past

That last post of mine got me all nostalgic and stuff. I went back and skimmed over some of my old essays (yes, I have archives of all digital assignments since 9th grade). My only comment is: wow, my writing sucked. It probably still sucks now too.

I read a persuasive essay that I had to write during junior year of high school and the topic was the flak that the video game industry was receiving due to violent video games. The good points were there, but they were horribly argued and explained. I'm not sure if it was because I was truly a bad writer or that I didn't try hard enough.

I guess part of the problem was that, in our high-school student mindset, we were fixated on the word count requirement of the assignments. It caused us to write as little as possible to meet the word count. Not to mention procrastination factor. It really makes you wonder how well you could have done if you had actually tried... I remember classmates (and probably myself too) complaining about poor grades on our essays; you know what? we were probably just being brats - we probably deserved those grades. Oh I'm not regretting anything, I made decent grades. It's just that, in retrospect, I'm a little disappointed in myself for being crappy. Oh well, what's done is done.

Switching tracks: I had a teacher in the social studies teacher in the 5th grade who, the only thing I can remember from her was two retorts she had. So like, the first, like, quote from her was "Don't say like. It's not 'like'. It is or it isn't." That absolutely killllllllled everyone back then. Like, yeah. It's a tough habit and I'm sure that we still use it in conversation today. I do wonder where the phrase came from though. Who started off the 'like's?

The second thing I can remember was:

Student: "Can I go to the bathroom?"
Teacher: "I don't know, can you?"

That killed everyone too. I don't really know why I'm sharing these memories, but those are probably the only two things I took away from that teacher. Social studies? meh... I don't even know what the curriculum was back then... But conversational precision, she definitely makes me think of word usage from time to time.

Uh, time for class now, next time: emergency exits... i think.