The Week In School: I Feel Like Sh*t

Yeah, I didn't really like This Week In School? Why? Well most of the Tests I did were duds, and for the most everything felt a bit to routine, uninspired and boring. I suppose this is just one of those Weeks eh?


Art: Our next task is this: imagine an alien/monster/human trapped inside the confined space of a box, and draw it like the alien/thing is trapped right in front of you. Bit of a weird topic isn't it? I suppose it fits in with this Years theme of 'Define space in art' but it just feels like a random topic that was quite literally pulled out of the Teacher's ass. So I started experimenting with the different shapes that a box could have: for example I imagined this fat alien blob trapped inside a circular box or an octopus confined to a small rectangular box that caused it to pack it limbs into every square inch of space. I haven't yet decided what I'm going to go with so you'll just have to wait until next Week to find out which idea I'll pick.    


Geography: We were mainly just correcting the work we did last Week while the Teacher was away, apparently if you live in Los Angeles you have a 50% chance of either being run over by tornados, swamped by floods or ravaged by Earthquakes. Sounds like a safe place to live in then... Monday was the History Test on the USSR, and at the time I thought it went superbly well (as usual), heck I even finished early this time which was a plus. The last question asked me to write a argumentative paragraph on how Joseph Stalin turned the USSR into a totalitarian regime and I pretty much wrote a full on essay! I did one 'introductory' paragraph on how the USSR was founded (with Lenin and his Bolsheviks), one on what Stalin did when he rose to power (concentration camps, propaganda, everything being owned by the government ect...), ANOTHER paragraph on the result of his actions (USSR became the 3rd highest industry powerhouse in the world) and a final paragraph on how all this meant it was a totalitarian regime. Why did I do all of this just for one question? Well for one it was worth half of the points in the entire Test, and secondly I wanted to show off how much I'd invested on this subject.
So what happened the following Thursday? I got my Result back, and was quite frankly livid. After all my hard work, WHAT DID I GET!?? A 14/20! CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS? Well I couldn't! So the Test was on twenty points: ten for the augmentative paragraph, ten for the other questions. I got 9/10 on the questions (as per usual) and a measly 5/10 on that bloody paragraph that I was so cocky about! Teacher's comments? 'You should make better use of your knowledge and better analyse the subject because half of it is irrelevant.'  So in short, all that effort I put into the other paragraphs wasn't at all needed: I just needed to do one paragraph on what Stalin did with the USSR and a little sentence at the end to conclude why it was a totalitarian regime. So she deducted points simply because most of it wasn't necessary? We corrected it in Class and minor the odd spelling error here and there if I had just taken out the Introductory paragraph and the one about the effects of Stalin's power on the USSR then I would have got almost FULL marks! Still at least I'm continuing to be Top Of The Class, my score was still the highest in the Year because apparently everyone else failed miserably at it. The average for my Class was 8,54/20 so from a purely statistical standpoint everyone was horrible across the board, with only me and a few other people getting more than half the points. Again I'm livid that I failed this Test, or at least by my standards anyway. The Teacher just deducted those points because, if anything, I went ABOVE of what was expected of me and did a whole lot more than just a 'little' paragraph of text. I just want to scream right now, that's two Tests in a row now where the bloody argumentative paragraph has seriously hindered my score. It's like I'm working just a hard as last year and yet I'm not getting these PERFECT Results anymore! GRRR SO FAUSTRATING!!!!!    


French: For the holidays I had to read this book the Teacher gave us called 'Un Secret' by this guy called Phillippe Grimbert, apparently it's supposed to be a really good read but basically I was 80 pages in, couldn't understand a damned word of it and just put it down. Which was a shame really, because judging from the film alone it seems like a really deep tragedy set in the era of World War 2. Yes that's right, for once in this subject we actually did something interesting and we've started watching the film adaptation of it, because one of our new objectives for this Chapter is to distinguish the differences between the film adaptation and the book. Shame she couldn't have showed us Harry Potter instead but oh well...Well more on the film next Week, and the less said on that awful Test I was subjected to on Thursday the better *SHUDDERS* Not looking forward to the Result on that one!


Sport: It was mainly Ping-Pong this Week, with a bit of Football thrown in for good measure. I still sucked balls at Ping-Pong, and to make it worse this was the Week where we were all evaluated on our performance so I don't stand one chance in hell of getting a good score! I lost nearly every match I was in, it was just a horrible way to spend an hour. Still I'm just glad that this marks the end of Ping-Pong, at least now I can go in on Friday afternoon knowing that I may NOT be the worst in the entire class. And I was just as bad in Football as well, couldn't score or save a goal for my life! *SIGHS* I'm not doing very well this Week am I?


Maths: I liked Maths a lot this Week actually, the work was easy, no mistakes were made and it all bodes well for the Test on Tuesday. Except we should all know by now that when the Test does arrive I'll be terrible in it no matter what, even despite all my previous efforts in Class (I'll probably make a few silly mistakes again), so in a way I kinda feel crap about this subject as well!


English: Got a 10/10 in one Test, so it wasn't all horrible results this Week then. It's a shame that I don't see getting full marks in an English Test as an achievement then, heck by now it's practically mandatory. The rest of the lesson was a debate on the difference between living in the country and living in the city. Pretty mundane stuff, all in all, but least it was nice break from the other lessons.


Music: The Test went well, but I'm not sure if I screwed up on one question or not (may have answered it incorrectly) so we'll have to wait and see. The rest of the lesson was on music being utilised for advertising, so we were subjected to more publicity. Not bad, but not good either. 


Technology: Remember that time when I f*cked up a month ago in front of the whole Class because I was so unprepared? Well I finally learned this Week that my Team (well mainly me because I was responsible for 95% of the work) scored a poor 2/5 on that project, which just adds to my increasingly sombre mood this Week. We now have to plan all the steps/stages it'll take to get from the idea of our project to it's conception (budget, getting the necessary materials ect...) and make sure to put them all in the right idea. Technology was alight I suppose.


D.V.3: Nothing much to comment about really this Week other than the fact that we did the interview with our school technician M. Chapel and it went rather smoothly if I do say so myself. We planned it so I was the one who wrote down the answers and my co-worker was asking the questions. Obviously I couldn't write everything down and ideally we could have done with a camera to film it with but I think I did a good job overall in jotting down the important words. Now we're not journalists so our questions weren't exactly 'think outside of the box' good, but we did come up with a few idea's that really made the guy consider his reply for a moment. Amongst the general questions of 'How long have you been in this line of work' we rather cheekily put in the addition of 'Do you like this job? What for you is the hardest part about being a technician? Would you recommend someone on this line of work?' His reply skirted away a bit on that first question so I was sure to repeat the whole 'So DO you like this job?' after he was done! Think I was being a bit to insistent there? I don't really care, it'll look good in the resume we'll do and we get an honest opinion about this type of job. He basically said that you do get a bit sick of computer screens after a while and it's grating to think that with every new system comes a stream of new problems to tackle (he mentioned Vista in particular as being a pain in terms of actually getting the thing to work) but OVERALL he doesn't HATE his job, he said that 'adaptation to the constant change of technology' was a required skill though that needs a lot of patience! So that's the main 'scoop', as they say, I'll maybe divulge a bit more about the interview next Week (as then we should be putting it into our Diaporama and I'll be able to explain it in detail).


German: We mainly studied an E-mail this Week, about a teenager named Leon writing to his friend Hannah in Hamburg about what he did during the Summer Holidays. It was boring, as usual, and this time even the Class said it out loud! One girl in my Class actually had the balls this time to challenge the Teacher, saying that learning German was useless as she'll never need it in her life ect... You can imagine the murmurs of agreement the Class cried afterwards! My personal opinion aside, it was pretty funny to watch, by the end it was like a full fledged revolution, a few of them even refused to work and the Teacher was just like 'Okay, if you don't want to work that's fine, though don't complain when the Test is to hard.' WHAAAAT? You can't just let them sit there and do nothing surely? Have a backbone for once, you're too nice! Give them all words for crying out loud! They're only acting like this because YOU let them act like this! Anyway I just sat at the back of the Class and kept quiet for the entire duration, bored out of my mind.


S.V.T: Well the Test that I've been dreading for quite some time now has finally arrived, and guess what? I FAILED BIIIIG TIME! And so did the rest of my year unfortunately. In fact the Teacher cannot recall a time in her career where a Class of 3eme has failed THIS HARD on a Test! I think the highest score was a 11/20 and the lowest got to a 1/20 (there were quite a few of these). It was quite literally SOUL DRAINING to see the Teacher hand me a Test that had a 4,5/20 on it. S-O-U-L D-R-A-I-N-I-N-G! Euh, I'll never live this down, that Test is quite frankly a disgrace to humanity, an indescribable travesty that will never be purged from my soul. I beg for Redemption, and yet all I see is dispair! This is a monumental failure! A blot on the whole of history, an avalanche of evil! A herculean monster! I could go on if you want but I think you get the idea by now...     


So that Test pretty much summed up this Week in a nutshell: pretty shitty. Let's hope next Week picks up or my average is going to go down by quite a few points come the end of the Trimestre. Can't say I'm in the best of moods either, I really feel like crap after that whole Sport fiasco.