One of my most wonderful (and sometimes annoying) habits is to make decisions quickly.  For the most part, this has not caused any problems, though there have been a number of occasions where this has cost me.

For example, I had always wanted to be a hairdresser.  Now, this might seem like a strange career choice, but after watching my own hairdresser work her magic, there was no question in my mind that hair school was in my future.

It wasn’t until I found out about the number of beauty schools in our area that I started to get excited - I was going to get to learn about something I loved at a beauty academy in our area.

It has only been a couple of years since I made that choice, and I have never looked back - I certainly love what I do.

During my couple of years at University, I met a number of people from overseas.  Now, these friends that I had made were some of the smartest people that I have ever known, but they all possessed the same challenge: their English wasn’t so good.

Now, they were not discouraged as they benefited from the free English as a second language site that I found for them.  Instead of needing to find an English class that would work around the college classes that they were taking, they were able to study when they had the time - right at their computer.

It was interesting to see the number of friends that they told about the free ESL classes they were using to learn English.  It wasn’t long before everyone was getting a better grasp of the language, and it was much easier to work with them in class as they were much easier to understand.

Needless to say, if you are looking to either learn English, or get a better grasp of the language, take advantage of the many sites that offer English language courses for free.

I would have to say that I am one of the least handy people that I have ever met.  If you have had the opportunity to see anything that I have ever built, it either just falls apart, or is crooked.

But even though I am not the handiest person in the world, I have been very interested in learning how to do our own home renovations.  I know that I should be able to learn how to do them, so I have been taking advantage of the courses offered at the local home improvement store.

For example, I was able to attend a course today on showers.  Specifically, we were discussing the benefits of electric showers, and we were able to see how shower cubicles are installed.  It was definitely easier than I thought, but there is a difference between watching someone install something and doing it yourself.

But, I feel that each course that I attend takes me one step closer to being able to renovate our bathroom on my own.  The hardest part will be convincing my wife to let me do it.

I have been helping a friend out with his graduate studies on the dating habits of the public in the information age.  He is doing it as his research product for his Masters in Sociology.

I would have never thought of doing such a topic, but honestly, I think it is a really good idea.  The fact that he couldn’t find any studies that have been done in that area of research almost guarantee that his work will be published, with the opportunity to continue to study it in more depth for hid doctorate.

In order to help him out, I have bought an e-book about free online dating, so that I could get the mindset of a person considering using such a service.  So far the read has been interesting and educational - I can’t wait until we develop some sort of experiment to measure the results.  I think at that point, the work will become really enlightening.

I have a friend that went to teach English as a second language in Japan and I thought that this was something that I would like to do.  I wasn’t too keen on moving to Asia, but I really thought that being a teacher for English as a second language would be a great occupation for me to go into.

In doing some further research I found that they were looking for teachers that would be helping others to learn English UK.  I decided that this would be something I would enjoy so much more, as I would far rather live in Europe than in Asia.

I applied at several English language schools in UK and after a long process was accepted at several of them.  My decision to go had been made up already and I had already started the paperwork.  My only decision left was that which school I was going to teach at.

I don’t know how many research papers I wrote and received bad grades on before I decided to get help to learn to write one properly. I always thought they were good and was stunned when I didn’t get a good mark on them. I decided that I definitely had to do something about it.

I took a term paper that I thought was really good to my high school English teacher and asked her why I was receiving such poor grades in college. She gave me some great advice and some really good pointers and told me to rewrite it.

I brought back my revamped book reports to her and asked her what she thought of them now. She told me that they were so much better than my original ones. I took her advice to heart the next time I had a writing assignment and enjoyed my very first high mark in college.

Before I attended college I would say that I wrote things the hard way.  By hard, I would say that writing them yourself is not really the most efficient way to do things.  I can remember taking hours and hours to write my admission essay when I could have used that same amount of time to earn money for myself instead.

You see, once I entered college, I learned that you could buy a custom essay online about any subject that you needed.  For example, I was able to purchase many book reports on the many books that we read in English class.

From my experience, the work that you would get for a small cash investment was well worth the time that you saved yourself from writing the essay.  There were so many opportunities that I was able to take advantage of things due to the fact that I didn’t waste all my time doing my own homework.  Sure, you might think my point of view is a little crooked, but writing is outsourced all the time when you are in the workforce.  If you look at it that way, I was actually training to be a better employee.

When I went to college and started the coursework for the five classes that I was taking my first year, I felt a little tinge of déjà vu.  It was as if I had been there before and done it all before and I knew in the year was going to be very little work.

In fact, I found the first year to be very similar to the GCSE coursework that I had done in high school.  I tried not to get too cocky, as I knew this would be a big mistake but I did not think that my first year of college was going to be much of a challenge at all and in fact, I could have just handed in my high school assignments.

I don’t know if all colleges teach the same work as as in A level coursework from high school, but I knew this when I was attending certainly did.  Maybe I just went to a really great high school, but I knew that it would get a lot tougher and was actually looking forward to it by the end of the year.

It has been a very long time since I have had to write an essay.  The other day my young granddaughter asked me for help with hers and I did my very best to remember the proper composition for one.  Working on it together brought back many memories and I had a good time reminiscing with her.

We talked about when I was in college and working on my dissertation.  She was fascinated that they even had colleges back then, as she thought that all old ladies used to be schoolteachers and we didn’t have to go to school to become one.

Amidst our discussions about my thesis and her essay, she realized that school is not really that much different now as it was when I was in school.  I may have attended an old one-room schoolhouse, but I had to learn the same things that she is learning today.

The one thing that I have always hated the most about going to school was the essay writing. It is so time consuming and I don’t see what we learn from doing it. I learn a whole lot more when I study for an exam than I do when I write an essay.

I asked my English teacher about it one day and she suggested that we would remember more of our coursework if we wrote essays about it. I had my doubts, but I figured she would know what she was talking about. I decided that I would wait for my final and find out where I had gained the most knowledge.

Amazingly enough, I did much better on the sections of the exam in which I had studied for previous exams than I did on the parts of the exam for which I wrote essays. This just went on to prove my point that essay writing is a waste of time.