Tag: dailyprompt

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As we wind down the course, let’s wrap things up and look forward. Some final prompts to choose from:

• Publish a course wrap-up: What did you enjoy or dislike?
• Describe an assignment or writing session in which you experienced an “aha!” moment.
• As I continue blogging, I plan to …
• 5, 10, 20 years from now …

I absolutely loved this writing course. Because of the variety in assignments, it really pushed me out of the box and showed me new ways to approach a post.

I felt the different structures were valuable because I was able to learn the concepts by putting it into practice. Because it was sort of like a challenge, it pushed me to not skip a day and go through it as a sequence.

I thought the homework assignments were great ideas, but I wasn’t able to accomplish them (like the collaborative guest post) because I mostly set aside a 5-10 minute window per day to work on these. 

When I give myself topics to write on, I definitely will give myself more time and plan out my writing process accordingly.

I think overall, my biggest takeaways were:

1.  Engaging readers with stories from my daily life, helping me develop a storytelling voice
2. Using my other social media to enhance the posts
3. Using images and graphics like my personal photos off my phone to help tell the story visually
4. Playing with short and long posts, as well as lists

As I continue blogging, I plan to use what I’ve learned about style, formatting, and approach to tackle some of the topics I’ve been wanting to write about like how to develop habits, book reviews, hot-button topics, and general recaps of interesting parts of my day/life.

5-10 years from now, I hope my blog will develop into an all-inclusive look into my life that will add massive value to my readers. I hope to develop my personal brand that allows me to reach the maximum amount of people so that I can make enough of an impact.

I also hope to develop my brand as a platform to help me achieve some of my other goals and network with other like minded people. Perhaps I’ll even be able to find some amazing mentors along the way 🙂

For today’s prompt, we were given a choice of 5 different tweets to write in. This one caught my attention the most:

People close to me know that I am a HUGE advocate for education, especially self-education and personal development. I set a goal for myself to read at least 3 books a month that are geared towards helping me grow in some way.

When it comes to our education system (school), however, I have to be honest and say I do have some reservations.

I think the concept of education from elementary to high school more or less accomplishes the goals of getting kids acclimated to a social environment, teach them to follow rules, respect authority, and gain a general understanding of different academic fields (i.e. history, art, math, science, etc).

One big issue with school is that it’s gearwd toward pushing kids through a specified curriculum based on age. It doesn’t take into consideration the different types of intelligence. Each student is expected to score at a certain criteria regardless of their natural strengths or weaknesses. School doesn’t generally cultivate these inherent strengths.

During college, similar issues arise. General education requirements force student to take classes that don’t pertain to what they need to know for their chosen field (given they have an idea of what they want to do). Some see this as unnecessarily prolonging their college journey and subsequently their debt.

But one of the biggest issues I have with school is that everything students do is focused on one thing: passing a test.

As this tweet points out, students spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours studying for an hour-long test. They cram a semesters worth of material over the course of several sleepless nights just to regurgitate it and forget all they learned minutes after the test is turned in. And all for what?

For a grade that makes up a GPA that they can put on their resume after they graduate so they have some shot at standing out amongst a stack of other resumes from their fellow college graduates, thousands of dollars in debt with so much useless and forgotten knowledge.

Dont get me wrong. As I’ve said, I’m not anti-school or education. College for me was an amazing experience where I met many longtime friends, joined several dance teams, learned a lot of interesting things (95% of which I probably will never use professionally), met my current girlfriend of almost 4 years, and learned how to interact in a professional/academic environment, and most importantly learn how to learn.

My stance is, if you don’t know what you want to pursue as a career, don’t go into huge debt. It’s a great experience but every college has the potential to create a lasting undergraduate experience. Try going to a JC and transfer after 2 years. Go somewhere significantly cheaper until you find something you can get behind.

One more thought as I revisit the tweet at the top, it can also mean that the more you learn, the more you learn that there’s so much more to learn. Like the 4 stages of learning:

1. unconscious incompetence
2. conscious incompetence
3. conscious competence
4. conscious incompetence

Final thoughts: our school system definitely needs to be restructured. Two very important things I believe need to be taught from the beginning are 1) personal finance, and 2) people skills. If these can be incorporated successfully, I strongly believe our students will be in a better position to succeed.

Thoughts? What do you think needs to be taught in school? I’d love to know in the comments! I respond to them all 🙂

I’m very excited to start this new series of Everyday Inspiration 😁

So last month, I committed to doing 30 days of writing using the daily prompt on the Daily Post. I’m happy to say that I’ve successfully completed that challenge as of yesterday! Today’s posts will kick off with day one of this new series to help me along my writing journey 🙂

Thank you to everyone who joins me on this adventure. As usual, I’d love to hear your comments and insights, as I read and respond to them all.

Day One: I write because…

Writing helps me put my thoughts into words. I feel like I have so many ideas in my head, writing helps me organize my thoughts while also being an outlet for the thoughts and emotions I would alternatively bottle up inside.

In some sense, writing for me is therapeutic.

Although I’m new to the blogging scene, I’m not new to writing. I used to be heavily involved in journalism back in high school as an editor for the school newspaper three years in a row. I’ve also been journaling almost on a daily basis for several years now.

For me, journaling not only helps with my mental clarity and emotional release, but also a priceless snapshot into my daily life and thought process for my future self. I think it’s one of those things that you would wish to have when you get older to revisit the past with more rich details than you could remember on pure memory.

The reason why I’m transitioning into a public space like the blogosphere is because I feel like I can add so much value to others. I know that I have certain experiences and insights that could help someone else who might be going through something I’ve overcome. Or maybe I can provide a unique perspective to an issue their facing.

Ultimately, I see blogging as a platform, maybe even one of many stepping stones, to help people on a massive scale years down the line. My hope is to take baby steps and develop my craft of writing, storytelling, and delivering a powerful enough message that can touch someone enough to make a difference in their life. My goal then is to keep elevating those skills and abilities to higher and bigger stages to make an even greater impact on my fellow human beings.

Once again, thank you for those who are and will follow me on this journey. I hope that this will be just as valuable for you as it already is for me, and that maybe this will be a fun and interesting account that I can look back on years from now and see where I started and how far I’ve come 🙂