Dear Ms Weldon,

Dear Ms. Weldon,

Hi. I know my last two blogs were late. :( But I was at my friend's birthday party and she didn't have an internet connection at her house, so I couldn't publish them until I got home from the sleepover today. You can even ask Bianca, Maddie, or Alex for proof - they were there and saw me freaking out over it. I hope you can still accept them and count them for my grade, but if you can't I understand. :(

Andie

Summer

As the end of the school year rapidly approaches and the sun grows increasingly warm every day, people grow more and more excited for summer. Out go the furry jackets and warm, cozy Uggs, and in come the cool flip flops and the hot shades. It's time for people to chill at their cottages, or run through the sprinklers in the backyard, bask in the homework-free life or just sleep in.

Summer is understandably one of the most favourite seasons. And why not? You don't have to worry about deadlines, tests, or tucking in your shirt, and it lasts for two incredible months! I can go swimming at my cottage with my friends, and get a tan at the beach. I can eat all of the freezies and popsicles I want. Life is carefree, easy, relaxing and wonderful!

There's really not any downside to summer. I just wish my whole life could be as amazing as a simple summer day.

Blooooogs

Maybe I'm just a loser who can't do things that other people can do with 50% of their effort, but blogging, for me, was painful. Everyone had similar feelings about blogs at the beginning of the year - we thought this would be a fun year-long project, where we'd get to express ourselves and personalize our own web spaces on the internet. But as we soon realized that the amount of time spent on writing them every week and how high Ms. Weldon's grading standard was, most of us started to resent the task.

Now that's not to say that I didn't try my best. I spent more time than most people on writing mine every week, and sometimes it took longer than it should have, resulting in late posts. I didn't procrastinate. It's just hard to write! It's difficult to harness my thoughts and actually turn them into words, and then into sentences, and then full paragraphs. Some people just aren't as creative as others.. Me being one of them. Because creative writing is marked partly on creativity and originality, and that's not something you can learn. Being graded on creative writing is like being graded on your personality and your character. I believe in another format of ranking - one where we are averaged on not only the quality of our work, but the effort that goes into it. Because when I get a rubric back on a blog that I must have spent more than 5 hours on in total, and I get only in the eighties, it's really discouraging.

My personal writing standard may have slightly improved since term one, thanks to Ms. Weldon's slightly harsh level of excellence. But I regret to say that writing a mini-essay a week, added to the normal amount of Language Arts schoolwork, was not a particularly enjoyable experience. Although I'm grateful that I got the opportunity to try it, I don't see a hobby of blogging in my future.