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So...
My relative from China is coming back to Sg next month...
Back to... cos she came here for a year to study English in hopes of getting a decent enough O lvl result to get into a polytechnic and get a diploma.
She is related to me in some way or another I guess... tho i'm not exactly sure how. My paternal grandma came from China, and when she came over to sg (with her husband i guess...) she brought my uncle along... my dad was bron in sg, if i got my facts right... her daughter was left in China i think... as with her many friends and sisters ++ others... my parents dont talk about it much, in fact they dont tell us about all that at all (ok, me n my sis nvr asked either)... so all i know is from hearing conversations amongst themselves. So this relative who's coming to sg again (i'll just call her X ok...?) is... probably like... the grandduaghter of my grandma's sister... or something.
Well we hardly have any contact with the relatives there... when my grandma was alive she would spend a couple of months in China every few years... and then we'd call them on the phone sometimes... like two of the relatives came over a few times... once when i was really young, and the next visit was like... a few years ago so its really rare for them to come sg... on the other hand we've never visited them there before. Yes... i've never been to my ancestral town before...
So well... when X came to sg like... last year (or maybe last last year), it was the 1st time we met... naturally, i wasnt sure what to expect... we didnt meet like really a lot either... mostly just some gatherings with my family or with my family + my aunt and uncle. We also invited her over for our yearly bbq...
But despite the short meetings... it was clear that we were worlds apart...
If you think that China is still a backward, poor, wat-have-u-not, country... than you are dead WRONG. Its a huge country and there ARE still undeveloped parts, but in MOST places things are developing faster then you can blink... and in the hokkien province things are no exception. Apparently my relatives are doing some kind of family business and doing really REALLY well. Not the riches ppl in China, but certainly much better then we are doing in sg... and it shows...
Well for one she is quite a picky eater... well not that she would outright not eat anything she doesnt like, but she wont eat much... and she doesnt really like to try new stuff, like we'd bring her to try some local speciaties but its clear that she doesnt like it... idk but the whole feeling of things doesnt rub off very well. Yeah, i totally admit that sg food just aint as good as the food elsewhere simple becos sg is soooo small and we have to import most of your food from overseas. Import overseas = you lose on the freshness, and as a result food just doesnt taste as good... (like the pork isnt as fragrant etc) but still... at least try to be more... enthusiatic? T.T After a while my parents and my uncles were just lamented that it doesnt matter where we go to eat since the spoilt kid wont enjoy it anyway...
Like just before she went back to China, we went for western at the airport. My parents picked western becos her results of the O lvls couldnt get her into polytechnic and her parents were thinking of sending her elsewhere to study, elsewhere as in some... western countries. Hence the choice. But it turned out quite... disappointing. She wasnt even interested in looking at the menu and just decided to order whatever i ordered (at least my dad's fear that she will just pick the most expensive thing on the menu didnt happen). I picked steak and found it really good... but she barely ate half of her steak... and i really dont think its cos she has a small appetide.
Maybe the idea of hanging out with old folks like my uncle just doesnt appeal to her... she made a bunch of friends (fellow China students in the langauge school) and seemed to be having the party of her life in sg. There was an incident where my uncle was trying to contact her and ask how she's doing, but she didnt pick up the phone... when she finally did pick up (or call back, i cant remember the details, it happened quite some time ago) at THREE AM, my uncle thought she was sick as she sounded really tired. Turns out she had been out partying with her friends and just reached home... so much so for coming sg to study... and it totally doesnt help that she only hangs out with fellow china students who found it equally awkward to converse in English. Langauge is something you need to practise with to improve. She asked me for advice on how to improve her English and i gave it to her but... I asked her to speak to her classmates and friends in English, since they are all in Sg to learn English... but she said they all found it too awkawrd (really, if you dont try... how will you improve? Hence i say it again - to all you English fanfic writers who think you have sucky grammer/spelling/whatever because English is not your 1st langauge: It really doesnt matter, all that matters is that you have tried! PLUS, because you are trying, you will improve and be an even better writer! So DONT WORRY, you are all HEROS in your own right! ). I asked her to try listening to the news, or heck even watch english dramas or random tv programs, or even listen to English songs... Then she told me that she once went to watch a movie with her friends, but it turned out to be a tragedy cos there were no subtitles and they couldnt understand a single thing. I was really quite... idk... flabbergasted. Its not like she just started learning the langauage. They had English lessons in China and they were boosting that her results and Eng are good. Problem is that the school she attend, although is the best sch in the province, is still just a school in the relatively small province and their standard was still considerablely lower then that of school in major cities. I've had loads of PCR friends in sec sch and she speak and understand way better Eng then X. (but then again those ppl are smart to begin with, else they wouldnt be able to come my sec sch i guess). Still... i bet she has learn English longer then i have Japanese, but it felt that I could understand Japanese better then she could understand English... hey i can understand like at least 90% of entire VSA or HnA episodes now! And my formal J lang classes were barely enough to let me take the lowest level of JLPT. Its simple... she just didnt watch English shows - how less painful can improving listening be really? Pick a nice variety show/drama, listen and read the subtitles... and voila! You've improved your listening! I dont think she spent a lot of time studying either... of the few times we asked her out she always had some outing with friends. Like she was talking to my uncle and telling him about all the places in Sg that she'd been to... sg is small but i'm sure you still have plenty of time to study after having so much fun *sarcastic*
There was just once that my mum was saying i should help her blah blah blah and she came over to my house for a while to study. Her English standard was really quite... it didnt feel like she was in th emood to study either, but i dont blame her for that since she could simply be uncomfortable with me around (we still barely know each other even now!)... but when she read out the passage for oral practice i was like... o.o. Have you even taken a China airlines flight? And you know that kind of incomprehensible Eng they speak when making pre-flight annoucements? YES! That was exactly how she spoke! AND by that time she had been in sg for months! Yes, i dont speak American English, or the Queen's English... and you can say all Singaporeans have a weird accent (as I say the same about you)... but... but... but... none of my friends speak that bad English! Whether those from China or even my uni friend from Malaysia with attrocious grammer (well he was Chinese and Malay educated so...), or my coursemate from vietnam whom i had trouble understanding at times... (sorry, not to offend anyone here! T.T )... they all speak better then her... and she spent months in Singapore already... in fact she had spent close to a year in Sg...! Arghs... idk...
It was no surprise that she didnt pass her English in the end... but what was surprising was her clear non-chalent attidute towards the exams. She went back to China almost right after finish the O lvls... and we meet up for lunch at the air port like... just a day or a few days after all her papers were over (yes, that western lunch). She didnt even mention a single thing about the exams...! I don't know about you... but i'd be talking about it if i were her. Its like... the major thing and THE reason she came to sg to study and yet even when it was just us kids (me, her, + my sis) she didnt mention a word about it either... and when i asked her she just say in a rather off handed manner that it was bad. And in quite a cheerful manner that it didnt look/feel like she didnt talk about the exams just because it was so disastrous and didnt want to think about it. Heck i doubt that she even put much effort into preparing for it.
It also irked me that day when she asked me that 'should have gone on all the rides in USS at least once already right?'. That sentence just totally sums up how diffferent a world we are in... sure we are living quite comfortably, but tickets to USS (universal studios singapore) are REALLY PRICEY! So no, i've not even been there once. Its one thing that i'm not exactly fond of those rides, but the ticket price is... if the entrance fee is cheaper i would go and probably try out as much of the rides as i dare (like those super crazy roller coasters are out for me)... but... ok... the USS website tells me that it a day pass costs 68 bucks if its an off peak day... 68 bucks omg... that's more then my weekly pocket money... and she asks it in a manner expecting me to have gone there already, and probably been there many times (she asked in mandarin of cos). No... i'm just not so rich. Honest. We are in a different league ya know? Rich kid, poor kid. Different. Not to mention all the other places she's been to with her friends... like movies almost every week. Movie tickets are rather expensive now too ok! Yeah you bet she had fun studying here.
I guess she just never really was intending to come to sg to study. Her parents intended it that way but not her, she was just out to have fun. Or maybe she was just badly mistaken. When she just came to sg she ask us if you had a lot of extra curriculum activies, and we said yes, then she went on saying stuff like how kids in sg have it really easy, like we end sch so early and in China they end very late, barely get any sleep etc etc... then she ask about me and i said i was in Uni and she said something to the effects of 'it should be very easy/relaxed isnt it?' That was just, sheer awkwardness. And the pride at which she made those statements... -.-'''
Like seriously -.-'''
Yes. Sg IS SMALL. You cant compare competition in sg with competition in China simply because there are like goodness knows how many more candidates in China than in sg. But that doesnt mean that we sg students are mega slackers either. Especially coming from someone who is only from a provincinal sch in China, i dont think she has the right to say that (her results in their national exams wasnt good, which is WHY she had to look for alternatives overseas - and NO singapore is not a like some paradise land where you can come to get a pretty cert for free, just because you think you're so good and in the top sch of the province - hey let me tell you, i was from the top school in my COUNTRY now eat that zzzzzz)
sorry, just got a little worked up there.
Yup, primary school students have formal lessons for just half a day, but most kids now go for so much tution its scary how much money tuition centers make. (Heck even kindergardern kids are not having it easy, there are more and more cases of parents sending their kids to TWO kindergardens - i dont know how competitive your country is, it could probably be worst, i'm just saying that sg just aint as slack as X made it out to be). And X felt that we are very slack cos we get to do all those extra curriculum stuff and have a lot of fun... the sad thing tho, is that those 'extra' stuff are actually complusary activities, and esp in sec sch/jc, they eat up a lot of your studying time.
My mum often tells me this story that i find really scary - kids in japan compare with each other by the amount of time they sleep, like if someone sleep longer then they think he/she is probably not going to make it cos they arent studying hard/long enough, and most kids sleep like at most 3-4 hours each day. Well i'm not sure how true this is (stories from my mum are... o.o anyone care to share your experience? XD ). But if i think of it carefully... is it really that competitive since primary school? When she narrated the story she used the term 'little kids' in mandarin so i get that image that she's referring to primary school or even kindergarden kids... but in actual fact the term can also mean sec sch or even jc (junior college, or like the last two years of high school)... primary school kids sleeping 4 hours a day is really scary. Nowadays i dont know how it is like for the current pri sch kids, but during my time over a decade ago it certainly wasnt so competitive... but then again being born earlier i seem to get everything easier... tuition centers werent blooming like flowers yet during 'my time'. But my sec sch days... yes... with the through train program my school had, we skipped O lvls and got a 'through train' ticket to JC. So that freed up a lot of time used for exam preparations to do other stuff. Most importantly, we had projects. Or as they call it, performance tasks. And LOTS of it. We even had performance tasks for math... and... wait for it... we had ORAL exams for MATH. MATH ORAL! They sure were creative is coming up with ways to challenge us. And yes, i did really enjoy the intellectual challenge... but the abundance of projects came with its own side effects. Yup, we were somehow all last minute workers, but it really doesnt help that you have like 4 or 5 projects given in the same times and due on the same week! And I must admit that many of us were perfectionists... the result? Every time a deadline rolls around you practically get no sleep... the entire night just rushing the project either alone or with your group mates. And yeah tons of presentations... i remember a time when we had to do power point presentations like for almost every lesson... and loads of report writing too... so it was then we learnt the art of 'crapping', how to make pretty power point presentations in record time, and the importance of not plagerising work (big fat zero to all who even lifted a single sentence from any website for that particular newsletter assignment i remember really really clearly. yes somehow my teacher was THAT free she went to google all the sentences she found suspisious. manually...)
We had a crazy but fun time... sec 4 was a great year... becos we didnt have O lvls, the sch gave us the entire last half year of sec 4 for modules... basically this system where we only had mother tongue, math and PE (physical education) with our usual class, and the rest of the day you take the modules you picked. A huge variety of modules were offered and minus some restrictions you could take whatever you pleased. Almost any way, subject to space availibilty. But there was a huge selection of subjects on offer. You could take lit modules even if you didnt take lit. I took an interesting module on greek mythology, a cultural + geography classs (cant rem the name), a pharmaceutical class and a molecular evolution class (actually, i cant remember the exact name they used but hte class was on molecular evolution). So yup, before i even entered jc i learned how to use BLAST and learned how NMR, mass spec, GC etc works and some basics on how to read the results... Stuff which is only taught in advanced (h3) modules in jc and uni... sure we didnt go into as much depth then, but it was probably about the same depth as it was during my year 1 uni modeules (we had more width in uni but similar depth, the extra depth came in the later years.) And to imagine that i had learned about all that in sec school! ah... those were really fun times. Challenging, but fun. Really miss those days...
sighz, i guess i've gone really off topic already... (but i did warn you this is a ranting post!) So yeah... needless to say i felt very insulted that X thinks we have it easy...
And she'll be back next month... she went back to china to do some eng course + exam there so that she can meet the entry requirements for a diploma course offered by SIM... and so now she'll be back in sg for the course. I... I know she's my relative and i shd try to be nice to her... but then we are so different its so... hard to talk to her. There just isnt much to chat about. (And omg... i'm an introvert by nature and if there isnt a need to talk i wont - unless i'm with ppl i know/close friends then in such situations introverts become extroverts... so the 1st few times we met i barely talked with her - she didnt say much either... than later on my mum told me she thought me n my sis couldnt speak mandarin...................... like............zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Just because it dont say a thing doesnt mean i'm mute ok? I cant write chinese well [its been years since my last chinese lesson, no more chinese since JC] and i hardly read much chinese these days [actually i do - chinese subbed Japanese shows :X], but i can speak mandarin very well thank you. I know many of my fellow friends cant speak mandarin for nuts but no, I.AM.NOT.ONE.OF.THEM. Me and my sis speaks and understand chinese really well thank you, we've been using mandarin to communicate (esp with my mum) since young. At home I speak chinese with my parents, unless talking about some tech stuff like cameras or phones/computers than we'll probably be speaking in English... actually i dont even notice what langauge i use... i just use what the other party is using. And my sis speaks mandarin as well or even better then me. In fact her friends from China thought she was ALSO from China cos she speaks good mandarin... So yeah... yet another insult)
Not looking forward to meeting her at all... trying to tell myself to be more friendly, be mroe... socialable maybe? But its hard. Really hard.
/end rant.
i was thinking its been a while since i wrote something in any of my blogs... actually i wanted to write a fic, but didnt feel like continuing any of my half written fics and couldnt think of a nice idea either so... i ended up with a huge WOT instead. >< oh wells.
My relative from China is coming back to Sg next month...
Back to... cos she came here for a year to study English in hopes of getting a decent enough O lvl result to get into a polytechnic and get a diploma.
She is related to me in some way or another I guess... tho i'm not exactly sure how. My paternal grandma came from China, and when she came over to sg (with her husband i guess...) she brought my uncle along... my dad was bron in sg, if i got my facts right... her daughter was left in China i think... as with her many friends and sisters ++ others... my parents dont talk about it much, in fact they dont tell us about all that at all (ok, me n my sis nvr asked either)... so all i know is from hearing conversations amongst themselves. So this relative who's coming to sg again (i'll just call her X ok...?) is... probably like... the grandduaghter of my grandma's sister... or something.
Well we hardly have any contact with the relatives there... when my grandma was alive she would spend a couple of months in China every few years... and then we'd call them on the phone sometimes... like two of the relatives came over a few times... once when i was really young, and the next visit was like... a few years ago so its really rare for them to come sg... on the other hand we've never visited them there before. Yes... i've never been to my ancestral town before...
So well... when X came to sg like... last year (or maybe last last year), it was the 1st time we met... naturally, i wasnt sure what to expect... we didnt meet like really a lot either... mostly just some gatherings with my family or with my family + my aunt and uncle. We also invited her over for our yearly bbq...
But despite the short meetings... it was clear that we were worlds apart...
If you think that China is still a backward, poor, wat-have-u-not, country... than you are dead WRONG. Its a huge country and there ARE still undeveloped parts, but in MOST places things are developing faster then you can blink... and in the hokkien province things are no exception. Apparently my relatives are doing some kind of family business and doing really REALLY well. Not the riches ppl in China, but certainly much better then we are doing in sg... and it shows...
Well for one she is quite a picky eater... well not that she would outright not eat anything she doesnt like, but she wont eat much... and she doesnt really like to try new stuff, like we'd bring her to try some local speciaties but its clear that she doesnt like it... idk but the whole feeling of things doesnt rub off very well. Yeah, i totally admit that sg food just aint as good as the food elsewhere simple becos sg is soooo small and we have to import most of your food from overseas. Import overseas = you lose on the freshness, and as a result food just doesnt taste as good... (like the pork isnt as fragrant etc) but still... at least try to be more... enthusiatic? T.T After a while my parents and my uncles were just lamented that it doesnt matter where we go to eat since the spoilt kid wont enjoy it anyway...
Like just before she went back to China, we went for western at the airport. My parents picked western becos her results of the O lvls couldnt get her into polytechnic and her parents were thinking of sending her elsewhere to study, elsewhere as in some... western countries. Hence the choice. But it turned out quite... disappointing. She wasnt even interested in looking at the menu and just decided to order whatever i ordered (at least my dad's fear that she will just pick the most expensive thing on the menu didnt happen). I picked steak and found it really good... but she barely ate half of her steak... and i really dont think its cos she has a small appetide.
Maybe the idea of hanging out with old folks like my uncle just doesnt appeal to her... she made a bunch of friends (fellow China students in the langauge school) and seemed to be having the party of her life in sg. There was an incident where my uncle was trying to contact her and ask how she's doing, but she didnt pick up the phone... when she finally did pick up (or call back, i cant remember the details, it happened quite some time ago) at THREE AM, my uncle thought she was sick as she sounded really tired. Turns out she had been out partying with her friends and just reached home... so much so for coming sg to study... and it totally doesnt help that she only hangs out with fellow china students who found it equally awkward to converse in English. Langauge is something you need to practise with to improve. She asked me for advice on how to improve her English and i gave it to her but... I asked her to speak to her classmates and friends in English, since they are all in Sg to learn English... but she said they all found it too awkawrd (really, if you dont try... how will you improve? Hence i say it again - to all you English fanfic writers who think you have sucky grammer/spelling/whatever because English is not your 1st langauge: It really doesnt matter, all that matters is that you have tried! PLUS, because you are trying, you will improve and be an even better writer! So DONT WORRY, you are all HEROS in your own right! ). I asked her to try listening to the news, or heck even watch english dramas or random tv programs, or even listen to English songs... Then she told me that she once went to watch a movie with her friends, but it turned out to be a tragedy cos there were no subtitles and they couldnt understand a single thing. I was really quite... idk... flabbergasted. Its not like she just started learning the langauage. They had English lessons in China and they were boosting that her results and Eng are good. Problem is that the school she attend, although is the best sch in the province, is still just a school in the relatively small province and their standard was still considerablely lower then that of school in major cities. I've had loads of PCR friends in sec sch and she speak and understand way better Eng then X. (but then again those ppl are smart to begin with, else they wouldnt be able to come my sec sch i guess). Still... i bet she has learn English longer then i have Japanese, but it felt that I could understand Japanese better then she could understand English... hey i can understand like at least 90% of entire VSA or HnA episodes now! And my formal J lang classes were barely enough to let me take the lowest level of JLPT. Its simple... she just didnt watch English shows - how less painful can improving listening be really? Pick a nice variety show/drama, listen and read the subtitles... and voila! You've improved your listening! I dont think she spent a lot of time studying either... of the few times we asked her out she always had some outing with friends. Like she was talking to my uncle and telling him about all the places in Sg that she'd been to... sg is small but i'm sure you still have plenty of time to study after having so much fun *sarcastic*
There was just once that my mum was saying i should help her blah blah blah and she came over to my house for a while to study. Her English standard was really quite... it didnt feel like she was in th emood to study either, but i dont blame her for that since she could simply be uncomfortable with me around (we still barely know each other even now!)... but when she read out the passage for oral practice i was like... o.o. Have you even taken a China airlines flight? And you know that kind of incomprehensible Eng they speak when making pre-flight annoucements? YES! That was exactly how she spoke! AND by that time she had been in sg for months! Yes, i dont speak American English, or the Queen's English... and you can say all Singaporeans have a weird accent (as I say the same about you)... but... but... but... none of my friends speak that bad English! Whether those from China or even my uni friend from Malaysia with attrocious grammer (well he was Chinese and Malay educated so...), or my coursemate from vietnam whom i had trouble understanding at times... (sorry, not to offend anyone here! T.T )... they all speak better then her... and she spent months in Singapore already... in fact she had spent close to a year in Sg...! Arghs... idk...
It was no surprise that she didnt pass her English in the end... but what was surprising was her clear non-chalent attidute towards the exams. She went back to China almost right after finish the O lvls... and we meet up for lunch at the air port like... just a day or a few days after all her papers were over (yes, that western lunch). She didnt even mention a single thing about the exams...! I don't know about you... but i'd be talking about it if i were her. Its like... the major thing and THE reason she came to sg to study and yet even when it was just us kids (me, her, + my sis) she didnt mention a word about it either... and when i asked her she just say in a rather off handed manner that it was bad. And in quite a cheerful manner that it didnt look/feel like she didnt talk about the exams just because it was so disastrous and didnt want to think about it. Heck i doubt that she even put much effort into preparing for it.
It also irked me that day when she asked me that 'should have gone on all the rides in USS at least once already right?'. That sentence just totally sums up how diffferent a world we are in... sure we are living quite comfortably, but tickets to USS (universal studios singapore) are REALLY PRICEY! So no, i've not even been there once. Its one thing that i'm not exactly fond of those rides, but the ticket price is... if the entrance fee is cheaper i would go and probably try out as much of the rides as i dare (like those super crazy roller coasters are out for me)... but... ok... the USS website tells me that it a day pass costs 68 bucks if its an off peak day... 68 bucks omg... that's more then my weekly pocket money... and she asks it in a manner expecting me to have gone there already, and probably been there many times (she asked in mandarin of cos). No... i'm just not so rich. Honest. We are in a different league ya know? Rich kid, poor kid. Different. Not to mention all the other places she's been to with her friends... like movies almost every week. Movie tickets are rather expensive now too ok! Yeah you bet she had fun studying here.
I guess she just never really was intending to come to sg to study. Her parents intended it that way but not her, she was just out to have fun. Or maybe she was just badly mistaken. When she just came to sg she ask us if you had a lot of extra curriculum activies, and we said yes, then she went on saying stuff like how kids in sg have it really easy, like we end sch so early and in China they end very late, barely get any sleep etc etc... then she ask about me and i said i was in Uni and she said something to the effects of 'it should be very easy/relaxed isnt it?' That was just, sheer awkwardness. And the pride at which she made those statements... -.-'''
Like seriously -.-'''
Yes. Sg IS SMALL. You cant compare competition in sg with competition in China simply because there are like goodness knows how many more candidates in China than in sg. But that doesnt mean that we sg students are mega slackers either. Especially coming from someone who is only from a provincinal sch in China, i dont think she has the right to say that (her results in their national exams wasnt good, which is WHY she had to look for alternatives overseas - and NO singapore is not a like some paradise land where you can come to get a pretty cert for free, just because you think you're so good and in the top sch of the province - hey let me tell you, i was from the top school in my COUNTRY now eat that zzzzzz)
sorry, just got a little worked up there.
Yup, primary school students have formal lessons for just half a day, but most kids now go for so much tution its scary how much money tuition centers make. (Heck even kindergardern kids are not having it easy, there are more and more cases of parents sending their kids to TWO kindergardens - i dont know how competitive your country is, it could probably be worst, i'm just saying that sg just aint as slack as X made it out to be). And X felt that we are very slack cos we get to do all those extra curriculum stuff and have a lot of fun... the sad thing tho, is that those 'extra' stuff are actually complusary activities, and esp in sec sch/jc, they eat up a lot of your studying time.
My mum often tells me this story that i find really scary - kids in japan compare with each other by the amount of time they sleep, like if someone sleep longer then they think he/she is probably not going to make it cos they arent studying hard/long enough, and most kids sleep like at most 3-4 hours each day. Well i'm not sure how true this is (stories from my mum are... o.o anyone care to share your experience? XD ). But if i think of it carefully... is it really that competitive since primary school? When she narrated the story she used the term 'little kids' in mandarin so i get that image that she's referring to primary school or even kindergarden kids... but in actual fact the term can also mean sec sch or even jc (junior college, or like the last two years of high school)... primary school kids sleeping 4 hours a day is really scary. Nowadays i dont know how it is like for the current pri sch kids, but during my time over a decade ago it certainly wasnt so competitive... but then again being born earlier i seem to get everything easier... tuition centers werent blooming like flowers yet during 'my time'. But my sec sch days... yes... with the through train program my school had, we skipped O lvls and got a 'through train' ticket to JC. So that freed up a lot of time used for exam preparations to do other stuff. Most importantly, we had projects. Or as they call it, performance tasks. And LOTS of it. We even had performance tasks for math... and... wait for it... we had ORAL exams for MATH. MATH ORAL! They sure were creative is coming up with ways to challenge us. And yes, i did really enjoy the intellectual challenge... but the abundance of projects came with its own side effects. Yup, we were somehow all last minute workers, but it really doesnt help that you have like 4 or 5 projects given in the same times and due on the same week! And I must admit that many of us were perfectionists... the result? Every time a deadline rolls around you practically get no sleep... the entire night just rushing the project either alone or with your group mates. And yeah tons of presentations... i remember a time when we had to do power point presentations like for almost every lesson... and loads of report writing too... so it was then we learnt the art of 'crapping', how to make pretty power point presentations in record time, and the importance of not plagerising work (big fat zero to all who even lifted a single sentence from any website for that particular newsletter assignment i remember really really clearly. yes somehow my teacher was THAT free she went to google all the sentences she found suspisious. manually...)
We had a crazy but fun time... sec 4 was a great year... becos we didnt have O lvls, the sch gave us the entire last half year of sec 4 for modules... basically this system where we only had mother tongue, math and PE (physical education) with our usual class, and the rest of the day you take the modules you picked. A huge variety of modules were offered and minus some restrictions you could take whatever you pleased. Almost any way, subject to space availibilty. But there was a huge selection of subjects on offer. You could take lit modules even if you didnt take lit. I took an interesting module on greek mythology, a cultural + geography classs (cant rem the name), a pharmaceutical class and a molecular evolution class (actually, i cant remember the exact name they used but hte class was on molecular evolution). So yup, before i even entered jc i learned how to use BLAST and learned how NMR, mass spec, GC etc works and some basics on how to read the results... Stuff which is only taught in advanced (h3) modules in jc and uni... sure we didnt go into as much depth then, but it was probably about the same depth as it was during my year 1 uni modeules (we had more width in uni but similar depth, the extra depth came in the later years.) And to imagine that i had learned about all that in sec school! ah... those were really fun times. Challenging, but fun. Really miss those days...
sighz, i guess i've gone really off topic already... (but i did warn you this is a ranting post!) So yeah... needless to say i felt very insulted that X thinks we have it easy...
And she'll be back next month... she went back to china to do some eng course + exam there so that she can meet the entry requirements for a diploma course offered by SIM... and so now she'll be back in sg for the course. I... I know she's my relative and i shd try to be nice to her... but then we are so different its so... hard to talk to her. There just isnt much to chat about. (And omg... i'm an introvert by nature and if there isnt a need to talk i wont - unless i'm with ppl i know/close friends then in such situations introverts become extroverts... so the 1st few times we met i barely talked with her - she didnt say much either... than later on my mum told me she thought me n my sis couldnt speak mandarin...................... like............zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Just because it dont say a thing doesnt mean i'm mute ok? I cant write chinese well [its been years since my last chinese lesson, no more chinese since JC] and i hardly read much chinese these days [actually i do - chinese subbed Japanese shows :X], but i can speak mandarin very well thank you. I know many of my fellow friends cant speak mandarin for nuts but no, I.AM.NOT.ONE.OF.THEM. Me and my sis speaks and understand chinese really well thank you, we've been using mandarin to communicate (esp with my mum) since young. At home I speak chinese with my parents, unless talking about some tech stuff like cameras or phones/computers than we'll probably be speaking in English... actually i dont even notice what langauge i use... i just use what the other party is using. And my sis speaks mandarin as well or even better then me. In fact her friends from China thought she was ALSO from China cos she speaks good mandarin... So yeah... yet another insult)
Not looking forward to meeting her at all... trying to tell myself to be more friendly, be mroe... socialable maybe? But its hard. Really hard.
/end rant.
i was thinking its been a while since i wrote something in any of my blogs... actually i wanted to write a fic, but didnt feel like continuing any of my half written fics and couldnt think of a nice idea either so... i ended up with a huge WOT instead. >< oh wells.
