Monday, April 18, 2016 "Academic Climb."

Monday, April 18, 2016
Week: 36
Songs to Remember: Get Down - B4-4

        What makes things hard for me is that I'm trying to enjoy the new experiences that are just piling themselves on me, while working. And at this point, after seeing that I have a 76% in math and seeing my grade go down 4% live in English, I just gotta clutch it, do the bare minimum.

        Just for the record, I got only 4 hours of sleep last night. Made a bad judgement in choosing to sleep at 3:00 AM (not even exaggerating). Anyways, my teacher for Psych is really pushing it right now. We gotta do a presentation, due Tuesday, the day after part 2 of our final, on a chapter from the book. We all had to choose a chapter to focus on, particularly one that we're struggling with, and work as a group to come up with shit.

        It's meant to be a sort of studying thing, like, group study (I hate the word "group" for the record). I don't like this method, and even treating it as just work, still, you're assigning us shit even after we've done the final (or just about to). And with the AP exam coming up, I think it'd be better for us to be given in-class time to study, ask questions if needed, etc.

        But yeah, seriously, it's only AP Psychology, the teacher's making it a bit too hardcore, even more than AP Biology (which I learned today that for out of all AP exams, AP Biology has the lowest 5 score percentage besides Physics, 6% as of last year. and only 30% gets a 3. Now that's saying something). English, on the other-hand, umm, things are going a bit slower, which I like, but uhh, I recently looked at the scaling for grades for it, and uhh, apparently there's only 2 categories: bulk work, and essays, projects, major works.

        25% of our grade is bulk, 75% is fucking essays and tests. The teacher updated our grades live in class. I watched my grade go from a 73 point something percent, bumped up by like 0.05%, and then boom, drop 4%, down to a C-, aka, 69%. Like, shit, In my honest opinion, he takes pride way too much on just one of his past students becoming a writer for the New York Times and mentioning his name as a reason of why he was able to get that position.

         But what about the other students? Probably another job other than writing. I don't know anymore, I just don't care to put in anymore effort than needed. I've hit a slope and I could see myself sliding all the way down to a D if I don't get off my ass to do a bit more, to clutch a C.

        Anyhow, Bio was just a study day, self-explanatory. Luckily our final ain't 'till April 30th, which is unfortunately on a Saturday at 8:00 AM. Also unfortunate, that on that day there's the K-Pop Showcase (of which I messaged the club president and she put my name down for "Hate". Yay). It's not that much of a problem though because the event obviously won't start at like, 12:00 PM.

        Math was, pretty harsh. The lesson was on word problems, so you pretty much the know the story already. I focused on copying down the steps and examples, rather than trying to decipher what to do, heh. Lunch was lunch, US History was a small quiz, nothing too bad. And finally, Chinese, where luckily, these won't be the final seats. We got to choose our own seats this time, for lesson 20, and I chose to sit in front of the freshman who sat in front of me in our last spots.

        Our group members were people who I rarely talk to, as in, at all, heh. Umm, I could see that Jk is sitting next to El, or should I say, the other way around, aaand Mt sitting behind him as well. I was like "Is this really the final seats for the series?" I counted 3 weeks ahead, including this week, and uh, nope, there's still more weeks, and I don't think we'll be in these seats for like, 5 weeks, that's a bit too long.

        So yeah, don't really like it, the atmosphere now is whatever, that is the perfect word to describe it. Umm, tomorrow is SBAC testing, if you don't know what that is, it's basically the board of education making us all do these tests online. Like, literally online, with having to input equations with clickable buttons, dragging lines on graphs, typing essays, etc.

        Nobody studies for it, and nobody should study for it, because it's ridiculous how much testing is being shoved down our throats, heh. We already got SAT's to worry about for letting colleges know our "intellect," now we gotta put in even more effort to not like, fuck up the SBAC, all the while studying for final exams, and, AP exams. And, college applications. And, community service, for the seniors whoose hours have been denied due to the new community service coordinator, of which we have to abide by her rules and her judgment on what is really considered "community service."

        And yes, all I do is complain, complain, complain, when I could be using this time to do work. What I wanna get out of this complaining is bring light to the absurdity of how people's futures are being decided by a single letter or number. Or numbers, if we're talking about money.

        Also, almost slipped my mind: there was KDT practice today, along with our live audition to some Key Club members, hoping that we're gonna get in for the charity dinner event in May. Practice for Mansae went without much troubles. For most. As for me, and a few others, our allergies got the best of us, particularly me. We practiced near the back of the L building as it was extremely hot today, highest was 88 degrees, and uh, wind was blowing, next to a field, so, you know what happens.

        Sneezes on sneezes on sneezes. I got allergy medicine now so hopefully we'll be good for a bit. Umm, yeah, other than that, it was whatever. Tomorrow afterschool is also a workshop for filling out AP papers for our AP exams. It's in the theater, after school, most people probably forgot about it which is why there's today and Thursday to do it. Says it takes about 30 minutes, I'm thinking 'bout an hour at most, only because there's a lot of Junior and Seniors at this school.

        Anyways, to sum things up, I'm unhappy with how things are turning out academically, I hoping to do the least bit possible to survive with all the scheduling I gotta do, juggling dances, assignments, studying, going to shit like mandatory workshops, doing mandatory testings, aaand, keeping track of due dates, event dates. This is gonna be one hell of shitshow before the first movie debuts. It's 12:22 AM, see ya.