This author is currently on hiatus for the ignoble cause of mugging. The public is advised to remain calm, as this routine protocol has been shown to have no effect on one's violent tendencies in 96% of cases.
| Friday, January 05, 2007 |
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The first weekend of the year is finally here, brining with it some free time to blog. I'm in sec 3 already, and I'm taking the Humanities Programme (HP) in HCI this year, which comes packaged along with nine compulsory subjects. I also opted for Biology, so that makes a total of 10 subjects: Triple Humanities (History, Geography, Literature), Triple Sciences (Chemistry, Physics, Biology), Double Languages (English & Chinese), Maths and finally a new addition to the HP syllabus this year: China Studies in Chinese (CSC). And for the shrinking group of third-language takers, that will be a total of 11 subjects. We'll also have to face the horrors of afternoon lessons this year, and the wrath of hardworking teachers like Mr. Ben Lee (our maths teacher) who insist on not coming late for his afternoon lessons and expects the whole class to follow suit. And teachers have the privilege of cutting long queues at the canteen during lunch break, whereas us poor souls have to endure queues which strecth up to 20 minutes long. That's 2/3 of our lunch time gone. Alternatively, we work on an empty stomach until the lessons end at 4.40 pm, an enormous feat for those of the likes of Zhaoxing who find it necessary to eat 5 or 6 full meals a day. Now take the sum all of that and multiply it by three afternoons, and you get And then the sadistic teachers torment us some more with the information of how much more difficult the examination grading system will be this year, under the guise of passing remarks like, "Half of my students failed my first test last year." (That, by the way, was quoted from our dear Mr Lee.) And some teachers go even further, by revealing to us the mind-boggling syllabus for the entire year, with the sec 4 syllabus being incidentally positioned right beside ourselves in the same Excel spreadsheet such that curiousity forces us to realise what we will most probably be doing next year as well. Again, remarks like "Don't complain, your sec 4 seniors are doing twice your workload" surface. It can only get worse. To kick a dormant mind which has processed nothing but movies, Counter-Strike and EPL for the past 2 months out of the holiday stimuli and back into the mugging gear for yet another school term is one of the greatest post-holiday challenges faced by teachers and students alike. So teachers solve the problem by cutting "orientation" for seniors to only one day, if an entire day of listening to talks, past accomplishments and future goals can be even called that at all. But one thing they all share in common: they always begin with a sinisterly cheery "welcome back to school" line by the teachers, when we all know they don't mean it at all. And on the second day, they quickly dump all the homework, anxious to not let the brains "rot" any further. Oddly, we had 2 compositions (one Commonwealth essay and one Chinese) and quite a few miscellanous worksheet as homework yesteryday, but for these weekends, we only received some worksheeets. That's 1/3 the work for 3x the time. And yet the teachers still talk so much about "time management". It's going to be one tough year ahead. Everyone doesn't seem too pleased with the prospect of being piled with worksheets, tutorials and worst of all, assignments from 10 sources. Even the Bishan Gay (the paedophile who likes to stare and smile unnervingly at young vulnerable children at bus stops and in the bus) seemed to be affected by the downcast mood of the students. For the first time in history, i caught him not smiling, but instead frowning and looking around the bus stop. It's really unforgivable because forwning is not good for his jaw muscles. Then, he spotted me looking in his directions and grinned widely. I chuckled and turned around, and realised my bus had arrived out of nowhere. In the end Bishan Gay didn't follow me up the bus: i guess there were too many XL-sized sec 4s who were complaining about how hot they were in their uniform, with long sleeves and and full-length pants. And with all these work and commitments, i'll probably have to re-categorise blogging into the "not important and not urgent" list. Which translates into about 2 or 3 posts a week, unless the teachers suddenly explode with kindness. No wonder the newspapers ran an article about experts predicting blogs will die out soon. |
'Twas teh winnar at 11:04 pm.
