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it's the end of the A levels... which is not a big deal really. that's partially because i still have the SATs to study for, and also because i never really had much anticipation for the end of A levels. the end of A levels means the end of a sustained period during which i found meaning in what i did, and i don't think it's for the certificate and what it entails for the future since i have hardly even put much thought into what universities to apply to, but it's more of the journey. i already initially had some interest in the subjects i'm taking, and i've learnt to appreciate them more along the way, especially in the latter part of this year. it's a pity that bouts of anxiety that i experienced throughout these two years with respect to academic results hindered me from fully enjoying the journey, but i can't really complain because i think overall i had quite a good experience. at some points there was a part of me that wanted the A levels to be immediately over, which is understandable from the perspective of the human being's need for instant gratification, but part of me knew that waiting is pretty disempowering. A levels are over, so what, next up it's the army, then you'll be waiting for the army to be over, and then next up it's university, then you'll be waiting for your final exams to be over, and then next up it's your job, then you'll be waiting to get promoted... the waiting really never ends. the only time you'll feel like you're truly free or happy would be the brief periods during which you have no "responsibilities" to fulfill or no "burden", or when you've just "made it". but that constitutes a small proportion of the entire course of your life doesn't it? i'm learning to quit waiting, start feeling that the present moment is good enough. when i visit my usual studying places, like starbucks at siglap and killiney kopitiam at changi airport, i will recall with nostalgia the times i spent studying for the A levels, and the many times people like zheng and tor were there with me. especially precious are the fond memories, like those of how zheng would never fail to make it damn bloody obvious when he stares at hot girls as they walk past, or how tor would repeatedly whine about little things like how he cannot succeed in making simple keystrokes in his GC. when i walked out of my last paper i felt bittersweet in the brief recollection of the memories i've accumulated over the months, and the knowledge that soon there will hardly be times when the school would be crowded and there would be a lot of people to meet and have fun with. this is especially since i'm not going for prom so there isn't really that "one last meeting" where everyone or at least most people will be gathered.. there will be the collection of the A level results but it will feel very different because it will be a mess with emotions running high. so yea in terms of the social aspects of school things are definitely changing, even if i feel these changes to be rather gradual. sometimes it bothers me that time passes too quickly. it serves as an anxious reminder for me to appreciate life, even if it may seem unpleasant, because before i know it it'll be over. then i'll look back and ask myself why i didn't learn to enjoy and accept what i was doing instead of resisting and struggling. gotta start enjoying life before it's over. |
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this year spotting topics is damn easy!! the new syllabus came out in 2007 for most subjects and cambridge is obviously exploring the depth of the syllabus, you can see that generally in 2008 they didn't test what came out in 2007, and this is the final year that they are using to cover the whole syllabus. anyway i feel like a god at spotting topics let's see i think i recorded down in chat logs and i can recall from memory what i spotted wrongly and correctly: for physical geog, i spotted limestone for drq, which was correct. then i spotted mass movement, urban heat island, global warming and management of floods for essay. all were correct except management of floods which came out in drq. i studied very little of plate tectonics/volcanology which is why i was quite scared the day before. plate tectonics appeared in both drq and essay in 2008, constituting more than 40 marks out of 100 marks?! but i was kinda lazy so i only studied the basics and in the end only 3-4 marks came out and with what i knew it was more than enough to answer the question. but of course my spotting wasn't perfect; i was quite certain that stuff that needed pure regurgitation like the structure & composition of the atmosphere wouldn't come out, but it did. i didn't study for it because i thought it was a waste of time but for essay you only need to do 2 out of 6 so it was ok. for math spotting is stupid because almost everything comes out. although i remember making a remark in jest half an hour before the math paper to claire, saying, "you know what will come out today? probability and differentiation in one question!!" hahaha that was a real fluke though. for ki i remember the night before i was thinking of what to study, then i predicted that ethics, art, science and history would come out. in the end i revised through ethics art and history cause i was pretty okay with science. in the end all of them came out, it's like probabilistically speaking since there are only four section b topics (which deal with these areas of knowledge) it would have been quite difficult to predict correctly for ALL of them but i did! then before the exam i was talking to zi kang and some other people and again i just spontaneously said in jest, "cambridge sent me an email, you know what will come out today? religion, political philosophy, existentialism, and... sex". religion political philosophy and existentialism are all very obscure topics and were the least likely to come out. in the end wtf, religion really came out, then guess what GENDER came out, and it's not even in our syllabus. when i said "sex" i obviously meant it as a joke but if you think about it sex = gender in its other definition so wtf i am some god!! and later jonathan said that actually my predictions in jest were 100% correct because he actually wrote political philosophy and existentialism in the question which was about ethics. hahaha. sadly for paper 2 i spotted wrongly, i thought language/math would come out in the end it was epistemology. for econs we know that market failure will definitely come out, but i spotted imperfect competition and it came out!! whee. btw if it's not too late i'm DAMN freaking sure inflation will come out for tomorrow seriously. for human geog today, i spotted the following essay topics: globalization - TNCs, population - pro-natal policies and optimum population (malthus, boserup etc), urbanization - transport and socioeconomic polarization, though i wasn't that sure about the latter. in the end it was quite accurate except socioeconomic polarization, and the pro-natal policies was not that precise because the question was about ageing population and the slant was towards service provision and sustainability and didn't require you to discuss much about pro-natal policies. last paper tomorrow hahaha |
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for math paper 1, after time was up i noticed that i had not corrected one of my answers to 3 significant figures and i hesitated for a few seconds before deciding to just change the answer, like i had this feeling that i would regret not making that change. after that i felt quite bad about it and i couldn't sleep all night, fucking went into my 3-hour ki essay paper the next day without having had any sleep. when i told my mum, who's a math teacher, about the incident, she said that at the most i would have been asked to cancel out what i had written, but it was nothing overly grave. also, for math paper 2, the same invigilator took my class and someone changed his question number after the paper had ended and nothing happened to him except that he was given a reminder. and the silliest thing is that today i found out from my mum that my act of changing my answer from 4 to 3 significant figures wouldn't have even made a difference; she has attended a cambridge marking workshop and it was stated that candidates are penalized for providing too few significant figures, but if they provide one or two extra it's okay. but fuck.... since tuesday there have been intermittent periods where this sense of guilt and uneasiness arises and there's nothing much i can do about it.. my mum said a lot of candidates do this but of course just because many people do it doesn't mean it's right... but there's really nothing much i can do at this point, what, report to seab? doesn't appear to be a wise move. anyway i don't know sometimes it really sucks, if you want to see it positively it's a strong sense of right and wrong (but apparently not strong enough to have deterred me from fucking making that move of changing the answer in the first place).. but perhaps many people would view it as paranoia. don't think i've shared this before, but i think most people don't know the extent of my paranoia.. i think in the past year i hardly ever told a lie without it being justified in terms of someone else's interest.. like the only lies i could possibly not feel guilty about telling would be like if someone asks, "eh today's paper was difficult right?" and even if i find it easy i'll be like, "yea it was quite tricky la" in order to make that person feel better. i remember once, the coach had asked me to go watch EPL matches in order to learn tactics.. then one day weeks later the coach asked if i had been watching then i lied to him and said that i watched some manchester united match in order not to be perceived as not having interest in improving etc. but i felt bad about it from time to time and one day months later when he was in a good mood i actually went to tell him that i had lied to him earlier on. it's like, even if it was just a minor lie, i could imagine that every time i spoke with him i would remember that i had lied to him and i wouldn't like that feeling. |
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i remember in sec 2, there was this assembly session where the topic for discussion was bullying. one of the teachers went up to the microphone and shared about an experience she had had earlier in her life: she was studying overseas, and i think she dropped her wallet on the streets. the person who picked it up took the money, and called her home repeatedly. during the sharing, the teacher then said, "he already took my money, what else could he want from me?" so i was sitting with a group of friends, and because of the way she phrased it, i blurted out "one night", which was obviously intended as a harmless joke. because my friends found it funny, they laughed quite loudly, and this caught the attention of the teacher who was sitting at the side. she then asked the student beside her what had happened, to which the student obediently told her what he had heard. the teacher immediately went down to the assembly coordinator to whisper something to her, and i knew at that point that i would get into some trouble. after assembly ended, the assembly coordinator asked a few classes to stay back so that they could track down who made that comment. eventually, i got into a whole lot of trouble, they called up my parents, and i had to write several apology letters and have them filed into my "white card", presumably a very important and confidential document that stays with you till jc and records all your misdeeds. the reason i only had to write apology letters was not that they were lenient, but that there was no demerit point system in high school and they couldn't do much to me (expulsion was obviously going to be ridiculous).
actually, till this day i'm not even apologetic. i remember going home that day and talking to my parents and brother about it. my mother said she could understand the rationale for the school's actions, my father laughed it off, and my brother found it hilarious and said that he would have said the exact thing in that situation. the only reason i wrote the apology letters was that this drama would end, imagine if i hadn't written the letters, they would probably have asked my parents to go to school to meet them, or continued to pressure me to do so.
i feel that i should not have been faulted because i had not intended for any harm; it was simply meant to be a comment to be shared among my friends, it's just that they found it hilarious enough to laugh loudly and this attracted the teacher's attention. there's a difference between heckling the teacher and shouting loudly ONE NIGHT and casually making the same remark to my friends, and the school treated it as if i had done the former. plus, one of the reasons that my offence was so grave was apparently the fact that it was insensitive and may have triggered off her painful memories. so the teacher cannot deal with her past, and someone makes a harmless remark that which triggers off her pain, and that person is fully to blame? did i cause her pain, or did i simply surface the pain that was already within her? you know, the most ironic thing is that if not for the intervention of the teacher sitting at the side, the teacher who was "bullied" would never have known about my comment in the first place. any hurt that she felt wouldn't have been caused at all.
i remember another incident in sec 3 or 4, one day we were informed that our social studies teacher was absent and that a relief teacher would conduct the lesson. when the relief teacher came, she simply gave out a worksheet and started reading garfield comics. i was sitting at the front, so i just casually asked her, "hey why don't you do something constructive during this time, like go through our worksheet with us?" she was quite friendly to me and said things like i don't know much about social studies blah blah.. later on she apparently told on me to the social studies teacher, who happened to be the same teacher who created a fuss with regard to previous incident i shared about, and you can guess that i got into trouble once again. but what the hell man, why didn't you just tell me immediately if you found my comment rude, why go tell my teacher? and they didn't even question why she wasn't going through the worksheet with us; they simply focused on my "rude" comment. i was asked to write an apology letter to her, which i refused to do so. i told my form teacher that i didn't want to write the letter, and if they wanted they could bring it up to the authorities. in the end nothing happened.
if these two incidents are representative of how the school deals with problems, then it reflects poorly on the school because they're just minor incidents, there's really no need to blow things up in the name of teaching the student a lesson or protecting the rights of the teacher whatsoever. the school is a microcosm of society; these teacher-student power relations are well paralleled in the workplace in terms of boss-employee power relations. so much of this society is about power, power, power. |
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if you can spare just five minutes, click on the following link for a very touching short film called leave me: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1
my interpretation of the film is a little different from the one the director meant for. instead of simply treating it as a healing process, i saw the possibility that the protagonist was indeed inhabiting a parallel universe - a separate, possible plane of existence. even if it is not in principle provable or falsifiable, and even if it may not appear to make a concrete difference to our lives, i believe in the possibility of multiple possible universes.. i look at it this way: assuming that we do indeed possess free will, every time we make a decision, whether it's through our thoughts and intentions or through our actions, we are making a decision to let our lives play out in a specific way, in a specific universe, of which there are infinite variations and possibilities. so it's like, you can imagine that in a parallel universe you may right now be in disneyland playing, but you have chosen to inhabit the universe in which you are studying. in a parallel universe you may feel completely different about the same life you are leading, you may be living joyfully and peacefully every single day of your life whereas in the universe you are currently inhabiting you are frequently unhappy.
so if we look at life this way, actually everything is possible, everything is already happening at the same time, just in a different universe, you just have to choose to inhabit the universe where everything that is happening is ideal and perfect. in that case, it's not a matter of making things happen anymore, it's a matter of choosing which universe to inhabit.
go watch the short film if you haven't! |
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