This Week In School: The Calm Before The Storm

Wow. New Year, new start right? A chance to clean the slate, undo all of your mistakes in the past and rectify your undoings. WRONG. My School has decided to Test the living Sh*t out of us! Next Wednesday - Friday will be NOTHING but non-top testing on all the top subjects: Maths (shudders), French (dies), History or Geography, Civic Education, S.V.T, Technology and Science. This three day period will determine almost 50% of my Overall average for this Trimestre! They expect us to revise for everything! I.M.P.O.S.S.I.B.L.E! I have to basically NOW zone out and do NON STOP REVISING for a whole Week! Which is not only mentally exhausting but is just unecessary! I mean, why do we have to do it all at once? Why not split the humongus Tests (a aclumation of half a years knowledge) over several Weeks? Why all at once? And why do we need to do it in the first place? Haven't we already proved in the last Trimestre that we know our stuff? Its just a breeding ground for stressed-out kids! This Week was just full of dread. The calm before the storm, ya know? By Friday I was about to explode I was so stressed out, mainly due to the fact that I keep pushing back Revision, the Days have become just sooo tiresome, the first thing I do when I come back home now is just sleep for two Hours straight. Now, this may seem a bit cliche, but School IS killing me now:

Monday was the best Day of the Week, although I was suffering from a severe case of after-Christmas syndrome which made going back to School after the Holidays feel weird....
It was like life was happy and free and relaxing and beautiful during that blissful Christmas time period, and then you get chucked back into School half-awake and not knowing what the hell had happened to you in those past two Weeks. I was mainly yawning throughout the entire day, dreaming about what I would do when I finally got backhome. The German Teacher was off for some reason (a trend that continued for the rest of the Week), so we were treated to an Hour of permanence with no Homework to do what-so-ever. Technology was again us researching about this mouvement sensor-thingy, and Art was me applying the finishing touches to my latest masterpiece on the Computer. Maths was the lesson that really waked me up, hitting 100mph from the word 'go'. The only way to describe it is both simple and complicated at the same time, I was fine as long as I didn't wrap my head around it too much. 
After lunch was when I fully realised just exactly what next Week had in store when the History/Geography/French/Principal Teacher announced our schedule for 'Les Epreuves Communes' (Or, as I like to call it, the Brevet but a little bit less important but just as stressful...): 

Wednesday, 12th January:  

History/Geography: 8h30 - 9h30 (We have to learn both subjects, but she'll only choose one of them to Test us on so its like double the workload for nothing, because we won't be Tested on it anyway)

Civic Education: 9h30 - 10h30 (A new subject that we've just started, mainly about the History of Freedom and Liberty ect...).

S.V.T: 11h - 12h.

Nothing but revision in the afternoon, time I normally spend sleeping...

Thursday, 13th January:     


French: 8h30 - 10h30 (Bloody hell, TWO hours dedicated to French alone? Are they going to be Testing us on the entire Language or something? I'm starting to worry about how sore my hands will get...).


English: 11h - 12h (One I'm least worried about, for obvious reasons).


Science: 1h40 - 2h40 (Not really that bothered about this one, but its still ALOT to learn and remember, especially when you count in all the other subjects as well!) 


Lessons as normal from 2h40 to 4h40.

Friday, 14th January:


Maths: 8h30 - 9h30 (I imagine I'll be pretty battered down and tired at this point, having concentrated so much on School for the past few days).


Technology: 10h30 - 11h30


PAUSE 


11h45 - 4h40 lessons as normal.


Well....looks like I've got my work cut out for me then :p


Please, please God, have mercy on my soul...


French was, in short, a complete disaster. Its got to the point where I can't even keep with the French anymore, and I was seriously starting to worry about getting a HORRIFIC Result. I am DREADING next Thursday. Better get my coffin ready...I'm just lucky if I get an answer right now. At least Maths is a possible victory, I'm almost grasping it now, but I gotta say, French has no hope. 

Tuesday was when I started to really panic, I can remember waking up from a bad nightmare that night (I dreamed that I had only scored 10/20 in a History Test), and I was a bit figety all day long. Maths I had a few problems with, and I figure that if the big Test is 2X as hard as this, I'm stuffed. To make matters worse, the Teacher gave us a surprise Test, which is really faustrating for me, seen as I'm constantly preparing for a surprise Test and the ONE day when you skip it due to alot of Homework, THATS WHEN SHE GIVES YOU THE SURPRISE TEST! I knew what to do, its just that I didn't have the definition in my head. I got a 3/5. Civic Education was boring, just endless documents about how Liberty and Freedom of Speech was acheived in France, which involved alot of laws and commitees signing petitions for 200 Years. The two hours of French that followed felt like hell, I just cried when I came back home, I am just helpless now in that subject. If you showed me a future where I had a full grasp on the French Grammar, I wouldn't believe it. 
English was hands down, the most fun I've had in School for a LOOONG time. The new Teacher, who is from New Zealand (he's travelled around the world a million times over, and is a bit of a freelance guy) just knocks you out of the park. He talks in an English accent, yet he's speaking and pronouncing the French words correctly and it sounded weird. He (I don't know his name yet) explained how he proposed to his wife on the beaches of America (he's thirty-ish), which was totally off subject but made you really feel in him and therefore invest more into him as a person (I believe that the more involved with the Teacher you are, the more work and care you invest into his subject), and not just some gruff, strict Teacher that gets the job done but ultimately you know little to nothing about and forget (in the long term) his/her teachings. Notice how when you look at the past you normally focus on the good things, and not the other stuff? Its kinda like that for me with a Teacher. He has also got alot of wit about him, saying that the cassete tapes that his predessor, M. Onno had gave him, were 'For Dinosaurs'. He said that from now on we would be mostly working on Computers, which came no surprise as he carries a Apple backback to School absolutely full of Tech gadgets. Nice guy, and funny too. Think I've just found a new favorite Teacher. 

Wednesday was fine, in Sport it took me a while to get back into the rythm (I can still only last to Level 4 on the high jump, I'm just too long and heavy) and in Technology our group had to present our findings to the Class. It was alright, until French. Here it had gotten cataclysmic, to the point where if I even see another page of French grammar, I automatically feel repulsed by it. The good news is that the Teacher bothered to help me, the bad news is that she gave me 5+ pages to learn (which is just nothing but conjugated words, so really, really boring. At least in History I know that events shaped the culture and society of the World, this I feel is just pointless). I still don't know whether I should give French a go, because right now I'm thinking that the time spent on revising for those 5 pages (plus a book full of Grammar) could go to refining and polishing the revision on my other subjects. Its best to focus on your strenghs, right? And even if I do manage to learn it all off by heart, its just so god damn confusing: is Le Passe Simple the one where most of the verbs end in -ais-ais-ait-ions-iez-aient? Or is that the Conditionnel du Present? DAMN IT, WHY COULDN'T THIS BE MORE SIMPLE! I honestly don't know how the French are able to understand this mess of a language...
I also managed to put the finishing touches on my Geography project in Permanence (the one where I had to create a brochure of Europe, remember), and I printed it out (I had to give it to Teacher anyway so I scanned it into my Computer when I came home):

 

Looks good, eh? I'm mostly pleased with it, although one of the things that It will be evaluated on is the level of detail, which I think is the only thing that this is lacking (spelt a few things wrong as well, but luckily the Geography Teacher won't show this to the English Teacher...). 

Thursday, was fine...mostly. I felt really ill during Maths, I thought I was going to collapse. Talk about stress getting to your head! Sport was, again the insufferable Ping-Pong. Why god, WHY? I won once. ONCE! And I got my last Test Result in S.V.T (the one where I muddled up the two types of lava, remember?): 15/20 which was ALOT more than what I was expecting. The afternoon was *SIGH* boring: The German Teacher was still off, Extra Maths was just a bunch of more exercises and Music was just another *YAWN* fest (We've seen the Notre Dame clip a 1000 times over, quit playing it!). At least the Teacher was kind enough to not give us a Test for next Week...

Friday was again fine, although the pressure was starting to show. I muddled up in a few exercises in more Extra Maths, and yawned my way through Ed Civ. But S.V.T was surprisingly interesting for once, we were studying how all the continents separated millenia ago. The afternoon went by in a second, the only real buggering thing is that when I was putting my Books back into my bag after Science a gust of wind came and sent my papers flying EVERYWHERE! Score No 1 for mother nature, who is a complete %$£&@! English was again, a blast, and has pretty much been the highlight of the Week for me.

And so that was 'The Calm Before The Storm', the storm abviously being the swarm of extreme Tests that will be flying into my life NEXT Week! The way I see it, it could go two ways: I get good Results in most of them, par maybe Maths and French....or I will collapse under the pressure and forget everything on the Day (which right now seems the most likely) and be crap in everything...
Next Week can't come any sooner, eh?
   

 I'll rest in peace....so long as Maths exercises don't get buried with me...