3.2 Mysha Macabuat

 

March 5 - Memory? Never Heard of Her

I swear we just blinked and suddenly we’re teetering on the edge of the school year’s finale. One of the last blogs I’ll write for AEP—bittersweet. I may pretend to loathe blog-writing, but I’ll admit: these are the breadcrumbs we’re leaving behind, a little trail of chaos and near-misses.

Anyway—onward to the day’s chaos.

This warmup? Off the rails. Literally. No Wordle. No Hurdle. No grid of doom (Squaredle, I LOATHE you). Instead, two maps appeared on the board like ominous apparitions. The task: give a sentence comparing them. Easy? Think again. You had to remember every single sentence said before yours and build onto it like a verbal game of Jenga. One wrong sentence and the whole thing collapsed. Spoiler: it did. I couldn’t remember the order for the life of me, but watching the others spiral into confusion was... kind of entertaining. Schadenfreude? Perhaps.

Afterward, we received yet another map worksheet. Cartography is slowly becoming my villain origin story. We shifted gears to grammar—specifically passive vs. present tense. Surprisingly useful stuff. We even got to practice crafting our own sentences, which is nice. I like words. I just don’t like when they gang up on me in grammar form.

March 12 - A Pen and a Panic

Back to tradition: board-based warmup. Hurdle. A classic enemy. Once, a distressing and difficult foe. Now? One of my women. (I must refrain from swearing. Tragic.)

We started off okay-ish. A few decent guesses. Then Hurdle decided to go full betrayal mode. Letters weren’t lettering. Words weren’t wording. My brain? Not braining. Still, by some miracle of collective effort and guessing luck, we finished. On time, even. Expected, from our class. 

Then came the meat of the lesson: how to write an essay. Real ones. Not blog chaos. Miss walked us through paraphrasing the prompt, writing an overview, and actually organizing thoughts in a logical way (a foreign concept, honestly). She even gave us time to write our own essay comparing maps from 1985 and today. I stared into the void, then wrote words. Some of them made sense. 

We wrapped up with a worksheet—some tense corrections and a fun little word scramble to fry the remaining brain cells. And then, with minutes to spare, we attempted to play Contexto. Key word: attempted. We failed. Tradition at this point, when it comes to contexto.