Daily Double

Howdy there reader!  My name is [...] and it has been 10 days since my last post.  I know, I know, you have been sitting on pins and needles waiting for the next Board Games post, and I am here to deliver.  I apologize in advance though, I fear this might turn into a sprawling, loosely anecdotal, borderline incoherent attempt at satisfying a word limit.  This blog has become a chore, an assignment.  At first, I was fascinated by my topic and by the open forum where I could write about it uninhibited, but alas the steam and motivation is gone.  The secondary reason I sat down to write is gone (the first reason is genuinely because this was a class assignment).  I don't care anymore.  This blog is an embodiment of what I am writing about.  I have become responsible for an online connection to nobody, but I carry the weight of a final exam with every keystroke.

I don't like that I have to write 500-750 words every week.  I don't like that I write 500-750 words every week because I am told to.  It is the same reason I did not like Animal Farm when I read it for a class assignment.  When I read it four years later on my own time, I loved it.  I was uninhibited.  I got to play and dance with George Orwell's words, and it belonged exclusively to the two of us.  If I wanted to share my opinions, I could.  If I didn't want to, it didn't matter.  Reading was safe.  It belonged to me.  It was not regimented or required.  It was not examined and tested.  Writing is not all that different.

I understand that writing for assignments is part of any course.  It is typical of every class I have ever taken, and I accept that.  I accept that there is a time and place where it is appropriate for me to fulfill class requirements by way of writing.  What bothers me about blogging for a class, however, is that it awkwardly walks a line between free-writing and classwork.  I'm not being graded so-to-speak.  I don't get my blog returned to me after 10 days with red pen markings and notes.  I don't know what makes one blog post better than another, and that is liberating.  I am free to write.  I still however, am required to write.  I am expected to complete a blog post every week that may or may not ever get read.  I'm pretty sure my parents never had this problem.  If they had to write an assignment they turned it in to a professor or TA or a mailbox.  At least they had the option of believing that someone would read it.  I actually know whether or not anyone is reading this.

Somewhere amidst this incoherent rambling is a point, and I'm getting to it, I think.  I like my topic, but I don't like this blog.  I don't like that I have very little idea whether or not I am doing well in this blog, or that there is some sort of benchmark, or that there is even some level of grading for what I am writing.  If a teacher gives me an assignment, I like that there is some sort of concrete feedback system.  I failed, or I passed, or I excelled.  Every time I hit "publish", I am submitting these thoughts into an empty "blogosphere" that is neither educational or academic.  It has sadly fallen to a similar fate of a math homework assignment in 4th grade.  I'm just doing this to get it done, and there is nothing liberating about that.