Do They Sell Time on eBay?
I’d like to buy some time, please. Just an hour or two per day. And maybe another hour for sleep. The closest thing that I could find to buying time on eBay was Power-Nap. Supposedly, it gives you three hours of sleep in twenty minutes…whatever. Still, someone could make a huge profit off of selling time. Just shrinkwrap it, give it a fancy name like “Astrotime” or “24/7 Plus,” and you’ve got a marketable product. Woo!
I don’t think that my problem is that I don’t have enough time, really, but rather than I suck at making up a schedule and actually sticking to it. I end up doing something entirely different from what I had planned. I guess I just need to get into the habit or something, and then I’ll be better, but for now my chronic procrastination problem can only get worse. If I use my time wisely and spread out the work, I’ll have no problem reading two books by Sunday, writing essays on both, and handing the essays in next week. But it will likely be the night before the assignments are due that I actually do them. That’s not a good thing. But eventually I’ll miss a deadline, fail some project, and I will have learned. I hope.
Many things have been happening lately, and I haven’t really said anything about anything, so I’ll just jump right in. It’s been an entire month since school started already, which blows my mind because it seems like we just started yesterday. Soon it will be October, and then the Cool will come, and all will be better. I can do without 100+ degree heat. Anyway, school-wise, I’m definitely doing better than last year. I find myself actually wanting to do my work sometimes (gasp!), though certain classes, namely chemistry, remain boring. In English I am continuing to read a book called Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. It’s a strange, futuristic sci-fi type novel about how a man from the past, John the Savage, comes to live in a futuristic society where drugs, sex, and flamboyance not only run rampant, but are socially acceptable. Sort of weird, but Huxley’s view of how society will be in a few centuries is suprisingly similar to the way it seems to be heading now. I mean, he wrote the book in the 1930s! That thur’s some foreward thinking.
For Brave New World, I have to keep a journal as I read it (not hard, but time-consuming), and I have to write three quick paragraphs answering some questions about the book after I finish it. When I’m done with that, I have to write an essay talking about the various religious themes in the book, as well as the impact of the main drug, soma. Everything is due on the 21st. I’m not going to say how far I am through the book, but I will say that in order to have the weekend to work on the essay, I’ll have to read and journal about 35 pages per day for the next four days. Not too bad, but 35 pages can take a long time when you’re writing page-long journal entries on every chapter. Now, had I not been stupid, I could have been reading those 140 pages a week ago, taking my pages per day down to about 15. But no…I had to procrastinate. (This entry is more of a lecture at myself than anything worth reading.)
The lesson here is that, with future books, I need to get a calendar and plot out where I should be by the end of each day so that I don’t wait so long before getting things done. Not procrastinating is also good because when I have to do a large assignment all at once, I get really fed up with whatever the assignment is about, so I’ll want to forget about it for a while. This happened with my Brave New World reading: I read the majority of the first half of the book within two nights before meeting with Kulinski the next day, so I didn’t want to think about it for another week. I’m such a bad keed.
My other major class is AP Euro, which I’ve talked about enough that it’s obvious that it was hard at the beginning. Now, things aren’t as bad. I have to go to school early tomorrow morning to finish a test, but beyond that I’m free until my critique of Postmodernism for Beginners, by Jim Powell, is due. Oh yeah, I’m sort of pseudo-independent studying in AP Euro too - Mrs. Cheeseman-Meyer has decreed that I am officially “up to the AP standard” as far as my writing ability goes, and so I will be challenged futher with difficult research projects and papers and such. I’m actually excited about this, because I can really kick butt with research-based assignments. The thing is, I still have homework other than for English and AP Euro, so it will be hard to spend a great deal of time on stuff for those two classes.
Chemistry really hasn’t been a problem of later, and Algebra isn’t hard, and neither is Spanish. But I’ve got Debate to go to tomorrow, and LitMag on Thursday. It’s not like I’m losing that much time by attending them, but it still delays me a bit. And my Photoshop class starts in a week, so I’ll have that to take care of too. On top of those things is the CSHS website, which is getting much better but will need a good amount of time to improve (I’m working on a database-driven backend so that pages can be fully dynamic). In my 90 minutes of work time each day, I have to not only code the new backend, but update the existing site as well, and things can pile up quick, especially when I requested them (which makes me obligated to post them). While Mr. Trapani has been gone, I’ve been put under the control of Mrs. Albertsen, the librarian. She can be a bit stern at times, and she is very quiet, but working with her isn’t as bad as it seemed like it would be when I first talked with her. I could be moving my workstation to her office, and the administration people could possibly be getting me some new equipment (computers, scanners, etc) to work with that would be much appreciated. Our current equipment really is out of date: for example, the scanners take about ten minutes to scan a single page, and the computers don’t have enough memory to compensate for the load placed on them during the scanning process, so they freeze while the scan is taking place and become generally unusable.
The CSHS website will soon have to take a back seat as I turn to my church’s website, which is in dire need of updating. My deadline is the 19th, which is too soon for comfort. Eeew eew…it’s really too bad I haven’t had time to actually earn any money for everything I’ve been doing lately. That’d make it all feel much better. Not that I’d charge my church for my services, but I could use a bit from the school if they feel like throwing some my way. After all, a fully dynamic, updatable website is much more than a simple web development class would ever accomplish. (Brag, brag, brag…gloat.)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the state of the education system in America and what needs to change to get students motivated and to a level of proficiency that they should be at. I mean, there are kids at CSHS, sophomores even, that write as if they were in 5th grade! And I ask, is this really their fault? Or is there just something wrong with the system. Likewise, I’d like to know: am I just really smart, or are other kids who are as smart as or smarter than I am getting screwed? Why is it that I have been offered all these extra choices, but it doesn’t seem like the same choices are offered to anyone else? Somethings are explainable, such as my Photoshop course; that came about because of my voluntary services to the school last year. But in English, I really didn’t do anything to get into an advanced independent study class - I just got pulled aside by Kulinski one day and there was no going back after that. And the same thing has just occurred in AP Euro. A note one of my papers from Mrs. Cheeseman-Meyer asked me to stop in to talk about more advanced options, and here I am skipping out on assignments the rest of the class is doing while I write critiques about books that are entirely off the subject we are currently studying.
Don’t get me wrong - I want to be in these special programs. But I sometimes don’t think I deserve it. There’s a girl in my AP Euro class called Dana that sits to the front-left of me who takes extensive notes on everything and has written three page test essays in 45 minute class periods. That’s pretty amazing, I should think. But why isn’t she getting any kind of special treatment? (Though truthfully, I don’t know if she is or not.) Am I just a strong enough writer that my sheer “awesomeness” at writing non-fiction outweighs the fact that I might not be as good a student as others? Or am I just as good a student, but I think I’m not because I see these uber-scholars in my classes that are sure to have much higher GPAs than mine?
And about this “Brett is a good writer” thing…what?! Me…a good writer? Sure, I’ve always been okay at writing stuff…I scored well on the AIMS reading and writing tests…but does that really warrant special classes and special assignments? Are other students being cheated? Do I deserve to cheat them? I dunno. I guess this just all comes down to a self-esteem thing. While my teachers say different, I just don’t think I’m that good of a student/writer/whatever. I was once the smart kid, but now I’m just another GPA in a sea of student ID numbers. I know that there are people at CSHS who are better than me at stuff. But I ask: What about them? I can’t be the only sophomore in an independent study English course, right? Right? But what if I am? Does that mean I’m smarter than I think? Or am I stupid to even think that I’m smart?
I just…don’t…know. And I don’t know how to handle it. Eventually people are going to realize how favorable my situation is, how I’ve got two great teachers preparing me for AP tests and college and beyond…while everyone else gets left behind. And then what will they think? Will there be resentment? Jealousy? Unhappiness? A large decline in my social status? Probably. And what about my own friends? Jim is in many of my classes…what will he think when I’ve got different assignments from him? Were I in his place, what would I think? I’d be…annoyed. Somewhat resentful. But that’s me. That’s coming from someone who’s used to being at or near the top of every class. Jim isn’t the kind of person who gets all jealous with it, because he just doesn’t care that much…right? But lately, he seems to care more. He has good grades, he’s in debate with me…maybe he does care.
Or maybe I’m just wrong about everything, and maybe I should stop throwing out these rhetorical questions. But…why? Why? Why me? Why was I chosen? Why do I matter? Why do I care about mattering? Why do I care about caring about mattering? It don’ make no seense. And finally…why am I up at midnight writing this when I should be asleep?
Update
10/7/04 - My opinion has changed on some of the above subjects. I just don’t have time to write about it right now.