My remarkable lack of artistic ability.

I'm a sophomore. My friends and I have a whole set of teachers that we had last year who (of course) still love us. A few months ago, a bunch of my friends and I went to our favorite former teacher's class and played "Vocab Challenge" with his frosh. We sophomores ended up winning (of course), but playing the game only served to remind me that the amount of time I had left before the SATs was getting smaller and smaller. And, oddly enough, I missed doing vocab each week.

Afew few weeks later, two other friends and I went back to his class and listened to him read part of a story by David Sedaris to his class. Afterwards, as we complained about our current teachers, he offered to provide us with some vocab words we could study from.

We said yes.

Don't get me wrong, I still think learning new words is cool. And most of the time I'm able to look more into the future, and remember that these words will come in handy. But I still find myself resisting when I dutifully sit down at my desk and open up my dictionary. I tell myself You don't have to do this! Why are you??? But then I remember the SATs. I remember reading articles so full of big words that they may as well be in Greek. And then, after a few cards, I start to think.

This isn't so bad, I say to myself. Besides, it'll help me a lot in the long run. And that's about when it usually hits me. Just because I don't enjoy doing something doesn't necessarily mean I want to do it. Just because it seems unimportant doesn't mean it won't help me or others in the long term. And finally, I realize that maybe the real purpose of the vocab cards wasn't to teach me the words. It was to get me to realize these things.

Always Learning, indeed.

P.S. I hid a vocab word from last year in the blog post!