A skill I learned through my own trial and error is baking. I grew up watching my grandmother in the kitchen, baking cakes and sweet treats for the family every once in a while. But I never actually tried it until I was 13 years old. My grandma had gone out to buy groceries and I was alone at her house. I saw a recipe for brownies on social media and I thought, how hard could it be? I mean my grandmother who’s in her fifties, who is in her late fifties, is able to create a cake in an hour flat with such accuracy. I wondered how hard it could be for me, a teenager who never really failed dramatically at anything I tried. So I decided to go to her kitchen and I brought out the ingredients, I turned the oven on and I started baking. And I thought how hard could it be? It has to be, it can’t be that difficult. It’s just a sponge cake with chocolate basically. And that’s when I realized I was terribly wrong. I somehow managed to use salt instead of sugar, which is obviously a huge rookie mistake. And when I realized everything that I had done wrong, I thought, okay, so maybe it’s not that easy. But oddly enough, that failure was what made me want to learn more. It sounds cliche saying that, oh, I failed, and that’s why I tried again. But honestly, I just couldn’t accept the fact that I had failed so badly at something I tried for the first time, which sounds insane, because obviously you can’t get everything right at the first try. And, but I decided to keep learning it because I realized that in a way, baking with therapeutic, it helped me deal with my emotions, it helped me practice my patience, as well as my ability to learn. So it taught me that I don’t have to be perfect at everything I try on the first time, as long as I keep trying again and again.
Band 7+: Describe a skill you learned not from a teacher or a course, but through self-experimentation. You should say: what the skill is, what mistakes you made while learning it, how long it took you to become competent, and explain what this self-taught journey taught you about your own learning style.
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A skill I learned through my own trial and error is baking. I grew up watching my grandmother in the kitchen, baking cakes and sweet treats for the family every once in a while. But I never actually tried it until I was 13 years old. My grandma had gone out to buy groceries and I was alone at her house. I saw a recipe for brownies on social media and I thought, how hard could it be? I mean, my grandmother, who is in her late fifties, is able to create a cake in an hour flat with such accuracy. I wondered how hard it could be for me, a teenager who never really failed dramatically at anything I tried. So I decided to go to her kitchen and I brought out the ingredients, I turned the oven on and I started baking. And I thought, how hard could it be? It has to be, it can't be that difficult. It's just a sponge cake with chocolate basically. And that's when I realized I was terribly wrong. I somehow managed to use salt instead of sugar, which is obviously a huge rookie mistake. And when I realized everything that I had done wrong, I thought, okay, so maybe it's not that easy. But oddly enough, that failure was what made me want to learn more. It sounds cliche saying that, oh, I failed, and that's why I tried again. But honestly, I just couldn't accept the fact that I had failed so badly at something I tried for the first time, which sounds insane, because obviously you can't get everything right at the first try. And, but I decided to keep learning it because I realized that in a way, baking was therapeutic, it helped me deal with my emotions, it helped me practice my patience, as well as my ability to learn. So it taught me that I don't have to be perfect at everything I try on the first time, as long as I keep trying again and again.
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