This Week In School

 
Because of Armistice day and some "other" Christian holiday the School was kind enough to let us off both Today and Yesterday. YAY! So I'm kinda in a 'mini holiday' right now which is pretty neat seen as I've only just come back from another Holiday! As much as they (arguably) overwork us you can't complain about all the Holidays. Good thing too, as Mon-Wed this week was a bit mixed overall. 

German is our first subject on Mondays, and remember that BIG Test last Thursday? I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the catastrophe that was *SHUDDERS* 7,5/20 (or 15/40 either way its pretty hirendous)! My class didn't fare too well either...
I made practically EVERY mistake in the book, from spelling mistakes to bad grammer to, well everything! I EVEN GOT THE BLOODY DATE WRONG! The teacher was surprisingly calm with us, and she even gave us a second chance: we're going to have EXACTLY the same Test next week, so all I have to do is learn the corrected Test and I'm guaranteed to get a really good score. So lets just forget THAT travesty as if it never happened...
Next we had a Technology Test, and went spiffingly well (as usual), so no surprises there. The subject matter was boring though, we had to name 3 types of lamp bulbs (i.e LEDS...) and give a justification for each one (ex: LEDS don't take up alot of power but exudes alot less light ect......) so very boring but you just have to learn it and then your guaranteed a good result. After that I got the longly awaited Art Test Result: a good 15,5/20 which I think was the best in the Class! But of course Maths had to ruin it...
Although she hadn't yet corrected all the Tests, she assured us that so far, only THREE out of the NINETEEN people in my Class had a score above 10/20! She then said that she had showed the Tests to the Headmistress and, because the Results had been so atrocious that ANYONE in 4eme with terrible Results in Maths will be, as she put it: "Invited into her office, as well as being offered a place in the Homework class (after school, students who want to can stay behind for another hour doing their homework) and will stay untill they know their Maths off by heart, as the Class clearly doesn't revise enough! Also, because you refuse to work at home...you will now have a short Maths Test every day untill you get your act together!" So, as you can imagine...I was pretty much shitting my pants! We then had to write on a piece of paper why we have had bad bad Maths Results, whether or not we revise for the Tests, our attidude in Class and so on....
So as you can imagine the Maths teacher is cracking down very hard on our Class. I think in general, my Class hasn't exactly been top of the leader board on their Results. In short, I had better get my act together in Maths or I'll be stuck in Homework Class, ARGGHHH! Maths has basically become a living hell now for us!
After lunch, we had an English Test (another 20/20 no doubt), which is still the easiest thing alive.
History was mainly an entire lesson dedicated to preparing you for the big Test on Tuesday. Which was very handy, as the Teacher had said exactly what to learn, how to answer a question properly ect...
French was just doing a stack of French related-exercises and FLE pretty much the same.
So that was Monday, of course I was revising my ass that night as we had the Maths Test (I spent two solid hours alone learning Maths off by heart) and the big History Test.

Tuesday started (of course) with Maths, which simply consisted of us writting down on a piece of paper a Definition. Except she wasn't really that precise on what Definition we had to write (I can't remembeer whether she had asked for a precific definition) so I just wrote down one of (the many) I had leant the previous night. Fingers crossed that I don't get a bad Result. Cos if not...I just hate to think about it!
History was next (two Tests in a row...horay!), and I literary finished it SECONDS before the bell went! I didn't even have time to check if I had made any spelling errors but at least I knew that what I wrote was correct. Phew. No doubt she'll take a few points off for something but I know that I at least did good.
Everything else was fine, except in German we had an unusually sharp leaning curve! We have quite literary gone from learning the basics of the language to writing a full blown conversation that now has to be acted out (in front of the Class may I add) and pronounced correctly! And we weren't even allowed to use 'simple' words, it had to be a proper conversation and be at least 30 phrases long! I decided to write it in French first and then put it all into Google translate (which I have yet to do).


Wednesday was okay, in Sport we are now doing High-jump (so high jump on Wednesdays and bloody Ping-Pong on Thursdays) and was really easy because (obiously) I'm so tall and I barely had to jump (more like step) over the line! When the Teacher put the rope higher though it did get a bit difficult!


Thats Mon-Wed then. Maths is just a living nightmare now and I did make a mess out of the German Test, but overall I suppose it went well...
The end of the first Trimestre is nearly upon me, (two weeks time I think) and so far with the exception of Maths and French I think will be quite a positive report. Or at least it should be, because I've worked my ass off!

This Week In School: My Poor, Poor Legs...

Well, I ran (or very slowly jogged) for almost THREE Hours this Week, and as you can tell by the title of this Post, my legs aren't feeling very well at ALL. In fact, there's a tendon on the back of my right leg right now that is just begging to snap (its already been stretched to bits, poor thing). You know I wouldn't be surprised if my leg had actually broken off during that cross country race on Friday: SNAP! Commentator: "looks like Tim's leg has just finally had enough...." I think I might just pull a sicky next Year (or maybe not), because that was bloody soul-testing. Our College and the one from Mauron always join together every Year for the traditional "Cross" race. A stupid tradition if you ask me, and one of the most pointless things in the entire UNIVERSE that exists only to torture both your soul and your poor, poor body (if I ever feel anything below my knee again it will be a bloody miracle). You can check out my in-depth rant about Endurance running in one of my previous Blog posts here: http://thelazyteenagerinfrance.blogspot.com/2010/09/do-you-know-what-really-grinds-my-gears.html. As if the cross country race wasn't enough, I was also swamped with a TON of Tests: two in French, two in German, two in Art, one in Technology and one in Sport (kinda, he'll be evaluating our performance over a period of weeks). If you think thats bad, wait til' you see the Tests next week...  
The German Test was easy, you just had to write down a string of numbers you heard and then recite another string of numbers to your class while making sure that you p-r-o-n-o-u-n-c-i-a-t-e-d every word correctly (may I also point out that these were SURPRISE Tests, the type I particularly hate because its just an exuse to pray on the kids who don't learn there lessons reguarly), anyway I got 20/20 but everyone in my class got at least 18/20 so no big feat. In the Technology Test I got a measly 8,5/10, which is just quite frankly an insult (SO WHAT I FORGOT TO PUT THE "S" ON THE END OF THE WORD! WHY CAN'T NOBODY EVER GET 20/20 IN THIS LESSON GOD DAMMIT??????), the guy clearly doesn't have the guts anymore to give me a 10/10 rating! I may also comment on my teachers name: Mr Bastide! Anyway after the insult of Technology, I should fare better in Art, in which I had to represent 1 second of motion in 25 Images (fairly easy, akin to the famous stop motion techniques of the 50s Sci-Fi B-movies. Not hard per-say you just need to be a good drawer: ex: a man putting his foot down is about one second, so you'll just have to illustrate that mouvement in 25 different boxes). French was a bit of a disaster as you had to study an old poem, which was clearly wrote by homeless drunk man sat on the side of the street somwhere as it didn't make a lick of sense (one minute the poete was walking down the street describing the "shiny" stars, and then it jumped to him riding a polar bear out in the artic desert! MIND F*CK ALERT! And the dictation were you had to write down a text said to you with as little spelling and grammatical errors as possible, and seen as the French language has so many god-damn words that sound the EXACTLY the same (the sound E has multiple spellings for a start, the word could finish by ee, es, ais, ait, aient, e, i ect...), so basically I'm (pardon the profanity) f*cked. Music was really easy, you just had to read a Biography about Jean-Babtiste-Lully to the Class (imagine my surprise when I found out that "Lully" was a man!), and I also recieved a very welcome 17/20 in the Test we did last week....So all in all, a mixed bag, just PLEASE DONT MAKE ME RUN 6 KILOMETRES AGAIN!!!!!!!!
Now exuse me while I rant at my bedroom wall for fithteen minutes: "ONLY GAVE ME A 8,5/10 DID YOU? WHY YOU LITTLE...$%£@*!"  

NOTE: I didn't actually rant at the wall like a madman for fifthteen minutes, it was just me being "funny."

Do you know what really Grinds my Gears Part 2: Tests

Welcome back to what really Grinds my Gears: Part 2! This week, I look at my Arch-Enemy, Tests! Quite simply put, Tests are a pain in the butt. They exist to stress you out, taunting you with the prospect of a bad result (shudders), and threatening you with a dark stain on your report. I'm only a month into 4eme right now and I can't even count how many Tests I've had already (I think I've done something like five Maths Tests in one month!). Tests are a living hell, but can be rewarding in the long term, which is part of the reason why I keep crawling back into its Dark, evil clutches...

                                                        THEY STRESS YOU OUT!


Tests are a emotional Roller-Coaster, with three primary stages:
1. Revision, the dreaded period where you have to Review everything you've done in the past week/month of  any subject (not accounting Sport, where Tests are a matter of endurance and physical skill), which for me, normally accounts to 2-3 Hours per Test (no joke, it takes FOREVER for me to even remember one sentence). I spend an entire day pushing back the so-called "Revision time" just because its B-O-R-I-N-G. I mean, could you recite a page of French Text for two Hours without getting bored? I can't. The Revision stage is nessecary if you even want to hope about getting a good Result. I learnt the time-consuming way that if you manage to recite your lessons off by heart you're practically guaranteed to get 5/5, 10/10, 20/20 ect... Only problem is that after two hours of reciting the words over and over again those words become just that: WORDS. It has no meaning to me any more. In Tests, I'm just reciting words by memory onto a piece of paper without any thought behind it. Like Blogger.com tasked with remembering the words that I've typed  when I hit the 'SAVE' button right now. I'm not invested into the subject at all, I'm invested into getting a good Test result. Ask me a Week after any Test whether I remember anything about that Test and I'll say (apart from what Result I got) NO. So that kinda defeats the whole purpose of a Test doesn't it?

2. The Test, the moment when you're the most stressed out: the high stress level points being right before the Test, when your frantically checking your Memory to see whether or not you've remembered anything, and the point where you stumble upon a Question where you have no idea what the answer is (which really Grinds my Gears I can tell you, because for me, thats one point or more less, which then means a lower score, which then means that my Report for the Trimestre has gone down as well, which then means...IT CAN NEVER BE PERFECT!...And I have less a chance of beating my previous score). These moments are the make-or-break of a Test. The really annoying thing about all this stress is that it can  sometimes put a cloud over your Memory, which means blocking certain facts or just effecting the overall Score in any way it can. If stress was a person, I'd shoot it, along with that over Bastard, the guy that invented Education: "GET ON THE FLOOR AND BEG FOR YOUR LIFE!" BANG! Anyway, lets wrap things up, as this paragraph is already becoming far too long...
3. The Result, the part of the process that requires the least effort, but contains one of the most tense filled moments of the entire process. So you've spent the next agonising days wondering about what the outcome will be, whether a 20/20 awaits you or a most evil 10/20 (10 is a insult, 0 is excrutiatingly painful), ready to eat you whole. I've had my fair share of both Results, and this is the only time that I can say that the wait is truly KILLING me. The moment when the Teacher hands you back your Test, the moment when you first set your eyes over the dark red ink at the top of the page, showcasing the two encircled numbers, is THE most tense filled, gut wrenching, suspensful and heart tearing moment that only the greatest of Alfred Hitchcock films can truly match up to. Then, at that precise moment, your fate is revealed...

It can end two ways: one where your left immediately overwelmed, happy, and proud....or the other where you feel bottomless, bullet-hole ridden and deserted, hating your very existance and even going as far as saying you hate your Life. It may shock you how someone can get so emotionally overwelmed over the History Test you had last Friday, but for me, thats what Tests are like. But why get so worked up about it? Its only a Test right? Surely its no big deal? This may seem like a cop out answer to these questions, but I have no reason why, it just affects me that way...

Having said that though, I have only recently become the perfectionist that I am, and I now find myself at the unfortunate point where a 18/20 in a History Test that I spent nearly three Hours on Sunday night revising for it is simply not enough. I have somehow developped this greed to become perfect in everything, and even though I can never acheive 20/20 in everything, god damn do I try. I suppose that's a good thing, put please God, take away all the stress and the hard work, I'm trying to be lazy, I really am! Funnily enough, two years ago I was getting really bad results, not to mention having quite a tough time at School and even a few Family issues. I can't say things have turned out the completely opposite way, but damn if it hasn't improved alot. So perhaps these feelings only occur to perfectionists such as myself? I don't know...
Anyway, I have already done far too much typing (my hands are VERY sore), and I've got quite a bit of Revising to do for an upcoming Test....OH NO, NOT ANOTHER ONE!    

                                                 ARGHHHHHHHHHHH!

What actually is the point of Homework? (Rant)

I'm in School for eight hours a Day: 8.16am til' 4.50pm (although I do get a 1 Hour lunch break). I normally get up around 7.30-ish, so I've got about 45mins to get dressed, brush my Teeth, eat my much needed Brekkie and perhaps do some Internet surfing for five small minutes but normally I take my time with my Breakfast. I spend the next painfully long eight Hours reminiscing mostly about what is the first thing I'll do when I get back Home (for me, it would have to be jumping into Bed and playing on my treasured Xbox console for an Hour before finally succumbing to my aching tiredness and just plain Crash-out!). But alas, now that isn't normally the thing I'll do. You see, they may keep you in School for eight Hours but they forget to mention the THREE HOURS OF BLOODY HOMEWORK they add onto the end of the each Day! What the hell has happened? Homework has gone up by nearly 30% compared to last Year! I never did understand why Homework was so important anyway. Why not just keep me in School for another three Hours? Surely I've got a life outside School?! All this Homework means that on average I only get about three to four Hours all to myself! That may seem like alot to some people but for me three Hours just passes by SO quickly (Ironically: three Hours in School lasts almost twice as long! But hey, I suppose thats life for you!). Why send me back Home in the first place? (Sometimes they let me off a bit though the Homework-o-meter has increased alot lately.) My point being: WHAT IS THE POINT OF HOMEWORK! Is it just there to annoy us even more and make Life PAINFULLY slower? Yes I'm sure there is an explanation on why they torture us like this but its still an annoyance/pain/bullet-to-the-foot! Sure you have your own option of choosing not to do it, but they sucker you into it with the PROMISE of good Test results (and a harsh penalty of punishment if you fail to do it, so really you have no choice)! Sometimes I think they give us Homework only for sake of giving us Homework! Example: For French on Monday I have to look up TEN Definitions of weird unprouncable words that nobody has ever even heard of! Why? Its not like I'll ever use them! Homework is just quite simply a unfair-affaire, it exists to Stress people over the fact that they have to learn 13 pages by Heart or get a bad Test Result (Not 13 Pages per Subject, but with all of them put together, you do have learn all that every few Days). God I hate Homework. 


P.S Yes I am aware that Homework is a neccessary part of Education and does help you to Progress in Life, my answer being: LIFE IS UNFAIR! Which is actually ironically funny for me.