Opening act

The physics design question is a failed experiment, in my opinion. a little background info for non-physics students (or if you somehow managed to completely miss it, in which case i think this is the least of your problems). anyway, it's something they just introduced for the new syllabus which takes effect this year. basically, you have to design an experiment based on researching a certain problem, similar to those we do for SPA, except much more detailed and idiot-proof (because the unspoken rule of exams is that the student treats the teacher like an idiot during answering, and the teacher treats the student like an idiot during marking -.- ). we are given an extra 30min for this question, but i think everyone would agree that it requires 40min at least to do properly. not to mention that for that huge chunk of time, we only get 12 marks out of it. come on, you don't have to be a math whiz to sense that there's something wrong with the mark allocation there. i predict a lot of people either forsaking the design question or sacrificing other questions to attempt it (i myself am sadly included :( ). but it wasn't just the design question that pulled me down today; i'm still rather disappointed that i couldn't solve some of the questions because i forgot secondary school geometry.

tomorrow's the maths paper. predictions: integration is a gone case, P&C and probability are (ironically) unpredictable as usual, and any complex number questions involving argand diagrams are hopeless. i would say that the rest are average-ish, though i don't want to get my hopes up. in any case, here's a handy exam tip from the math-iest webcomic i can think of: XKCD! :D if you know the answer but can't remember the derivation, just blindly reverse-engineer until you get something that kind of looks like the formula, then fill in the gaps. example:

anyway, i met laura on the bus today after school. turns out that unknown to either of us, she actually stays just a few bus stops down the road. she told me that she's currently working as a relief teacher in her ex-secondary school, and that her current colleague (and ex-teacher) is lionel's mother, which i imagine is quite epic since lionel and laura were like two polar opposites who were forced to work together XD (and also lionel and van ho, and generally lionel with any half-sane person).

and i think i should stop giving advice to juniors. and juniors should stop coming to me for advice. because honestly i'm not very good at giving it. i tend to either exaggerate the problem and turn it into a horror story of the educational system (your PW grade is determined by luck and not effort!), or trivialise and dismiss it without ever addressing it (relax, CTs are only 20% of your overall grade :D ). i used to have this problem in writing essays in secondary school, where i would either over-dramatise everything in a failed attempt at descriptive writing or understate everything in a failed attempt at tongue-in-cheek humour. i guess it's just difficult to say intelligent things without thinking. wait that sounds kind of... aww crap i did it again -.-