefully Saturday and Sunday. But being that I have a lot of homework to do this weekend, who knows when you'll see an entry from me again. I still never talked about the blog to Joey in school, so I'll try to bring it up next week in psychology. As for now, I'm taking a long and relaxing break, and maybe actually go to bed early. That's another topic -- I need more sleep during the school year, but of course such is suited only for another time.

Have a good one.