Idea for a title escapes me

Just one more week until we enter SWATVAC, and our 12 years of schooling comes to an end. This week, I’ll have my last psychology and spesh SACs.

The Chinese oral is out of the way now, so it’s basically just going to be practice exams from here onwards. I’m expecting an 8/10 or above for that.

Going to make a dual post today because the other stuff is completely irrelevant to this one!

Limit does not exist

It seems that most people (including me) have the general misconception that when doing a practice exam, let’s say a 2 hour Methods Exam 2 paper; it takes only the 2 hours required to complete the paper. This is wrong. I finished the 2007 VCAA paper in 2 hours and a reading time of 5 mins, leaving 4-5 answers incomplete. What did this mean? It meant that I had to look at the assessment report, read over it and learn how to do the questions I left out. I followed on to finish these questions.

This total process of reviewing and correcting took 2 hours. Thus, in reality, the total process of completing the exam and understanding all the concepts took 4 hours and 5 minutes. That’s two-fold the time required to finish the paper.

Sure, you could argue that correcting and reviewing can be left for the following day, but in my opinion it’s better to nail that stuff into your head while it’s fresh in your mind after manipulating it sub-consciously or consciously for 2 hours.

Moral of the story: Don’t start practice exams at 9pm!

A list of things to do before the end of year exams:

• 36 Methods exams (1 and 2 inclusive)
• 18 Specialist exams (1 and 2 inclusive)
• 14 Psychology exams
• 1 full 3 hour English exam
• 10 Chinese SL exams
• 10 AMFAS pieces
• 5 Analysis pieces
• 5 Context pieces

With a total of…
98 exams (treating each essay as an exam)

Which amounts to…
145 hours

and according to my quantum theory of connect 9000…
that’s 290 hours

Below is a visual representation of the above exams (a.k.a nerd pr0nz):

all your trees are belong to Ti-89

Best of luck to all.

6 More Weeks…

…until the English exam, and just 3 more weeks until the Chinese SL ‘kou yu’ exam.

Practice exams this week were kind of…meh. The methods MAV paper was pretty difficult, but not impossible for me. Psychology was decent, considering I haven’t put in many hours towards the subject recently. And Spesh was…well let’s not go there.

Had a great time at Crown last night with the 1 hour unlimited play for $15 at Galactic Circus…shame they locked out the Tekken 6 and SF4 machines…damn. Well the new Initial D Stage 4 was pretty sweet and Mario Kart was strangely hectic. Wasn’t expecting to bump into Kelvin and Viki (on their date?) there either. Guess we’ll try Box Hill Timeout next time.

That being said, it’s time to get my ass back into gear – especially for the upcoming two weeks which will be extremely busy. I’ll be attending TSFX lectures for pretty much every subject and then going to VATE during the first Saturday of Term 4.

I guess preparing for the oral exam should be the upmost priority for all of us doing a second language; so find a partner and get practising!

“Lost time is never found again” – Benjamin Franklin

I Procrastinate, therefore I blog (v.2)

Since posting lists is just so piss easy, requires almost no effort from my behalf and fills this page up quite nicely; I’ve decided to continue with the popular “LET’S GO MEGA HAPPY FUN FUN YEAR 12 SURPRISE TIME SUPER FUN BONANZA!” theme.

**View the original here**

So, without further ado….

“You know you’re in year 12 when…”

1. you actually wanted the super-collider to blow up the Earth for one day so that the English SAC would be postponed
2. you get all excited when the Education section of the Age has something which you can actually benefit from (i.e. the exams guide, or a textual analysis)
3. you have brought your study notes into the toilet before so as to not waste any precious study time
4. the younger kids ask why you get to go home so early, you say you get heaps of spares in year 12, and they think year 12 is awesome because of that, and you think they’re idiots because of that etc.
5. you get that special feeling after an English SAC, which makes you feel like you wrote nothing ‘useful’ at all
6. you get your English SAC back without a conclusion and still manage to get A+ and think, “what the fuck happened there?”
7. your English teacher(s) become one of your best friends
8. you think that putting up (HW) or (study) tags or any other variation in your MSN’s personal message makes you l33t…
9. …when in fact you aren’t really studying at all and really just camping your computer, fingers ready respond to your friend’s outrageous Youtube link with “OMG Lolz pr0ns!1” or “ZOMFG sif rick roll lolol”
10. you try and scab any vaguely useful sources of information related to any of your VCE subjects from the internet when the opportunity comes by
11. you have a designated “study playlist” or something similar in your iTunes
12. house activities seem even more pointless then they already are
13. you get that awesome feeling knowing you’ve beaten your friends in a SAC..you horrible person
14. your friend’s reaction to your smelly fart before the English SAC is “Never came poison from so sweet a place”, and it’s freaking hilarious
15. you visit ign.com or flick through a gaming magazine, and shed a tear because you know you won’t be able to play those games until the end of the year, you silly geek!
16. your typical daily routine consists of: sleep, do stuff at school, study – repeat.
17. you experience so many mixed feelings approaching the end of the year; hope, relief, anxiety – none of which are truly dominant among the rest

I realise there’s a lot about English SACs on there. The reason being because it’s pretty much all that’s been on my mind this whole week, and it was our last English SAC. LAST SAC. I mean, man when’d you expect to hear that?

Yeah…I’m freaking tired as hell at the moment, just like all Thursdays; day starts at 7 in the morning and ends at 10 at night because I’m out all day.

More to come.

I procrastinate, therefore I blog.

A small list to which everyone in our cohort can relate to, enjoy.

“You know you’re in year 12 when…”

1. you get all emotional over anything below an A+ in SACs
2. you admire rather than ridicule someone who did 4 hours of study
3. you expect an extraordinary overnight change upon turning 18
4. you think that wearing your Year 12 jumper out of school is ‘cool’ and gives you ‘sic rep’
5. you regularly visit http://www.entercalc.us.to or any other ENTER calculator to make yourself “feel good”
6. you have been using the Beijing Olympics as an excuse for lack of study
7. you get randoms and mates coming up asking “How’d the SAC go?”, “What’d you get for your …” and “ready for the SAC?” etc. ALL the damn time
8. you are asked the same two questions from every new person you meet: “What subjects are you doing this year?” and “What course do you want to get into next year?”
9. you have become somewhat of a perfectionist
10. having naps after school is normal
11. …having naps in class is also normal
12. you’ve jammed the library printer at least once as a result of printing off an insane amount of practice exams
13. you see at least one person have a mental breakdown each week
14. you are having one of the best times in your life, but probably don’t realise it
15. you have only seen less than a quarter of the movies that you wanted to watch this year
16. you are kept sane by the thought of how fucking good schoolies/after school celebrations will be
17. you start to choose the alcohol which will be purchased on the first night of schoolies/celebrations
18. you apply quotes/context concepts learnt in English into everyday life
19. you’ve used at least one maths or science related joke and received praise for it…because we’re all nerds inside
20. you’re financially bankrupt
21. “the pen is mightier than the sword”
22. you want the school day to go longer, just to get some extra work done
23. sleeping for less than 6 hours becomes the norm rather than the exception
24. the VCE co-coordinators lecture about how much work you should do actually sounds reasonable
25. jealousy becomes a trait amongst almost all your friends
26. a VTAC guide (or two) makes a comfortable pillow
27. you ask “when are we getting our SACs back, sir/mrs.” too often
28. you skip recess/lunch a few times a week to visit your best friend: the library
29. wagging classes is acceptable, provided you are “prioritising”
30. it appears that people are speaking to you in binary code
31. 01100010 01 0011 0110
32. you are constantly predicting your own and other people’s ENTER scores…
33. …and feel an uplift in your ego when the ENTER score you have predicted for them is lower than the ENTER score you have predicted for yourself
34. you find inspiration and motivation to study, in songs and films
35. you have temporarily relinquished yourself from the days of DoTA
36. you get annoyed at the younger kids who seem to be having fun all the time
37. you regularly pull off all nighters to study for SAC’s or get homework done
38. you plan your social weekend for study
39. you start to worry about that thing called “the future”
40. you feel nostalgia on a daily basis “remember when…”
41. you think: YES! Finally holidays are here!
42. …until you realise that holidays are really just a study break
43. you make to do lists that extend to three months in the future
44. you dropped a subject last year because you were getting B+’s
45. you do more work on the weekend than in class
46. you are so tired that the funniest thing you can think of for muck-up day is getting a pizza delivered to your school (which doesn’t work because no local pizza stores do lunchtime deliveries)
47. you boast and compete with your friends about how many SACs you have during the next week
48. you calculate absolute value functions in your head before going to sleep
49. you have, at least pondered once: “what if I stopped studying now…”
50. you feel like you’re in a very long race to the finish line
51. you’ve stared directly into the face of adversity
52. …and managed to pull yourself up from the ground in order to keep your dreams alive

“He who knows himself is enlightened,
He who conquers others is strong;
He who conquers himself is mighty” – Lao Tzu