My last day for teenage angst passed yesterday. I don't feel my age. I mean, you can't make someone not be a teenager overnight right? At least not when he has been one for the past nine ( ten? my maths is failing me ) years.

Anyway I had a really gooooooood lunch today which alleviated whatever depression I have been feeling over the past few weeks. Hell, I am feeling like I can do without teenage angst right now.

I think I am especially ill-suited to be a teacher, especially at this point in time. At least being a teacher to at least 40 overcharged teenagers anyway.

I have been tired for the past few weeks. Not physically tired, because all I do in school is bum anyway and I haven't exercised since the last Ice Age. Its just very annoying to have to deal with all these minor inconveniences when you are facing a very real prospect of ending up without a scholarship and having to slave your four years in England to afford the cost.You see, I did a little mathematics and found out that studying in England would blow a really big hole in mom's wallet.

Of course thinking about it is not going to help, but that's the least I can do right now. I would rate my chances of getting one as anything between highly improbable to downright impossible.

I wish someone would tell me what to do.

The weather sucks because its pouring and I haven't had dinner.
Also, I have neither the money nor friends to eat out with.
Army stole my friends =(

I am down to thirty dollars with one more week to go in Singapore. How?!?

Might be leaving the island for good at the end of next week. Am torn between scholarship apps and friends on one hand, and a more comfy life, no budgeting and financial constraints on the other.

Tough choice. I'll mull over this for awhile. Or flip a coin.

My one-week break has convinced me that waking up at five to face a bunch of hyperactive kids is preferable to my current life, where I am spending my days alternating between lazy stupor and reading Popper at devastating speed. But mostly in lazy stupor. Anyway, at the rate I am going, I might finish his Conjectures in a couple of days, and the book looked frighteningly thick a couple of days ago. I doubt this is healthy.

I think Brightsparks just fucked my scholarship apps beyond belief.

You know how documents typed out on Words comes out weird when you cut and paste it onto blogger.com? I think I did that for all four of my scholarship apps - my personal statement is riddled with undiscernable nonsense which happened to be apostrophes and other such punctuations on Words.

Am hoping scholarship officers would realize the plight of technologically challenged persons and ignore their misgivings of someone who couldnt spell properly.

But hey, I am supposed to study sciences in uni, not English.

I am so bored these few days that reading Popper's Conjectures and Refutations is better than the alternatives, whatever they are. That nmeans I am pretty damn bored.

Actually, I suspect alternatives may not exist.

My stint my new school, which is quite unlike a-certain-school I attended not too long ago, just confirmed what I had suspected all along, that not all is well with the education system.

A major problem would be the fact that there is a current emphasis on moving away from traditional learning(i.e mugging). Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with mugging. This is perhaps the best kept secret among the better schools. They have lots of out-of-classroom learning, educational gimmicks, but the boys don't believe in them. At the end of the day, after lots of fun in school with the new website in class, everyone still goes home, takes out the thick books and mugs. How else do you think they consistently get the scores? Because they are smart?

Anyway, the point is, getting the scores is hardly education, you might argue. Which is a fair enough view. I can understand the purpose of the policy, even if I do not agree with its implementation. I have always thought that it is an elitist policy, geared towards the top schools. You can make them work in top schools, but there is no way in hell you are gonna impress a bunch of under-motivated kids with abstract ideas about education.

Plus, at the end of the day, the same system that pushes for a more liberal approach to education is gonig to judge these kids, the ones in my school, based on their examination scores. Their immediate futures (i.e, ITE, polytechnic, JCs) are going to be decided by their O level scores, and for me that settles the debate. Yes, CCA plays a part, for that miserable two bonus points, but hell, I'll be damned if you can convince me that joining a CCA for two bonus points is any closer to an education than focussing merely on exam scores.

Which is symptomatic of most Singaporeans. Singaporeans are desperately incapable of living with the intangibles and unquantifiables; they have an almost obsessive need to quantify and rank everything. As long as success is defined by the number of points one gets for O's, the system can have no pretensions to moving towards a less myopic ideal of education. And it is unfair that while the judging criteria do not change, the teaching systems in schools are expected to, because the ones who will bear the brunt of it will be students in schools like __________. The ones in top schools will play along, but will always have the sense to realize that, at the end of the day, academic results always come first and you will always be judged by that, at least in this part of the world, and, unlike fickle policies, that is not something that will change anytime soon.