Last Friday evening was the parent-tutor dialogue session.
After seeing all my subject tutors, Mum was... erm... appalled at my performance. I think she sort of lost her senses as well, maintaining that I didn't tell her I failed all my Maths tests even when I clearly did.
She even asked me to drop Physics on that day. You may be thinking that I should be happy for that, but recently I felt like continuing doing Physics and trying to understand it more, instead of giving up so soon.
On Saturday morning, Mum kept on scolding me for underperforming in my academics, and I retaliated in some instances, for example when she said that the summaries I did for my notes were worthless.
I was thinking, "Well, as long as I failed my tests, all I've done was just shit."
Things got better come late afternoon, but she was still angry with me.
Oh yeah, I met Jiansheng that evening while having dinner with Mum at Eastpoint. He was with his cell group members.
On Sunday morning I did my tutorial for Charged Particle Dynamics, and while revisiting the notes for the topic, I almost thought of dropping the subject again. I was feeling very insecure about this subject because I'm not very good at deciding which formula to use at a given time.
After doing a few questions on that topic later, I felt much better again. Fickle me.
I did, however, decide to take practical steps to salvage the situation. I decided that I should not play computer games again in school (so the previous entry is going to be my last entry about games until the end of A levels). I decided to keep my home PC game CDs in my College locker.
I've got to continue in my "Island-hopping" (doing short questions on a few chapters every day) which I did last year.
I've got to leave the computer lab after blogging and moderating the College Forums.
I've got to pray more for self discipline and wisdom.
And pray more for patience too, because I'm about to whack that tortoise-slow computer in my house. YARRGH!
Today during Chemistry practical, we did thermochem again. This time we're to burn a candle, use it to heat water in a calorimeter, and determine the heat generated during the combustion by measuring the temperature rise in the water. I was a bit clumsy with the lighter and nearly burned my fingers!
The whole experiment went on fine, and I could come up with some pretty solid sources of error and improvements. I even had time to "kiao kah" at my bench and read the ST forums!
Meanwhile, long after the candle had been removed, my water was still at a temperature of 35 degrees Celcius! The calorimeter had real good lagging, I would say.
But, of course, I had to say that the lagging was not good enough, for "academic" reasons.
Just when I thought everything was fine and I was one of the fastest to finish the experiment, Ms Fong came to check my work, and she told me my format of presenting the answer was wrong! I should do my evaluation in essay format, not in point form!
So in the end, it was a whole lot of rewriting which I had to do...
Later during Physics lecture, we were taught this "De Broglie wavelength". De Broglie was a scientist (also a prince) who proposed that particles exhibit wave properties at a certain wavelength.
So even a human does exhibit wave properties! However the "wavelength" was about 6.3 x 10 to the power of -38, so it was hardly noticeable. Phew.
Imagine seeing me running through a slit and being "diffracted"! I'd have freaked out!
While going through the "gound state" and "excited state" stuff, Yong Chuan asked a very lame question:
Qn: "What do you get if you add all the various states together?"
Ans: "United States."
Oh my goodness...
Later was computing during which I saw more hope for my coursework. I used some gradient tool in Photoshop to create gradient-coloured bars used for my title backgrounds... which enhanced my site's visual appeal a bit.
The coursework was to be completed by the end of this week.
