Where Have I Been?

Howdy, everyone. I’m sorry for not posting for the past few months. I just want to give a few updates to my loyal readers.

I’m not giving up on this blog. I plan on making more blog posts in the future. But in this blog post, I want to talk about where I’ve been these past several months. Part of the problem has been my usual procrastination. Every time I sit down and decide to write something, I get distracted by something else that seems more appealing which causes me to go down a rabbit hole. I might talk about that in a future post.

One of the other things that have kept me from concentrating on my writing is that I’ve finally been hired for a job. Over the summer, I worked at Lonestar College. Then, towards the end of summer, I got a job at Kingwood Middle School. Both jobs required me to work a lot to help students with special needs. At Lone Star College, I would take notes on behalf of kids who were deaf or had difficulty using their hands due to some disability. Meanwhile, at Kingwood Middle School, I’ve been working as a paraprofessional for an Applied Skills classroom. I’m an all-around assistant for the teachers there. I help monitor the kids during their electives and at lunch and answer their questions about class assignments.

This work I’ve been doing at school has taught me a good deal about patience and alertness. Now that I have a job, I am a lot more motivated and thoughtful about what course of action I take. I have to be, or else I won’t be able to help the students in my charge. My students also need clear expectations up front and a kind but firm hand to guide them. The surest way to avoid misbehavior is to use as few words as possible when talking to them about class expectations.

Speaking of students, the student that I’ve been privately tutoring has improved a great deal over the past few months. Through his efforts, his handwriting skills have progressed by leaps and bounds, going from illegible to well-written, though we still need to work on his spelling. As of this writing, he’s still working hard at overcoming the behavioral challenges he faces at school. I call him every day to help him to overcome the obstacles that stand between him and success.

From my job, I learned a bit more about how to best appeal to him using things he likes. For instance, I had him look up vocabulary words in his favorite book series Percy Jackson and the Olympians (which also happened to be one of my favorite book series as a kid). The Percy Jackson series uses a lot of vocabulary words from Greek Mythology, which can prove to be a barrier to kids learning how to read. Despite this, the entertaining nature of the book and the audiobooks he listens to as he reads help him to better comprehend the passages. In another instance, I used a Dungeons and Dragons map creation program to teach him how to design his continent with accurate geography. D&D is also a fun activity for young men, as it lets players use their imaginations to create a fantasy world of their liking. The in-depth nature of some D&D worldbuilding software online allows one to get a rough idea of how government and geography are in real life. For example, I introduced my student to the different kinds of governments based on the Dungeon Master’s Guide’s chapter on creating towns and villages.

There are fun things I’ve been doing while on my hiatus and plenty of interesting things to talk about. For example, I’ve been playing around with different Internet bots like NovelAI, experimenting to see what they can do. Such programs open up new avenues for creativity that I think can be fun if they are pointed in the right direction. I want to write about these developments and what I think they mean for modern creative writing.

There are a lot of exciting things that I’m planning on writing about in the coming weeks. I hope you stick around. Until then, “have a nice day!”