My Game of Life

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Gah, i really have no mood to blog today. Homework's pouring in like the rain (which forebodingly hasn't stopped yet), and Mr. B.Lee was sadistic enough to let some of us miss his afternoon lessons for Maths Quiz Training BUT we still have to do his assignments. Which are always to be handed in on the next working day. Plus, he gives some time (usually about 10 mins) every lesson for us to do his assignments. And that 10 mins is worth 1 hour because, if you're crafty enough, you can get your groupmates to do different questions then come together at the end of it to copy the other answers. Teamwork FTW. So missing his lessons ain't that good after all.

Anyway, on to the main topic of this post. I take back most of my words in the previous post about Mr Docherty. Main reason because that was just the "introductory" lesson, and first impressions are deceptive.

So on his second lesson yesterday, he walked casually into class. Our hearts skipped a beat when we saw that he didn't bring any notes with him. After the greeting ritual he went over to the computer and spent a few minutes logging in, finding his files and starting up the Powerpoint slideshow. Yay, slack lesson ahead, we think.

Then we saw his slides. They were all black-and-white, as in the very basic black Times New Roman on the default white background. And oh, horror, chunk after chunk of text crammed every single slide. Furthermore, his sentences are riddled with typos (cos according to him, he used a French keyboard when typing it out.) And he has this weird habit of CAPITALISING a lot of the stuff. Maybe it was his way of emphasizing the point or something, but he could really just have used bold text. Or maybe he lost control over Caps Lock and it was behaving wildly.

Gosh, i suddenly realised how much better Ms Foo's powerpoints were. At least she puts some background pictures (there was one of a half-naked man underwater, in relation to humidity) and includes a little bit of animation. Though the file sizes of her slides could run up to 10 MB or more due to all those pictures.

And since there were no handouts, we were set to work copying down the slides word-for-word. Well, at least that's what most people did, in the spirit of "Copy First, Understand Later." For me, i simply read through his points and just scribbled down those which i had at least an inkling of, which turned out to be half (or maybe one-third) of them. But at least its better than people like Yu Xuan who pratice the habit of "Don't Listen, Don't Copy, Don't Understand? Don't Care." And he was ticked off by Brian for talking to Huangji twice.

At least Docherty verbally explains some of the points a little. But his voice is so soft that he cannot stand any background noise - he even requested for the choppy ceiling fans to be turned off. And even when the entire classroom was dead silent, we still had trouble hearing him. Not that we would bother to, anyway, since most people were too busy copying down the "information" to listen to him. Eventually he got the hint and said at the flashing of a new slide, "Fine, I'll let you guys cpy down the slides first." (Note that I haven't included his accent cos its too troublesome to weave his pronunciation into the words.)

Who said you won't sleep in his lesson? Well, I did, but I didn't realise we would be spending History periods simply copying down everything there is (even if we don't understand) while vague sounds which sound like words with a Scottish accent play in the background. The only thing that would possible keep you from falling asleep is the writer's cramp you get from copying down so much stuff.

To Brian's credit, however, he did ask us if we understood what he was saying, since there was a very puzzled or defeated expression on many of our faces. But since we didn't quite want to hurt his feelings or anything, we simply just shook our heads and said "Nah, I'm OK." Besides, i doubt our level of understanding would have been raised much anyway even if he had wasted some extra time by explaining the concepts.

Towards the end of the lesson, he had Ben go and collect his notes. And when Ben returned, there was an audible gasp from us, whose expreession had turned from =S to o_O!!!!!!!!! To think that we had even imagined there would be no notes. Here was a very thick stack of them planted on the teacher's table for all to gawk at. To give a rough idea of how tall the stack was, it would have been 2 or 3 hard-cover Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix books stacked on top of each other. About 1/4 or 1/3 of Ben's height.

So in concluding his lesson, Docherty told all of us to digest the notes back home (about 20 pages of reading to be done for each), write an essay on a question based on those notes, and understand the concepts for a class discussion on Tuesday. We had thought he might have let us off a few minutes earlier as he had done in his first lesson, but we ended up being dismissed 5 mins late instead. Like i said, first impressions are deceptive. I guess ang moh teachers are less slacky and are determined to finish what they had planned to teach, at the expense of the students' time.

But i heard its even worse in mainstream History lessons. Mr Samuel Lim makes the memorise almost 100 pages of theories abotu history, even to the extent of remembering useless facts like who the historian who said that quote was, and when. I mean, not like that will help us or anything, right - even if we become historians in the future, there's always Google to rely on for your research papers. And Mr S.Lim also demands an answer the very moment after he asks a question, else he will get mad and scold the students for "wasting everyone's time." Not to mention his tight deadlines, lots of self-study and memorising, and how he expects everyone to be fully prepared for every single of his lessons.

In conclusion, History is the suckiest subject. And because of that, History teachers suck (Ms Teo CM, anyone?), except some suck more than others.

'Twas teh winnar at 11:26 pm.