Hey guys! Long time no blog... I promised myself I wouldn't stop blogging after class and I haven't done such a great job of keeping that promise, but for the rest of the year, I am working on committing myself in every area of my life, blogging included.
Anyway, I am taking four classes this semester, English 112, History 160. Biology 100 and Political Science 120. This semester I am talking all of my classes online, although Biology is a hybrid course, meaning I come into the college on Monday nights for labs. I took classes online this semester, because it means I get to sit next to my BFF each day. She does cyber-school, so we sit in a glass office at church and do our homework with a bunch of our other friends as well. I'd definitely have to pick English 112 as my favorite course, even though the assignments are really annoying. Although, come to think about it, I hate everything that we're learning, I enjoy doing the assignments, but I cannot stand the topics. So it's almost the reverse of what I originally said. Moving on, dual enrollment continues, except now I'm sixteen. Don't worry though, people still have crazy reactions and wonder why the heck I'm even able to get on campus, let alone take classes and function (somewhat) properly. Good news though, I figured out my major and where I'm transferring! Drumroll please....... Okay, okay, okay, so I am headed to West Chester University where I intend to major in English. I'm also going to minor in business and technical writing. I've already signed my guaranteed admittance and everything. Lately I've been looking at freelance jobs online, and I've found a few that I really like. I'm currently waiting for people to email me, and the wait is driving me crazy! My favorite of the lot is the job where I get to caption videos, I've already completed three as part of the application process, and it's actually really enjoyable. I'll update you guys when I get a notification.
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Oh my gosh!!! We got a cat!
Wednesday, October 21st, Grammy (My grandmother on my mom's side, the one who owns a traveling carnival) went in for knee surgery. Almost everyday since, my mom has made the commute of about an hour or so, to go out and help her. Last night, my mom and my sister went out to visit her, and when they came home, Emma came through the door screaming. "We have a cat! We have a cat!" she screamed. I believed her, but I didn't. I saw the carrier in her hand and I figured we were just taking care of it for a few days while Grammy recovered, but my mom said otherwise. I was totally surprised, we've had cats in the past, but after the last one being eaten (it was either a bird or a raccoon that did it), I figured we'd never get to have any pets again. In the past, we've had 2 cats, 4 kittens, 20+ fish, a field mouse, and 3 pet rocks. Obviously, we were bored of the rocks pretty quickly, so that didn't last long, the field mouse ran away the night we caught it, the 5 of the fish lasted for a few years, 6 lasted for a few months, and the rest were killed by my mom shortly after we bought them. She has a knack for killing goldfish. Once, while we were staying at a trailer park, she set my brand new goldfish, Rose, behind the wheel of a trailer. "Mom! Don't put it under a tire, what if they run over it?" I said indignantly. "They're not going to move," my mom argued. I woke up the next morning to a broken fishbowl and a dead fish.. "I told you!" I shouted "Well. maybe they will move" was all my mom said. After that I never let her near another one of my fish. Before my brother Zach was born, we had 4 kittens, Samantha was mine, Beans, was Sam's, Emma belonged to Emma.. and my parent's had the runt of the pack, so they decided to name it runt. My mom decided to sell them when they were only a few months old, so they weren't with us for very long anyway. Plus, you already know what happened to my cat Schootch, she was older then me, so I guess it was her time anyway, and our other cat Snips died of age back in 2009, and my dad had her back in the early 90's so she was definitely getting old as well. So all that said, Scrunchy, a dark colored, striped, 8 week old kitten, who is the most adorable thing I've ever seen. She has been sleeping on my tummy this entire time I've typed this, and she only weights a few pounds. Seeing as almost my entire family is allergic to pets, my mom has asthma, and we were almost completely clear of any pet residue, well, that and my mom's constant refusal to let us get a pet, I figured we'd never have a pet again... Well, maybe some fish, but that's about it. Anyway, all that to say: We have a kitten! Reflection Time!
Class Life: This week in class, more people gave their AMA presentations, and we scheduled our midterm conferences. Basically, we are going to try and convince our professor to give us the grade we want. We already sent in our pitch, a one page double spaced paper, and now we are just waiting for our conferences to talk about it. So I took a slot for 2:30 pm on Thursday, and my professor and I discuss the grading or 'elevator' pitch, he also said we can talk about publishing a post I wrote. In class, I found out that my AMA still hadn't been due even though I thought it was. I had rushed around like crazy trying to create my video and do the life of a homeschooler section that took forever to write. I'm actually still editing and cutting that down, because I realized that it doesn't truly reflect every week as much as it does one single day that I remembered. More often then not, I used to have very hectic mornings, and I was so busy that my sister had to make my lunches for me. So finding they weren't due yet was a bit of a relief. Home Life: Sunday, was my last work day for the carnival season. We went up to Cacoosing, which to give you a general area, is near Reading. I worked in the cotton candy trailer, which is kind of out of my element. Like I've said in the past, I'm used to working in the sausage trailer. It's a really cute fair. It is very family friendly, with a cute craft show, about five rides, pony rides, and a street fair over the bridge. It's about five hours long, and by the time we're done, its way past dark. Today (October 20th), is my baby brother's fifth birthday. He is obsessed with Spiderman, so we used cray paper to create a giant spider web on the ceiling, then we placed a giant fuzzy, purple spider inside the web and just have it hanging there. We also have a cake covered in frosting and sprinkles with Spiderman's colors. Plus, we have a bunch of Spiderman plates, cups, and stuff like that. We have a tradition the each kid gets to pick out their birthday dinner, so Zach picked both kinds of pigs in a blanket, hot dogs wrapped in bacon on one tray, and hot dogs baked in bread on the other tray. We're just waiting for my father to come home so we can begin the festivities. There are remarkable differences between the life of a homeschooler and the life of a college student. As a homeschooler, I wake up close to six every Monday, I edit my paper one last time, I make sure my math grades are printed out, and I pack up my lunch. I throw together my backpack, and I run upstairs to take a shower. I contemplate just wearing my pajamas, but mom wouldn't want me to wear my pajamas out of the house. So, I reluctantly throw on my favorite pair of jeans and a flowing blouse. I make breakfast, and I run upstairs to wake up my brother, I think that is the tenth time I've run those stairs and it's only approaching 7:15am. My brother is kicking and screaming as I try to wake him up, he hates his nursery classes. I struggle to get him dressed, and after eight minutes, I give up and start calling for mom. She lets out a sigh as she was trying to finish up her biology lesson, edit Sam's paper, and tell Emma what she needs to get done before we leave. She still hasn't had time to get dressed yet. She gives Zach a quick tap on the butt, and he knows it's time to listen up. I run back down the stairs start packing stuff up into the car. Don't forget the Ripstiks, I tell myself. It's getting close to 8 o'clock and I realize I forgot to eat the breakfast I made myself. I sit down to eat and watch everyone run around trying to get ready to go. After I've finished up, I sit down next to Zachary on the couch, and I watch an episode of SpongeBob that I've seen about a hundred times since the time I was his age. Finally, everybody loads into the car, and mom realizes she has no idea where her keys are. She starts running around the house searching for her keys, and Sam climbs out to help. Another five minutes go by, and Emma runs in to go look. I feel bad that I'm not helping, but somebody has to stay out with Zachary. They come out after three more minutes, and we realize we're probably going to be late. Well, we'll be late for being early. My mom is part of the administration team at the co-op, and she's supposed to get there early to unlock the church that rents the rooms to us. By the time we get there, the sun is finally starting to warm things up, but not enough. We close our jackets tight, throw on our backpacks, and run for the heated shelter. We hesitantly take off our jackets once inside, and we ride around on our Ripstiks. The clock approaches 9:00 as other homeschool families arrive. By nine fifteen I begin gathering the children in the nursery program. The nursery teacher begins to teach sign language, as we try to get the kids to stay in their seats. We listen to a story about the seasons, and do a little dance called ‘Grey Squirrel’, and then it’s free play for the kids. 10:30 rolls around all too slowly. I tell the nursery teacher that I have to get to class, and I go sit in the last thirty minutes of study hall. The guys start playing random YouTube videos, and we’re all laughing, having fun, and showing off by the time the teachers arrive, so we put the chairs back and get out our notebooks for English Class. One friend moves over to the next room and works on his paper for his dual-enrollment at Delaware County Community College. Our teacher takes five minutes to get setup, and ten more minutes to decide that we’re all ready, although we’ve been ready for fifteen minutes. We hand in our papers as she tells us everything we did wrong with the last ones. She went on to teach us about something that had no relevance to any of my papers, usually the only time I learned something new involved the first six weeks she taught me. After that, she went on about different issues that come with writing, run-on sentences, the use of colons, commas, or different sentence openers. That was the main thing. Our class used a program that focused on the structure of the sentence more than it did the actual words. We looked for different ways to word sentences, start sentences, and dress up sentences. Most of our time was spent looking for words other than: see, saw, look, good, bad, pretty, ugly, say, said, and anything of the sort. I guess it didn’t look smart enough for them. It was nice though, because I was the teacher’s pet. Eventually, the hour and a half passes by, and it’s off to lunch, The guys and I walk up to Wendy’s and get some bacon burgers. Matt also orders an extra large, extra cheese pizza. We hang out in the lunchroom, joking around, goofing off, and I ride around on my Ripstik while in heels. Next, It’s off to biology, we had five main areas to study: botany, anatomy and physiology, life sciences, zoology and cellular and molecular biology. She gives us an interactive lecture, we look at slides on the microscope, play a review game, and are given lots of readings and questions to complete. This class was always interesting, mainly, because my mom was the teacher. Finally, my last class of the day, Algebra 2. This was my favorite class. This teacher comes over to do game night, her son is my brother’s best friend, and she is one of my mom’s best friends, she had also taught me Algebra 1 and Spanish 1. My friend arrived during lunch, but she had been in Worldview, not biology, so I hadn’t gotten to say hi yet. I give her a hug and we sit with each other in class. The guys have avoided the girls like a plague since they first showed up, but that’s what they always do. Our teacher goes through the next four lessons in our textbook, and we do about twenty example problems. After she is confident we are all comfortable with the material, we vote on which game we should play. The vote usually goes for Tic-Tac-Toe. We grab out our calculators, and start to play. The rules are simple. A math problem is put up on the whiteboard, and each team has to quietly solve it on paper. Our teacher looks at each team’s work, and whoever answered it correctly get’s to place an X or an O on the board. If both teams get the correct answer, it goes to the team whose turn it is. Whoever’s team get’s three in a row wins it. once we finish up, class is over. We pack up our stuff, totally exhausted, which is why we decide to go play basketball. My mom tells us to go ahead and put away the balls, so we grudgingly obey. My mom finishes cleaning up the building as families leave, and we head home. I tell myself I’m going to get this, that and the other thing done, so when we go home, I get out my books, put up the websites I need to use for research, and pass out on the couch. After 3 hours, my siblings wake me up because they’re running around and screaming with the TV on. It’s roughly 7 by this time, so I eat dinner, put on my pajamas, and groggily lounge around until bedtime. When it finally time to go to bed, I lie wide awake for the next three hours until my mind shuts down from boredom and I sleep through the night until 11 the next morning. Homework involves photography, math, reading, writing my English paper, answer questions for science class, more math, Wednesday night dance class (aka P.E.), edit my paper, Veritas Press, printing out my grades, and finally, more photography until it’s time to go back to Co-op on Monday. So basically, I meet up with friends at a school like environment, hang out during lunch, continue with the school environment, and then go home. Homework for the week consists of 80+ advanced algebraic expressions to solve, A chapter’s worth of reading with at least 10 comprehension questions, dance class in place of physical education, writing one to three new papers each week, and editing last week’s paper after viewing our teacher’s comments. I also had an online interactive video course that averaged about an hour a day. Free time mainly consisted of television and photography. So, I was kept extremely busy with my work. College life is a bit different.
Class Life: This week in class, we started our informal presentations of our AMA's. I went in front of the class, had Dr. Mangini play my video, and listened to what people had to say about my assignment. Dr. Mangini completely removed my word count for draft#2, and he wants me to give a day in the life of a homeschool student versus a day in the life of a college student. Although, I think I have to do two days to show the differences in homework as well. I will probably post them to my blog later so that they're still here after having edited my AMA.
Home Life: This week was STORM once again, but my dad had work and he brought my oldest, younger brother with him. My mom also had a bachelorette party to go to, so I was the only other person left to babysit my other two siblings. Babysitting is code for: Pajamas, movies, mish-mosh dinners, and homework out the kazoo. We had some organic, vegetarian, Korean Popstickers. They were kind of tasteless. There was no difference in the flavors, everything tasted exactly the same. So, I kept working on my AMA draft#2 but it's taking a long time to put together the day in a life of a homeschooler, and I haven't even started the day in a life of a college student. I have to get both of those finished, add in some details to the rest of it, and film the new video. Hopefully, I can do the new video before it gets too dark again. Anyway, I actually enjoyed working on my AMA, I was all cozy and cuddled up on the couch with my fuzzy pajama pants, my favorite jacket, and a nice warm blanket. I also watched Shrek Forever After in the background, picking up bits and pieces. I'd already seen it five times so I knew what was going on even with all the parts I missed; same as I'm doing now with Halloweentown II. Great movie if you haven't seen it, I definitely recommend it to anyone wanting a good, non-scary, Halloween movie. So, that was my weekend, tell me about something cool you did in the comments below! So I decided to use Grammarly while editing my Adaptive Mindset Assignment, and I freaked out. I don't pay for Grammarly, but it tells me what's wrong with the paper, so I can then look through the paper to try and find the mistakes. Well, I was scrolling down and looking through the different issues, and all of the sudden I saw that there was plagiarism detected. I was like WHAT?!?! There is no way there is plagiarism, there can't be! I wrote this myself, and never even looked at a source for it! I wrote and uploaded it directly on my own website!
You know how on bad cartoons people start to have a flashback and the last word they said echoes? But then the camera zooms back out and it's just them repeating the word... Well, that's literally what it sounded like in my mind. Website, website, website, website. I then lie back in my seat and I'm like "Website... Ha, It saw this on my website so it thought I was plagiarizing... Hahahaha (whew, I was so worried) Hahaheh... Reflection Time! Class Life: This was another exciting, interesting week of class, as to be expected when you have Dr. Mangini as your teacher. We had an in class game show... Yes, a game show. Who wants to be a compositionist? We were asked questions based on our past readings, discussion topics, and other little details we have run into along the way. We talked about the word and the world, Anne Lamott, Paulo Freire, the Banking Concept of Education vs. Problem-Posing. We also went over our Adaptive Mindset Assignment (AMA) and negotiated our plan with our teacher. We finally decided to work on our assignment, have it finished by Tuesday, then in class we will do a writing workshop. By Thursday we should have our polished first draft posted to AMA page on our websites. Keep a lookout for it, I will probably post my work directly to my website so you can see the work I do as I go along. I think my biggest issue I face as a student at college, especially a young student, is how I might rank against other students. Do I seem too immature (I know I do in my English class, but in my other classes I'm not quite sure)? Am I going to understand questions asked me even with my lack of 'life experience' so to say? How will I be able to handle my schedule once we really start getting into our major assignments? Home Life: This week my family found our new favorite TV show. Limitless. Basically, Brian, the protagonist, takes a pill known as NZT, and unlocks access to every brain cell for 12 hours. He is used as a resource to the FBI, and does everything he does to try and make his father proud. It comes on CBS Tuesdays at 10pm. It is insanely ridiculous how excited I became after having found out it comes on without any conflict towards my college schedule.
Today, Saturday, I am babysitting my 16 year old friend and we are watching our favorite television show, talking in strange accents, and she is eating Mac N' Cheese with a giant wooden spoon out of a bowl with a happy face on it. I am forcing her to go ahead ten episodes, giving her twenty different clues that are completely ruining her whole television experience. Yet she still considers me one of her best friends. (Hi Camry!) I also set up a Tumblr account to promote my blog, here's the link if you want to look. http://rebekahjwilliams.tumblr.com/ Class Life: Class this week was pretty interesting. Our professor was mute for the day... Yep, mute. He made a silent argument using videos, he arranged them in the same way he would an argumentative essay, and taught us a lesson using a different genre of text.
Home life: This was a pretty interesting week, as I said above, my grandparents left this week. Actually, it was just my grandpa (Poppop), my grandma (Mommom) left in August. Poppop left on Tuesday while I was arriving at college. Both my grandparents go to Florida every year, they hate the cold, so the go to the sunshine state. We usually visit them in February, but there have been a few exceptions because my dad had to work, or we didn't have enough money. This year we may just have to go early because college starts again mid-February. Anyway, I was also invited to a homecoming dance, but I'm not going. (Sorry Tori!) My friends have heard me say that the only thing I don't like about homeschooling is the fact that I'll never get to go to a homecoming or a prom. Of course, there is a homeschool prom, but there's only one guy I'd want to go with, and he wouldn't want to go with me. Plus it's out in Harrisburg, and that's a long ride. We were coming home from a small group, and my friend's mom was driving me home. She asked what school I would normally go to if I wasn't homeschooled. "Uh... I think, maybe Penncrest?" Came my unsure reply. "What?!?! No way..." You could just tell how excited her mom was. "Girl, I got you hooked up. I can get you into all the dances, I got you covered" Said Emily. Immediately, her and her mom started talking about which boy they should find to be my date. "Oh yeah, that would go great, tell my mom you're getting me a date for the homecoming dance." I said with sarcasm emanating from every word. "What, no, you'll be fine!" Emily laughed. "Yeah right, that'd go over so great." Was my reply. "No, besides, I can just your ticket for you to go, it doesn't have to be with a guy." Emily said, trying to get me to come along. "I don't know, we'll see, I have to talk with my mom. I'll message you, okay?" "Yeah girl, let me know!" I said goodbye to Emily, and thanked her mom for dropping me off, and I went inside. They next day was college, and when I came home, on the stove, was an apple ginger cake my mom had made. Yes, I know, we're still trying to use up those apples. I forget what my family was watching, but I know when it was over, mom brought out a batch of kettle corn she had just made. We convinced them to watch Jack Black's "Gulliver's Travels" from 2010, because they still hadn't seen it, and then we all went to bed. Today, I mostly did homework, and then we had a movie night, we watched the second half of "The Croods" and all of "Hotel Transylvania" and then it was off to finishing my blog. I did most of it, but there's one last thing I want to tell you guys about. It's my favorite place in the world, with college coming in as a close second. My church. Calvary Chapel of Delaware County, CCDELCO, for those of us who are there all the time. Sunday's, we have church, movie theater seats, worship with the band, and the projector slides that help me write down the notes when Pastor Bob goes a bit too fast. Wednesday's, off to midweek at Julianna's house. We used to all get together and do an outdoor thing, but we moved it so that girls are at one house, and guys are a few streets away. Just because of the other stuff going on at the church. We changed the setting a bit too. Instead of John Reilly leading worship (check out his music video with Lecrae here), we sit around with our leader Mrs. Lisa (Love Her!!!), we talk about the different aspects of the bible, how to get the most out of reading it, how to take notes that mean something, and tons of other subjects. Saturday's are the best things ever. The second and fourth Saturday of each month, we meet at 5, eat dinner together, play crazy games that we have no clue how they ever came up with, we have a live indoor concert, and we listen to John Reilly speak for 15 minutes. Then it's dessert and a dance party, and before we know it, 8:30 rolls around, and John comes out with his famous quote "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." Then we go outside, and we either all hang out or go to our cars... This week, we had Anthony Pagán and John Olgram sit over a tarp (you know it's good if they have to bring out a tarp) and there was a carton of eggs numbered 1-12, nine were hard boiled, and three were not. They took turns calling numbers, they received the egg with the matching numbers, and then proceeded to crack them with their foreheads. The first person to get two raw eggs cracked on their head lost. Anthony was the winner, and he won $20 towards our fall weekend at camp stream side. Lucky ducky! If you've checked out the Pruning Trees... Dad style, you've seen what he did to our tree. What you didn't know is that it was an apple tree. We were left with a wagon full of apples. Not like a little red kids toy. Like a wagon that you see people drag around amusement parks, the ones that fit two or three kids. Anyway, my mom has made three to five pots of applesauce so far, and she's barely made a dent in our pile of apples. We decided to make a Jewish Apple Cake. We peeled and cored six apples, then we cut them into chunks. We took a pack of J&J cinnamon sugar (the packets we get when we buy SuperPretzel soft pretzels for the carnivals), and poured it into a Ziploc bag along with the apples. We then shook up the bag and set it to the side. In a large mixing bowl, we sifted together flour, baking powder and salt, and we set that to the side as well. In a different large bowl, we whisked the wet ingredients together, sugar, orange juice, oil, and vanilla. Finally, we mixed together the wet and dry ingredients and added the eggs in one at a time (well, we threw in all of the eggs at once, forgetting the recipe said to only do them one at a time). We layered it all into a bundt pan with the apples in the Ziploc bag, and we baked it for an hour and a half at 350º. It had to come out five minutes before the oven went off, and the outer edges were just a little overdone, although the center was perfect. It kind of reminded me of the bread pudding my mom used to make when I was younger. She'd bring home all of the stale bread from her restaurant, and then she'd mix it with milk, sugar, butter, and vanilla. It was our favorite treat, mom would make it almost every week.
Click here if you want the link for the Jewish Apple Cake recipe. |
Rebekah W
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