The keyboard had been typing for an hour straight.
"What the heck am I writing?", Jeffrey thought to himself.
Jeffrey had been lost imagining the scene he was writing. Some chapters took more work than others. He pour time into research and anxiety and then not write anything. Often times he thought what he wrote was terrible and looking back it was decent. The things he wrote as a writer was a much different experience than when he read as a reader.
Jeffrey knew that at the end of the day he just wanted to write a good story. There were a lot of things he wanted to say, but it probably wasn't important at this moment.
A rare moment of self-reflection passed over him. A sense of calmness mixed with an inertia of writing eagerness and anxiety pushed him on.
Jeffrey took some time to pause everything. It's been a while since he did so.
_________
Returning to ~2007
Jeffrey was at home. It was quite noisy since his house was small, the walls were thin, and his siblings were loud.
The kitchen noises of his parents cooking were definitely making homework a lot more difficult.
"First, I'll write my name at the top at least. Teacher name, class period, and class subject.", Jeffrey thought to himself.
"Next the title of the essay", Jeffrey just crafted a title that came to mind.
Then Jeffrey continued searching through the novel looking for quotes he could use. He didn't really have a subject or question in mind. He was trying to slowly figure out and develop an approach to the prompt the English teacher had given.
"Why did Mr. Mackleroy tell his students to give up?"
"How did Mr. Rosewater approach things differently"
"Do you agree with Star girl or Mr. Magee?"
the orange No. 2 pencil slowly deposited it's pencil lead onto the page as Jeffrey started to write his intro paragraph. His right hand slowly started turning gray rubbing and smearing the words he wrote.
Why do we learn?, Jeffrey posed a question at the beginning of his paragraph
In the book "Don't Care High" by Andrew Clements, the author poses this question to his readers. Milo and Wallace Wallace are constantly at odds with their teachers. The game they make with Chris Rylander, Brandon Mull, and Stuart Gibbs challenges the entire school to think differently.
Jeffrey slowly writes out sentence by sentence on the lined paper.
He resists the urge to the crumble it up into a ball and start over, but instead erases long chunks of sentences before writing it again.
"Haah, I actually have to do this again", Jeffrey said to himself.
His weekend slowly disappearing from him as he still had a social studies test on Thursday to study for, a science quiz tomorrow, an art project to complete and he was going to wing the saxophone chair assignments.
Jeffrey sat working in his room for 4 hours.
"I know all this, but it takes so long. I'm pretty sure homework is what school is using to keep kids busy", Jeffrey thought to himself.
"There's so much to learn though", Jeffrey looked at the thick stack of textbooks they were assigned to this semester.