reflection

when this year first started, i wasn't exactly confident in the educational merit it would bring as my last year of high school in a newly-normal period of history. while this wariness is still prominent in a handful of my other classes, this english class has actually proved to be a pleasantly surprising challenge. something that immediately comes to mind is my improvement with the in-class essay. though nothing can ever change the sinking feeling of dread and horror that one feels when sixty minutes are allotted for you to somehow transform your muddled thoughts into expectedly eloquent words, i really think that i've gotten a lot better at the ICE in this one semester than i have over the span of a couple years-- and i'm pretty confident in my explanation as to how. the answer is technology. i've always hated hand writing essays, they always end up way too messy and my thoughts are never put down onto paper the way they are arranged in my mind, and i often find myself leaving points unfinished or forgetting what else i wanted to write because of the organizational limitations of a pencil, eraser, and paper. this is why i feel typing these rather than writing has benefitted my grade report and skill as a writer. even the feeling of typing feels more organized and fast-paced than writing, because the blinking cursor and the little click click clicks always cheer me on. another element of online school that has helped me become more clear-headed when i write is the fact that i get to separate myself from the pressure of the task. when you're writing an essay in a classroom, you're stuck with at least twenty other mouth-breathers and the sound of pens scribbling and erasers chafing the paper. your teacher might have an obnoxiously designed timer set up on the board, ugly bright colors and flashing numbers looming over you as you wait for it to count down to zero and make you jump in your seat even though you were expecting it, because why do they all choose the bomb detonator one???? you have to restrain yourself from anxiously glancing up at the clock after ever scrawled sentence and squinting through your thick-lensed and scratched glasses to read the clock, and then you start feeling angry at yourself for getting rusty at telling time-- something that you've known how to do since first grade-- and maybe this reflection is becoming too oddly specific... but online, none of that is there, because life on a computer is organized into apps and tabs that you can simply click away from, and then boom! all your distractions are gone, and you can focus on writing. it's no argument that it's much easier to add ideas (and mass delete the bad ones) online than on paper, which just makes for a more streamlined and focused writing assignment. who knew that all you might need to improve your skills as a student was to get thrown into an entirely new schooling program?