Final post of the year for Secondary 1 :)

This will be the final post on my blog for the year. This year has been kind of difficult to cope due to the sudden change of surroundings and circumstances. I had to make new friends making me very lonely at the beginning of the year, and i dearly missed my primary school friends even till this day. I have come a long way I must say since I first stepped into this school, unaware of how the school looks like and lost in this huge place.

Due to the lack of accustoming, I was not able to do well for my exams. I started getting tense when I heard that I could not continue to Secondary 2 if I continued to fail my Chinese. I was scared by then as my other subjects were relatively okay and my math could cope very well.

Along the way of a hard and difficult year, I met some very good friends like Samson, Khe Han ( he was my first friend as we were in the same orientation group) and Wei Liang ( he was my second friend). I can still clearly remember the day when I became friends will Wei Liang. Just remembering it makes me laugh. I met him in the canteen and we realised we belonged in the same class. When we went to buy drinks, I paid for a watermelon juice. As I waited for it, Wei Liang held his chocolate milk which he had planned to buy. When I got my drink and walked of, then he realised he had not paid for his milk! That was the best day I had!

A few weeks after that, we had to choose my CCA and I got scouts! I was furious then! I could never get into the choice of my own! All I thought scouts would be about was just camp, footdrill and cooking. All I liked about it was cooking and nothing else.

I still distinctively remember the first time I went for Scouts camp. All of us thought it was very fun. Even the leader said it was fun! All I wanted to do after the camp was to just die! The food tasted horrible! There was no games! We had to solo hike in the school and solo night for one whole night and not just an hour. The leaders even told us around 30+ ghost stories of every single part of the school just before we went to bed. I was scared stiff! I even heard a woman's high heels footsteps which was what the leader said! My friend said that last year when he went for camp, he had to wake up for fire drill. He went to the water cooler to drink water and when he turned his head around, he saw a Japanese ghost sweeping the floor! On the second night we slept in a tent. We slept at 12 a.m. and were abruptly awakened by the leaders saying there was "a fire". We had to quickly pack our bags and run to the terraces with our heavy bags!. After that, we ran 1.6 km while singing songs at 3 a.m.! Then we had to do pumping on the track which has hard and painful. That was the worst camp I had ever been to. In the end, we had to run 3.2 km!

After overcoming many obstacles in my studies, I started to cope for my exams. I planned what I had to study way beforehand and got prepared. Now for the exams, I did better than I had expected it to be and I'm proud of myself! I have to especially thank Mr Balan for teaching me. Although he is very strict, he still teachers well and even somewhat gave us the answer for the literature component in the final year exam! Thank you.

Well, my last post of the year has finally come to an end and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. All those fond memories of my best friend will be treasured and kept well as I continue my journey to become a scholar one day and be a proud hwa chongian. :)

My reflective journal

1. My parents have plenty of expectations for me if you were to ask. One of them will be to get grade 8 piano by next year. I have been playing piano for 8 years now. I started when I was in Kindergarden and now am learning for grade 8. I hope I will be able to pass my piano so that I can get rid of that burden. Another of my parents expectations is to get good grades for my exams and to get a good job when I grow up so that I will be able to support them. Unfortunately, one part of this expectation is half way there. I do not do totally well in exams and I even think I suck at my subjects. I don't do well in my English, Chinese but am still improving, History and Grography ( for this subject sometimes I do well, sometimes I do badly ) . The only subjects which I consider myself good in is Science and Math. I still have a long way to go before I can score in my exams.

2. For me, I wouldn't put too much burden on my children if I even do get married. I would just give them one objective that all parents have including In mmy own parents, do well in exams and do well in PSLE, O/N/A level and so on. This is the most common expectation for every parent as they will lose face if their children do badly in the exams. Doing well in the exams will also affect the children as it will determine whether or not the child is smart enough to qualify for University and continue studying and eventually earn a good amount of money to live comfortably. Without this expectation, children will have a care-less attitude and will not do well in exams.

3. In my opinion, I would say that the expectations of the two generations will not differ cause every parent wants them to do well in their exams.

Book review

I have just finished reading "Mrs. Frisby and the rats of NIMH". The story tells us how Mrs. Frisby goes about taking care of here children and her sick child. Moving day will be coming soon but Timothy who is the sick mouse, is not strong enough to move. Hence, Mrs. Frisby meets a crow named Jeremy and he tells her that there is an owl living in one of the hollow trees in the forest and that she should meet him should she want to get advice on what she should do about moving day. The owl recommends her to seek help from the rats and tell them to move her house before moving day and talk to Nicodemus who is somewhat the chairperson of the rats. These rats are the civilized type and not the typical ones seen on the everyday streets. Nicodemus tells Mrs. Frisby his story about how he knows Mrs. Frisby's husband, Jonathan Frisby who got killed by Dragon the cat. Nicodemus tells her that they were ordinary rats looking for food when people caught them for an experiment and injected them with some liquid which was supposedly able to allow the rats to live twice as long and could make them smarter and intelligent. Slowly, the rats learned to read and write along the journey as they escape from the laboratory and enter somebody's house and read encyclopedias and later escape and arrive at where they are now. In order to move her house, the rats had to put sleeping powder into Dragon's food. While doing so, Mrs. Frisby gets caught by Dragon's owners and overhears that the rats were going to be exterminated.When she got out, she told Nicodemus everything and on the next day after moving the house, all the rats shifted out except for 10 of them who stayed back. In the end 3 of them died. As Mrs. Frisby did not tell her children the truth and what really happened, she decided to tell them everything and the truth, about the rats and how Jonathan Frisby was related to them.

The Lesson

Quietness ruled OK in the staff room
as bravely the student walked in
the workaholics ignored him
his voice exploded with a boom

"The theme for today is violence
and homework will be set
I'm going to teach you a lesson
one that you'll never forget"

He picked on a teacher who was typing
and throttled hime then and there
then garotted the lady behing him
(the one with grotty hair)

Then sword in hand he hacked his way
between the quiet rows
"First come, first servered" he declared
"fingers, feet, or toes"

He threw the sword at an early bird
it struck with deadly aim
then pulling out a shotgun
he continued with his game

The first blast cleared the backrow
(where those who worked hard hang out)
they collapsed like plastic figurines
when the plug's pulled out

"I need to go to the toilet"
a teacher demanded
"Of course you may" said the student
put the gun to his temple and fired

The monitor popped a head round the doorway
while the chairman named Tom
nodded understandingly
the threw in a nuclear bomb

And when the ammo was well spent
with blood on every chair
and have the bomb exploded
leaving the whole school bare

The student surveyed the carnage
the dying and the dead
he laughed a wicked laugh
"I was just playing!" he said

Favourite poet

My favourite poet is Dylan Thomas. He was a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from school and preferred reading on his own; he read all of D. H. Lawrence's poetry, impressed by Lawrence's descriptions of a vivid natural world. Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and reading, but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published to great acclaim when he was twenty. Thomas did not sympathize with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden's thematic concerns with social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, has more in common with the Romantic tradition. Thomas first visited America in January 1950, at the age of thirty-five. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and notorious, for Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling. He became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. Tragically, he died from alcoholism at the age of 39 after a particularly long drinking bout in New York City in 1953.(poets.org)

Favourite poem and Figurative Language

Messy Room by Shel Silverstein
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater's been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or--
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh, dear,
I knew it looked familiar!

Hyperbole-Oh, dear,
Metaphor-chair is becoming quite mucky and damp
smelly old sock had been stuck to the wall

The poet used these figurative language to emphasize how messy the room is and the things in his room.

I like this peom because the poet is able to make a room sound messy and is capable of making me imagine how messy the room really is. It also partly depicts a side of me because I also have a messy room sometimes.

Book review 4

I have just finished reading a book "Messenger" by Lois Lowry. It is about a boy named Matty, whom an old man took care of, who helps people send messages through Forest in Village. People do not dare to go through Forest themselves as it had killed many people in the past. All the people in Village had a certain skill like Matty but he did not know his skill yet. He wanted his true name to be Messenger. Much later, there was Trade Mart where people would trade their own things for other things. However, after this Trade Mart, everyone started acting strangely and Forest became more wild. All those who were nice in the past became selfish after Trade Mart. They even decided to close the gate in Forest to prevent other people from coming into Village. The old man who took care of Matty when he was in Village wanted Matty to bring his daughter Kira, who helped Matty escape to Village, to Village so that he could live with her. In the end, Matty heals Forest from becoming wild and Kira's comma which she got along the way and manages to bring Kira back home safely.