I’ve got my classes for the next two terms, and my marks from the last one. I’ve actually had them for a while, but I couldn’t be bothered to put them up. I can’t imagine that there’s too much demand for up-to-the-minute Stu updates, and I’m only putting them up now for general knowledge, and pride.
Final Marks
Religion - 80
Communications Technology - 90
Math - 88
English – 86
Average 86%
Over all I’m pretty happy with my marks, despite the predicted fall of numbers. As it turns out my slow-handed righting is going to be quite troublesome, and I should probably look to fix that before Grade 11 and 12 exams come up lest I shit all over my future, and potential career choices.
My future classes are as follows, keeping in mind that I do not have the actual schedule on hand so I do not know the teacher names, but I wish I did have it in order to explain some changes to the time-table. Now, instead of having periods 2 - 4 lunches they all occur on a 2 hour long period 3. Grade 9s have their lunch for the first 40 minutes, grade 10's have their class interupted for the second 40 minutes, and 11's and 12's will be having theirs for the final 40 minutes of period 3. Feel free to discuss that. However, even if I did have the schedule on me, I would probably keep teachers anonymous in case they chose to google their names, and see what things some jackass kids are saying about them on the inter-tubes.
Semester 1
World Religion
Guitar
Math
Physics
Semester 2
English
Ancient History
Chemistry
Biology
It should be a fun-filled, eventful, and busy year. But we don’t need to worry about that quite yet.
Part II: Bee-Eff-Eff
So, I'm sure regular readership all remembers my soft spot for that girl in my math class, she knows who she is! Anyway, the short version of the story was to befriend the female, in hopes of increasing hangout time, and getting to know her. Well, it actually worked a lot better than I could have possibly hoped!
It was several weeks ago, the day that Harry Potter and the Order of the
So we went and watched the movie, quietly making ridiculous suggestions to improve the movie, mocking the huge gaps missing from the plot, and just making conversation the whole night, laughing away. Since then we’ve hung out for the vast majority of the waking hours on several days of the week, joined with good-guy Tank. That most-popular Mr. Smith's son. The three of us have watched Kung-Fu Hustle, Hot Fuzz, Reservoir Dogs, and 300 just this week, as well as billiards, guitar hero, swimming, mission, and walking around aimlessly. It's be a few weeks of a lot of fun, and I'm surprised that i didn't really have to put much effort into befriending her, and yet it has turned out so great! Hurray for things that put themselves together, eh?
Part
So far I am about halfway through my summer vacation, and I still have loads to do. Beating a few games, going on a wacky family vacation, and re-teaching myself music notes, and their corresponding placements on a guitar, as well as keeping up with the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. So far I’ve made some new friends, found a deadly spider, beaten some games, and watched some really, really awesome movies. The seconds half should be awesome and should at least provide me with some interesting posts.
4 comments:
Great!
Glad stuff seems to all be on the upswing!
So, about the schedule...
that means that I, taking my period 2 class, will have half the class, a 40 minute lunch, then the second half of the class?
Ugh... poor teachers...
They can either try and pack all the teaching into the first half (which means no one would ever show up for the second half) or they could be interrupted by this lunch and loose everyone's focus...
Being a slow writer does kinda suck - one thing that was pretty cool though was that, in the majority of my classes, on the finals there aren't that much writing (generally, there have been a few exceptions). A fair number of classes are all just multiple choice, even.
Bottom line - even if you go into a "soft" field, there's a pretty good chance that you'll write more in your grade 12 exams than in your uni exams.
Oh thank God. I've been suffering without my up to the minute Stupdates.
You should have a 24 hour blog feed. Your life is more interesting than mine.
Also, I have to agree with Binkle about the whole schedule thing. I think the people who make these timetable decisions have - perhaps - forgotten what it is like to teach. I mean...what if you have a gym class there. Do you get changed, go for the first half, get unchanged, eat lunch, get changed, go for the second half, and get unchanged?
Or do they just not have gym during that period? Because...then they are really screwing up their whole "we can never fit enough classes into the gym, oh Lord!" dilemma.
And if you're worried about slow writing, it could be an issue if you go into the sciences, math, or engineering. Unless the slow writing applies strictly to text, and not to formulaic stuff (though there is some textual stuff in those courses too). Ultimately, I don't think it is a big deal. I mean...Andrew wrote his high school exams unbearably slow (apparently it is genetic) and he seems to be okay in university.
And I don't know what Binkle means by soft field, but as long as you avoid English, you should be fine. English exams seem to be primarily huge, well-plotted in class essays, with an assortment of other stuff. I wrote my in-class essays the same as I did in high school, and my marks dropped from the mid-80s to high-90s, to a 65. Long story short, I know never to take an English at university if I can avoid it. Oh, and never take a philosophy course that is really a feminism course. Not only will it be unbearable (and insult your gender), but it will also have a sizeable amount of regurgitative writing on the final. And, you'll hate life a little more afterwards.
Just steer clear unless it is mandatory.
Also, Binkle, I would kill for multiple choice exams (in my electives...I know it isn't exactly practical in math). :P
Multiple choice is so easy; just from a statistical standpoint you have pretty good odds.
Anyway, I'm tired. I actually wrote an exam today (if the timestamp on Binkle's comment is correct, I was wrist deep in a recursive method at the time he posted it). So...I'm going to stop rambling in your comments and go to sleep.
...
So tired.
MC aren't the same as what you wrote in highschool.
A, B, C, D isn't all that common; there are generally more options (which hurts the, "statistically you'll succeed" argument).
Also, they tend to like, "Choose the MOST correct answer" - so, there are multiple answers that ARE correct, but one is MORE correct then the rest... which can be rather tricky.
it's not impossible or anything, but getting MC isn't an opportunity to turn your brain off - you've got to know your stuff, because you can't "fuzz things" like you sometimes can in written work - the machine is only looking for one answer.
The only reason they do MC is that there're too many people in most of my classes to mark long answer - 200 finals * 20 minutes per final = 66 hours - or almost two weeks of work. And marking a big long essay or two in 20 minutes seems kinda tight... if we bump up the time to 30 minutes per exam, we get almost three weeks of work.
By "soft" fields, I was thinking "not math" - in highschool, I remember most writing being on the english, religion, etc. tests - much less volume of writing on the math and physics tests.
I liked my philosophy courses; though I have avoided English - but then again, I never really liked English all that much in highschool either...
You know, in defense of the classes - when was the last time you actually attended a lecture? I've gotten the impression that you skip most every lecture, then work out of the book to try and catch up. I don't know about your classes, but I always find that I get more out of the lecture then I ever could out of the text book (especially when most profs deal with content in lectures that isn't even covered in the textbook). I think perhaps your lower marks might NOT be "content is harder" and might be more attributable to your learning style (and there's nothing wrong with that - I myself had to drop a DE course, not because the content was hard, but because I couldn't LEARN that way)
Also, as for the "We don't gotz da Gymz0rz" - St. Mikes is putting on that big addition, which I believe includes another gym and a weight room. I wouldn't be surprised if there were science labs and some computer rooms in there too - bottom line is that they might just have enough spare specialized classrooms to put some out of use for a period a day.
Those types of multiple choices are the same as what I did in senior levels of high school. In Ms. Laurin's history class (if she is still teaching Stu, take it. Best class ever), we had multiple choice tests of that nature, and it was always choose the most correct answer.
Also, I have already done multiple choice exams in university, and I'd say they were about the same with what I did in high school. Now, granted, it isn't a universal standard. I am just providing it as a counter-proof to your assertion.
Furthermore, I think there was something fundamentally wrong with your math there. Unless you mistyped.
200 finals * 20 minutes per final = 66 hours, but - with a 6.5 hour work day, it works out to be about 10 days (give or take). While I will admit that this is a lot of time, they seem to take a tremendous amount of time in returning marks to us...so...yeah. You've rounded up a lot, and I didn't even assume they spent the eight hour work day marking.
And when you said soft fields, I wasn't sure what you meant that justified using the adjective "soft". I have no idea what that means. If we were talking about soft sciences versus hard sciences, I'd assume you meant poly sci (soft) versus biochemistry (hard). But, how it applies to things overall, I wasn't sure. Even still I don't know the full definition...except that math is "not soft".
Unless soft is related to writing...but I don't really see the connection between the two.
Oh, also, I wasn't badmouthing philosophy in general. I was talking about my gender issues class. It was excruciating. We learned that intercourse is how man punishes all of female kind.
First of all, as far as maths are concerned, the change feels drastically different. Of course, in my case, there are a few things to keep in mind.
1. I took a year off between high school and university. And, I say a full year because I didn't really do any hard subjects in my one term of fifth year. This gap made my math abilities a little rusty.
2. As for my English marks dropping, it was in the one class. I'm doing fine in the other English class (I've got 100% on most tests and assignments (save the first one, because I had to get a feel for what he wanted)). The problem with my Children's Literature mark was that the prof said my writing was great, but apparently my ideas weren't thought out well enough. And that kind of sucks, because it was an in class essay, and I had to pull that stuff out of my ass. The book I wrote the essay on is one I have read three times, and both English classes lectured on the same book, and even with all of that info, my logic was still not up to his standards.
3. I didn't go to my math classes this term because I couldn't learn anything from them. I couldn't understand my calculus teacher (she had a thick russian accent). Despite this, I only lost a single mark (or two) on each assignment, and I got a good mark on the midterms, although I feel I may have butchered the final due to nervous panicking (at first I didn't know how to answer anything, and then I realized I was an idiot and started writing down answers).
4. For Algebra, I just couldn't learn from my prof. He went on tangents, and I lost focus. So, I figured, if I was going to spend all this time recopying notes from the textbook later anyway, why not just learn from the textbook exclusively? So, I devoted more time to assignments, before we got into some funky abstract shit that I couldn't wrap my head around until the exam.
5. And for CS 134, we did too much stuff that was not programming. It was concept/ theoretical stuff. I had that. I like programming. I like getting a task, and programming something to make it work. I don't like talking about the ethics of programming (which we did, and it was boring). So, my marks suffered there too.
Bottom line is that my marks don't suffer because I do not go to class. It is because the material is sometimes difficult, although I think I did pretty good this term.
Oh, and the content is harder. In fact, we were encouraged to do an assortment of practice problems before going for first term, because the university acknowledges that there is a huge gap between the knowledge we acquire in some highschools, and the knowledge expected in university.
Hell, I can only remember using two trig identities, but during frosh week, I heard people spouting off many. And I was worried. Still am. But, I seem to have worked myself into a grove. I just need to take some more interesting electives, and I should be fine. Children's Lit was boring as hell.
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