If I had to say one thing saved me in my educational life it would be gaming. Yes, weirdly enough gaming helped instead of hurting my educational life. Majority of the population would say video gaming is counterproductive to school work ( including my mom). But I don’t know that I would bothered to keep trying without it. For starters this requires some background on how I was brought up. When I was younger I was always told “do your work first then play”. This was drill into my brain by my mom. Anytime I would complain about work bring boring “do your work first then play”. Or when I would be playing a game “Did you finish all your work?”. It felt like work was the most important thing in this world. What would be without work? I was never the fastest to do my homework so I never got to have fun. My day would go “wake up, go to school, go to after school, do homework at after school, short break for an activity, get picked up and go home, finish homework, sleep”. There was not much room for anything I wanted to do. Even the activity I would do at m after school was counselor controlled and sometimes boring. My mom was a bad role model on what she always preached which was “balance”. From the time I was young till this day she would go to work at 9am and come back at 7pm. And even after that she would work from home all hours into the night. She seemed to never do what she wanted. This was kind of traumatizing for me. I said to myself I never want to be like my mother when I grow up.
I loved gaming growing up and I looked up to these youtubers that got upload games and get paid for that. I wanted to be more like them and not my mom. So that’s how I got into gaming. At first it was very shallow. My mother did not want me downloading anything on her computer and she wouldn’t let me get one for myself. So for the time being I had the games on my 3ds and my dads Kindle. There was one problem, I couldn’t play games with other people. This didn’t bother me for some time but I soon got bored of those games. So, I went behind my mom back. I downloaded whatever games I could on her computer (which wasn’t much). However there was still a problem, the “admin password”. Without the admin password the amount of games I could download was very limited and as grew older I would get bored for the other games. While all my friends would go to play games like COD and Fortnite I couldn’t download them. So I found an app that would bypass the admin password and let me download games. Yet again there were downsides this app only allowed a limited number of games to be played on it. It seemed no matter how much I tried I would never get out of this pit.
Now at this point you may ask yourself “How did this save your educational journey?”. Well it didn’t and it did on one hand I was so captivated that I could finally play games no matter how limited I was that I was distracted educationally. On the other hand, I had gotten out of the quicksand of constant work. This was my ideal “balance”. However, it wasn’t balanced at all. For a while I was lost, I would skip out of homework and play games. I felt the need to make up for the time which I had lost when I was younger. I felt that I needed to “balance things out” however what I was currently doing was imbalanced itself. I had to figure out how to get my homework done. Over trial and error with trying to figure out how to do my homework. My result ending put being gaming. My main problem with homework is I get burnt out. I would get burnt out from anything like: looking at a long passage, a hard looking math question, or just because. I need a way not to get burnt out. Simply put playing games would give me reset on the timer that would burn me out. If I felt like I was going to burn out I would just play video games and feel refreshed again. Now I just had to figure out the last puzzle piece and that was the self-control to finish my work. This took quite a bit and longer than I would have hoped. I would often find myself burning out and turning to video games but not having the self-control to back to what had just made me burn out. After all, why would anyone want to do something like that. That’s why it was the norm to finish work and then have fun. But that norm didn’t work for me so I had to be resilient and push through. I eventually got used to going back to finish something. Not only did this help me gain some self-control but I also gained some resistance to burning out. Even right now I have kept typing without stopping once all while doing another classes work! No matter what my mother may say or other might think I truly think that if I hadn’t had the experiences that I had with video gaming it would have ended up a lot worse for me.
Jonathan – this is interesting and I see this is an important topic for you. You’ve written about this before. It could be the beginning of a good essay. But first
You have to work on paragraph breaks. Your reader will NOT want to read these HUGE blocks of text! It’s super hard on the eyes.
You need to create some scenes. Make theatre of the mind for your reader.
[Good way to introduce your weird savior!] If I had to say one thing saved me in my educational life it would be gaming. Yes, weirdly enough gaming helped instead of hurting my educational life. Majority of the population would say video gaming is counterproductive to school work ( including my mom). But I don’t know that I would bothered to keep trying [trying WHAT?] without it. For starters this requires some background on how I was brought up.
[new par] When I was younger I was always told, “[D]o your work first; then play.[period inside]” This was drill into my brain by my mom. Anytime I would complain about work bring boring “do your work first then play”. Or when I would be playing a game “Did you finish all your work?”.
It felt like work was the most important thing in this world. What would be [words missing] without work? I was never the fastest to do my homework so I never got to have fun. My day would go “wake up, go to school, go to after school, do homework at after school, short break for an activity, get picked up and go home, finish homework, sleep” [yes this is funny and sounds like a dull life] There was not much room for anything I wanted to do. Even the activity I would do at m after school was counselor controlled and sometimes boring. My mom was a bad role model on what she always preached which was “balance”. From the time I was young till this day she would go to work at 9am and come back at 7pm. And even after that she would work from home all hours into the night. She seemed to never do what she wanted. This was kind of traumatizing for me. I said to myself I never want to be like my mother when I grow up.
I loved gaming growing up and I looked up to these youtubers that got upload games and get paid for that [briefly NAME one or two professionals and their salaries?]. I wanted to be more like them and not my mom. So that’s how I got into gaming. At first it was very shallow [meaning?].
My mother did not want me downloading anything on her computer and she wouldn’t let me get one for myself. So for the time being I had the games on my 3ds and my dads Kindle. There was one problem, I couldn’t play games with other people. This didn’t bother me for some time but I soon got bored of those games. So, I went behind my mom back. [Can you make this a dramatic scene with your trials and errors. Can you set the scene – were you doing this in secret while pretending to do some HW? How old were you? What grade?] I downloaded whatever games I could on her computer (which wasn’t much). However there was still a problem, the “admin password”. Without the admin password the amount of games I could download was very limited and as grew older I would get bored for the other games. While all my friends would go to play games like COD and Fortnite I couldn’t download them. So I found an app that would bypass the admin password and let me download games. Yet again there were downsides this app only allowed a limited number of games to be played on it. It seemed no matter how much I tried I would never get out of this pit.
[now in this next part, you get to the point of connecting to your educational journey. OK, so give me the timeline. When did it happen that you learned to do the balancing act of school work and gaming? What grade? Can you give us a scene of the first time you learned to balance yourself? What HW project were you stuck on? SHOW me the time you had “hard looking math question” and how gaming actually helped you stick to getting it done. Where were you? In your bedroom with math problems spread out on the table?
Now at this point you may ask yourself “How did this save your educational journey?”. Well it didn’t and it did on one hand I was so captivated that I could finally play games no matter how limited I was that I was distracted educationally. On the other hand, I had gotten out of the quicksand of constant work. This was my ideal “balance”. However, it wasn’t balanced at all. For a while I was lost, I would skip out of homework and play games. I felt the need to make up for the time which I had lost when I was younger. I felt that I needed to “balance things out” however what I was currently doing was imbalanced itself. I had to figure out how to get my homework done. Over trial and error with trying to figure out how to do my homework. [NOTICE you are doing a lot of TELLING; instead you need to SHOW me with a well chosen scene. Reach back into your memory for the best example of a time this happened. And paint a picture for the reader. THINK back on Malcolm X and the scene of reading during the night guard watch. He made it seem exciting.] My result ending put being gaming. My main problem with homework is I get burnt out. I would get burnt out from anything like: looking at a long passage, a hard looking math question, or just because. I need a way not to get burnt out. Simply put playing games would give me reset on the timer that would burn me out. If I felt like I was going to burn out I would just play video games and feel refreshed again. Now I just had to figure out the last puzzle piece and that was the self-control to finish my work. This took quite a bit and longer than I would have hoped. I would often find myself burning out and turning to video games but not having the self-control to back to what had just made me burn out. After all, why would anyone want to do something like that. That’s why it was the norm to finish work and then have fun. But that norm didn’t work for me so I had to be resilient and push through. I eventually got used to going back to finish something. Not only did this help me gain some self-control but I also gained some resistance to burning out. Even right now I have kept typing without stopping once all while doing another classes work! No matter what my mother may say or other might think I truly think that if I hadn’t had the experiences that I had with video gaming it would have ended up a lot worse for me.
Jonathan, Not for this Education Narrative, but pls save these for the future –Unit Two Research Project possible topics for you. I want you to hang on to these articles which I am passing on to you. THey might give you ideas when we start on Unit Two.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/opinion/video-game-addiction.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/health/kids-video-games-cognition-memory/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/learning/what-students-are-saying-about-video-game-limits-parental-involvement-in-dating-and-road-trips.html