Well, that was one heck of an opener, eh? Well, aspiring "froshie bloggers", you might want to take notes now. Not in Cornell Format or anything. You see, blogs are made much more engaging by starting things with a BANG! That could be an onomatopoeia, or a "hook" that directly greets or addresses the audience or asks a particular question to keep them reading.
How am I an expert? Ask the 8th grade English teachers at my middle school. They liked this post (http://www.arcabaran.com/2019/02/sicko-bowl-new-splatfest.html) so much that they literally started using it as an example for their students' blog projects as an example of a good hook without me being notified. Until some kid from that class commented about it a month later. Maybe my blog is still being used in the project directions there 'till this day...
But if you have been continuing to take notes, then you'd also notice that my blogging format isn't very traditional in that I kind of write very, very long as I just let things spill straight from my brain. That isn't a good way to start. When I started to blog in the third grade, my posts were like the length of this: http://www.arcabaran.com/2014/09/my-old-blog-until-it-went-crazy-and-i.html. Now obviously, less than ten words isn't what the teacher is asking for this assignment, fellow comrades, but you get my drift... (SEND IT INTO NINTENDO SEND IT IN >:O)
Ok, what was I even getting at? See, this is what I meant. Um. Alright, you're getting bored. You're about to leave this page to instead read a blog with a more interesting title. Ooooh.... "JesUS take the wheel", that sounds interesting. Or what about ":)"? I'm going to tell you, please stay. The point of this post is to discuss a massive conspiracy going on in our English class that relates to procrastination. Oooh, that's got to have gotten your attention at this point.
"Gee, I procrastinate so much, I'm such a special snowflake" are basically 95% of the posts on our class blog. Yeah, I get it, it's the night that the bio objectives are due, AKA the one day every 1.5-2 months that the entire freshman class gets less than sixty seconds of deep REM sleep. But another blogging tip; even if you write about the same thing, still be unique. It's all about how you write it. Please quote me on that, but use MLA to cite me (Baran).
Ok, now for the actual post:
How our teachers are trying to fix our procrastination problem without us noticing
"What a big claim, Arca! You don't have any evidence for that! Also, for your information, I don't procrastinate, I just get free time early." Ok, zoomer. Well then, have you noticed our English teacher's exact quote (in my class at least) when she was introducing the assignment that this was a "time management activity"? That's a pretty big red flag right there already that this isn't just about the blogging.
She, like many of the teachers, actually pities us for our procrastination. Think about it... was a student right here at High Tech, has gone through literally the same bio objectives as us (almost), made potentially many of the same mistakes that we are making right now. But that's not the only evidence that this entire assignment is meant as a really positive and helpful conspiracy to make us more productive (gee, you don't see many conspiracy theories commending and thanking the alleged conspirators, huh? Welcome to 2020).
I'm not saying that all of us constantly procrastinate. But if there were a bell curve to model the percentage (like gut-feeling) of how bad of procrastinators the freshmen are, the mean would be "quite bad" with outliers near the "I finish every single assignment the minute it's assigned, and now my life is like Disney World, yipee!" and "I literally turn things in the minute they're due and get an average of fifteen minutes of exhaustion sleep every week." But you know, still roughly symmetric.
But my biggest piece of evidence for this project specifically is the grading system. Notice how that in order to get the highest grade possible, you have to be able to manage your time the best? By that I mean, either make a post literally every single day that is at least two paragraphs (done by a population sample that, at large, doesn't enjoy writing more than most other subjects... I'm an outlier), or to make slightly less than 31 posts but to pour lots of time and effort and quality into them (like I may end up doing in the end). How would one achieve both of these goals in the midst of constant new bio objectives, labs, and projects (all of which our teacher clearly knows about)? By managing their time better.
What's my evidence for her knowing that most of us would break our necks trying to get 105 on this assignment? How would she know that we have a reputation for being "try-hards", despite having gone to this school herself? Right there, on her classroom door, is posted a printed Tweet by someone else that is taped on the wall to directly address her students and give them advice about "recalibrating" to just giving 100%, instead of... Is that 105% I see? (dun dun dun!!!) It all lines up now... just kidding, I forgot what the actual Tweet said, so it might not be 105%, but that joke could've been worth it.
So you're telling me that our teacher not only blatantly said that this was an exercise in time management, but designed the assignment so that our "try-hard" selves (as she evidently believes we should strive to improve, as evidenced by the Tweet she's taped on her door) could only get the highest score possible by procrastinating less or by using dark magic? This is some crazy time travel management display, Doc, but I'm pretty sure that this isn't some crazy conspiracy but just blatant fact.
Hey you, fellow freshman: The teachers aren't blind to your poor time management. And one of them cares about you enough to literally design a graded project designed to try to fix your problems for just a month (a daunting task, indeed)! Now, isn't that wholesome? What, you didn't actually read up to this point and just skipped to this point to see if this post had any end and wasn't a bottomless scroll of text? Then to that, I say, you have been deceived, and this is in fact not the end of this post. So jokes on you, get whip and nae-nae'd (*dabs* with an automata movement project box).
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That's since, according to the sacred texts known as the Project Rubric, the posts have to be about something that happened to me today.
Oh, no. Didn't I technically write about today when I referenced that it's the last night to work on Bio Objectives? I guess I still feel like typing (guys, my typing speed is something that I forgot. What's your typing speed? Leave it down in the comments, just curious), so I'll actually talk about something that happened to me today.
I was going to find a way to mention in this post that our bio teacher himself, when told that the vast majority of our class blogs were about procrastinating bio objectives, said quite dryly, "They're not special," minus an eye roll that I'm imagining myself as I type this. So I guess that counts.
But I'll also be super unique and talk about what I bet not a single freshman has talked about, which is of course the teensy-tiynsee (how do you even spell tinesey, geez??) epidemic known as COVID-19.
So today, our engineering teacher gave a schpeel (as she called it herself) about the coronavirus. Yeah, there was recently a scare in a town that's in my state that had a hospital that was thought to have contained a patient with it, but it turns out it tested negative. On the same day, my mom changed her mind on not letting me watch the Sonic Movie in a movie theater packed with small, sneezing, food-eating children. Those two things are probably just coincidences, though.
She said to use Lysol wipes on every single computer in her lab that we touched, so that 99.99% of the germs die and have to respawn or something like that. Wait, how did that work? I'm not sure I paid attention during bio when he taught us that (if he even did. It might have been taught in history instead). She also said to stack up on Autodesk Inventor 2019 Professional free student downloads to prepare for the apacolpyse. Also bury your gold. Just kidding, not that last one.
She said that there was a possibility of our school closing in the upcoming few months due to the virus if it got close enough (apparently there's one case as close as NYC, which doesn't sound good), in which case it would be fantastic for anyone who wasn't sick or at risk of being sick since I know we could sleep in, play lots of Minecraft, and only have to worry about the limited amounts of homework that our teachers could manage to try to email or Google Classroom post to us.
But then, the coronavirus somehow spread from people to desktop computers (I mean, the computer themselves were infected somehow), and it led to me wasting forty minutes of work time. Let me explain.
So, my first computer forces me to update Windows 10, and then when it's done, nothing works or loads so I can't open up my project in Inventor. My teacher says to try another computer. I try it, and then it doesn't recognize my password. My teacher says to get more Lysol wipes, wipe another empty computer, and try to do it there. That doesn't work either. One more failed attempt later, and it seems like every single computer in the room is biased against me. Not a single one worked until I had only about thirty minutes of classtime left. Then, I was able to finish maybe a third of my work, which thankfully isn't due very soon, so that's a relief. My teacher announced to the class a joke about the coronavirus also messing up computers, and it was pretty funny.
Anyways, that's the end of what should have been my Sonic Movie review for Day 2 of March Blogging Madness (which contains all the constant spectator fun, without all of the basketball and probability functions). I would have delayed the movie review to tomorrow, but I want to be able to write about something "relevant" to the day each day, and it's the 3-year anniversary of the Nintendo Switch's console launch tomorrow, so there's no way on Earth as an early adopter of the thing that I'm not jumping on that particular opportunity to finally blog about something on time for once. Unlike most of my Switch game reviews, which as of this moment, sit in my unfinished blog drafts nearly two years late or more. Sorry, Super Mario Odyssey. At least I got to beat your story mode before I gave you a review (unlike, cough cough, Breath of the Wild, cough cough. I don't have coronavirus, don't worry).
Until tomorrow, this is Arca signing off. Later, gamers.
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