Author: thestudiojosie

Is it just me, or are the weeks going by ten times faster than usual? During the day it feels as if it will never end, but at the end of each week, I find myself wondering how it went by so quick. Time is a hazy concept these days.

I can’t believe we’re going into our fourth week of quarantine/online learning/all this craziness. This week, I turn 18. In the very first blog post I wrote for this series, I wrote that all I wanted for my birthday was to be back at school because I genuinely thought this would only last a week or two. Back then I had so much more hope! Now, my wish is to be back in school before Memorial Day, but we’ll see.

This week was…alright. Like I mentioned last week, piano is my favorite class, and it’s really the thing I look forward to every day. This week we started a unit on music appreciation/history, and it’s so interesting. We are learning about three composers from the Baroque era now (Handel, Vivaldi, & Bach).

I also said this last week, but learning how to read basic music myself makes me so much more appreciative and impressed by these composers (and all musicians in general). Like, obviously I knew they were considered “great,” but it never really clicked as to why until now.

My other two classes were fine. Ceramics is getting more and more difficult for me now. Not so much because of the assignments, but because I am so eager to work with clay again. I really really miss it.

Here is the owl I promised I’d share with you last week.

It is made of all recycled materials/things I had around my house. The base is a cardboard tube, the head is paper mache, the wings are cardboard and tissue paper, the feathers are old paint samples, and the ears are wire with string wrapped around it.

For this week’s fun piece of entertainment, I wanted to encourage you to watch the Bon Appetit Youtube channel! Listen, you don’t have to be a cook or a baker to love these videos. They’re so much fun, and everyone in the test kitchen crew is wonderful. I’ve been a fan since they started making Gourmet Makes, and the channel has totally taken off since then. Now it’s kind of like a really really good reality show. Go watch a video or two to cheer up (and get very hungry)!

That’s about all I wanted to share for this week. I just wanted to check in with y’all and share these updates. This coming week I’m thinking about doing a couple of posts, one for my birthday and another sharing a playlist I just finished. But anyway, how are you doing?

I hope you all have a relaxing Sunday night. I’ll be back soon, only next time I’ll be an adult :0

This week I decided not to write a post every day for the sake of repetitiveness and for my lack of inspiration. Thus, here is a recap of my week indoors and of my eLearning experience…

This week I woke up late every day. Well, late meaning 9:30 a.m. Each morning, I quickly jumped in the shower, grabbed a piece of fruit, made myself an iced coffee, and logged into my first class at exactly 10 a.m. Over the past two weeks, I have enjoyed being able to stay up later at night, but it has certainly not helped me be a productive person the next morning.

In Italian class this week, we continued working with the past tense and discussed how to mix it with the imperfect tense. Today, Friday, we didn’t have school (since we only have formal classes Monday – Thursday now), but we took a quiz. I also met with my classmates who are planning to take the AP Italian exam later in the spring, and we went through ten (very difficult) multiple-choice questions. We only got two wrong – whoo hoo!

In Ceramics, we continued to work on our found object sculptures. I can’t remember if I mentioned this last week, but I’m making an owl. I’ll share it when I’m done, but so far I have been very grateful for my superfluous amount of leftover cardboard and paper scraps. Each day for homework, we take a video of our daily progress and submit it so our teacher can see a 3D example rather than just a photo of the front side.

In Piano, we learned about chord inversions and continued practicing chord creation. We also took a test on everything we’ve done so far in the semester, and yesterday we did music trivia (and I won ;)! ). Even from afar, I am loving piano class because it makes me realize how little I know about music. There’s so much to learn, and it’s making me more appreciative, attentive, and curious while I listen to music on my own.

Week two was definitely easier than week one. I have come to realize that we will most likely not return to the school this year. I mean, the Olympics were postponed…and they’re in July. I can only hope and pray that we are able to come back for at least a couple of weeks. With new alarming statistics and scary stories coming out about this pandemic every day, it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain hopeful, but I’m still trying.

Aside from school, I have been talking to friends and family a lot through FaceTime. I had a Zoom “reunion” with all of my friends from my Italy trip on Wednesday, and it was so much fun. We’re planning another one on Sunday and I can’t wait. Seeing them, and all of my other friends & fam, over FaceTime just makes me that much more eager to see them in real life. It’s just scary because I’m not so sure when that will be.

And now, here’s my happy piece of entertainment for you! I wanted to share this awesome website/app I came across. I shared it with my piano teacher this week and I’m totally obsessed with it. It’s called Radiooooo and it’s basically a music discovery program. You can pick (almost) any country in the world and mix it with any decade from 1900 – now. Then, you can select a type of song from the three categories: slow, fast, and weird (weird is my favorite).

Users of the app can add songs, so there are thousands for each decade/country combo. It’s very well-made (although, the iPhone app isn’t great; I’d go with the tablet version or the web version), and it’s such a cool idea. There are a lot of other neat features I have yet to play around with, but if you’re into music at all I highly suggest checking it out for a fun “trip around the world” from inside your house 🙂

ALSO, this week I watched the Amy Winehouse documentary, Amy, which is available on Netflix. If you are at all a fan of hers, I can’t recommend it enough. I have thought about it every day this week and can’t stop listening to her music. Go check it out this weekend and have a happy Friday!

Well, I survived a whole week of distance learning and social distancing. If you did too, congratulations (I guess?), and I hope you made it through the week alright.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how different this year has already been compared to last year. 2019 was probably the best year of my life, and, while I know it could always be worse, this year is shaping up to a pretty crappy one so far. I just hope it gets better over the next nine months.

Today was a good day, though. It was Friday, so my classes were relaxed and fun. In Italian, my teacher did a cooking lesson in her kitchen on cacio e pepe. Even when we’re at school, she occasionally will bring in a hot plate and prepare a dish for us all which is one of my favorite parts of the class. At the end of the lesson today, she told us how she had meant to do this with us all at school and that she was so sad that we weren’t able to taste it. 😦

In piano, we had a “show and tell,” and most people showed their pets, so that was really fun. When we’re actually in school, we don’t always have a lot of time for bonding and learning about each other, so the little things we’ve done through online learning have made me feel a lot more connected to my classmates and teachers. God, I know I say this in *literally* every blog post, but I really, really, really want to go back to school.

Aside from my schoolday, I started preparing a new sourdough recipe. I’m really anxious to see how it turns out, but I’ll find out tomorrow morning after I bake it! I was thinking of doing a post all about my sourdough journey sometime this weekend since I won’t be doing one of these blogs til Monday. There’s a lot to talk about, so stay tuned!

My happy thing for today is Trey Kennedy’s YouTube channel.  I just watched three or four of his older videos after forgetting about him completely, and they made me laugh so hard. They’re just really goofy and scarily accurate, so check them out if you need a laugh.

That’s all I have for today. Always remember that Friday is the best day of the week; try to make yours a good one, even through all of this craziness.

I’ll start today off with a happy piece of entertainment. The Guardian just released their ranked list of David Bowie’s greatest songs. While it’s missing a couple of my favorites (e.g. Soul Love and Lady Grinning Soul), this is a solid list. Here’s a link to the actual playlist on Spotify. Happy listening!

Also, not school-related: I am becoming more and more irritable stuck inside my house every day, but I also don’t want to leave. I have been keeping myself busy, yes, but I dream of going to the beach with my friends.

Anyway…now onto day five. 

Today we received an email from the administration at my school. It contained a couple of updates regarding eLearning. The first was that, as of now, May 4th is the earliest possible date of our return. The second was that we will now only have formal classes Monday – Thursday; Fridays will be “office hours” for teachers, so we can meet with them if we want, but we’ll be given an assignment on Thursday to work on over the weekend.

So online learning is kind of the new norm, at least for the next month or so. The potential May 4th date was encouraging, although I’m sad we’ll be out of school for all of April. But, say we do come back on that day: we’d still have an entire month left until graduation which would be so wonderful. I’m trying not to be too optimistic because that date was only tentative, but I can only hope that it remains true.

Before classes today, I had a Women’s Leadership club meeting. It was really nice to be able to talk to all of my friends in the club and to our awesome advisor. Then, after school, we had a student council meeting which went really well. Since most of our events and plans aren’t going to be happening anymore, we began brainstorming ideas of virtual things we can do to keep the school community connected. There were some really great ideas that left me feeling excited and inspired.

I’m happy that most of the clubs I’m in are continuing to meet. It’s great to talk to my teachers and classmates, but since I’m so involved with clubs at my school, it would be weird to go without them for so long. Club meetings always make me feel very accomplished, even if we just chat about potential ideas for the future, and feeling like I’ve accomplished something while stuck in my house is exactly what I need.

This whole thing has made me realize so many things, but one I never really pondered before was how special my school community is. I seem to always focus on all the things that go wrong or that I dislike about my school. Maybe that’s just because I’m a teenager and it’s just the way my mind works, but this situation has made me see how connected my community is and how well everyone works together.

I know that not all schools are like this, and for that, I feel very lucky. If I could wave a magic wand and give every school the same opportunities and capabilities, I would. All I know is that once we all return to, many of my peers will have a similar mindset about our school. And even though I’m graduating this year, I look forward to seeing how this setback leads to positive growth and change, both in my school and in the world as a whole.

Have a great night.