Today I was stuck at home because of one pretty annoying school rule: if you vomit, you cannot go back to school for 24 hours. At first, that sounds like just one day, but it really isn’t. If you vomit sometime during the school day, the 24 hours continue into the next day. Even if there is only one hour left before the 24 hours are finished, you still cannot go to school. So, great news for me: I had to stay home.
Being home was not completely terrible because I got a huge Harry Potter LEGO castle for my birthday, and I absolutely love it. Since I had nowhere to go, I actually had a decent amount of time to build it. That was probably the best part of the day. Other than that, the day was pretty mediocre. Honestly, “mediocre” describes a surprisingly large number of days in life.
I slept in because I didn’t have school, and when I woke up, I somehow found myself freezing on my bed wearing basically just underwear and socks. Not exactly my best experience. Then my mom told me I had “some homework.” The words some homework sounded pretty harmless.
They were not.
I started working sometime around nine or ten in the morning, and somehow I was still doing homework until around two in the afternoon. That is about four or five hours of work. My mom’s definition of “a little homework” turned out to include an entire set of math work, Language Arts work, a whole essay, and then my SSAT and ISEE preparation books.
Then there was the vocabulary book.
The book proudly says that it contains more than 2,000 vocabulary words, timed tests, synonyms, antonyms, fill-in-the-blanks, and basically every possible way to make vocabulary feel more complicated. I already didn’t exactly want to do it, but looking at the cover made it even worse.
It might be one of the most boring-looking books I have ever seen.
The title is basically SSAT & ISEE Vocabulary 2000, and the cover looks like somebody designed it at two in the morning after completely giving up. There is a giant blue section, extremely plain lettering, and a bunch of bullet points telling you about vocabulary words and synonyms. No interesting logo. No cool picture. Nothing that makes you look at it and think, Wow, I really want to learn 2,000 words today.
Then I looked at the back, and somehow it was even stranger. It says something like “Over 2,000 classroom-tested words for the SSAT and ISEE,” and there is this random image of a hand holding up some graduation-looking thing. I honestly don’t know who designed this book, but whoever did it clearly did not spend very much time trying to make it exciting.
The funny thing is that the inside is actually much better. Once you open it, everything looks organized and professionally printed. It looks exactly like a normal math or language arts workbook should look. So I guess they spent every second of their budget making the inside useful, and then when they got to the cover, somebody just said, “Whatever. Put some blue on it.”
After spending hours working through all of this, the SSAT and ISEE are starting to get on my nerves. Some of the questions look really hard, and sometimes I honestly wonder if I will be able to do well on these tests. I don’t exactly feel confident about them yet.
But I guess there is not much point worrying about that right now. What I can do now is just keep practicing and do the best I can. After all, the Middle Level is a lot harder than the Lower Level.
Life is life.
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