The physics and chemistry tests that I had today went pretty well, considering that the test I had last week was nothing less than a debacle, and that I was able to answer all the questions this time satisfactorily and with considerable ease. This time I actually studied, and I should be getting over 50 marks out of 60 (both tests combined) if the teachers don’t pick out ‘procedural errors’ and such stuff that inevitably cost even the best student a lot of marks. Last week I didn’t study enough to save my ass from failing, and yes, I failed that test. In my defense: it was one of the hardest I’ve, or anyone else has ever written; I skipped a third of the questions; and I was absent during some of the more important classes for various reasons, ranging from illness (incurred possibly from the stress of not being used to studying as much as I’m expected to and being pressured from all directions to do so) to vacation—my trip to Bangalore. So last time I managed to scrap 77 marks out of 160 (with my having attempted around a hundred questions, each worth a mark), and I owe this debacle to trigonometry, which I’ve grown to loathe thanks to its abstruseness, the fact that the teacher dude failed to make me understand a thing, and the fact that the math workbook we have has around 200 questions (I’m understating here) from trig that we’re expected to do. I didn’t think I’d ever admit to being intimidated by a topic, especially in math. It goes to show how different the course we had in ICSE is from the present course, which is based almost purely on IIT-JEE. To reiterate what I said in one of my recent posts I don’t have the slightest desire to study in IIT. I don’t care if my dad, his brother, his sister and three of his cousins studied there, or if my grandfather and his brother were longstanding professors of really good reputation there. I simply have no desire to get into IIT, and frankly, my being stressed out by all this is fully justified. Who wouldn’t be if they were expected to study their butt off for a course that they had no desire to do? Doing college in this country is the last thing I want to do. Thank goodness my parents aren’t stereotypical, or rather, typical Indian parents who prefer to mold their kid’s future for them rather than letting them do what they want to do. I don’t know what I’d do if my parents said something to the effect that getting into IIT was my only option, and that if I failed to do so my life would lose all meaning because I wouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere else, and that I needed to do everything humanly possible and impossible to get in. My dream for a long time has been to get into UC Berkeley, but unfortunately, this horrific course on IIT-JEE is taking up so much time that the prospects of my getting into the college seem pretty far off. So yeah, I certainly hope that I manage to get into UC Berkeley, or for that matter any college with an outstanding reputation in the United States, just so I can gloat to people after I graduate of having received a great education without having ever gone to IIT. I have other childish plans of visiting my teachers at my present school and telling them that it’s possible to be ‘successful’ without being a student at IIT, and in the process I’ll tell them in strong words that they were of no help to me at all and that I would have learned better from dead ducks. But obviously in order for me to do all that I need to focus on my goal, even it means rowing upstream against the current of my present course.
0 comments :
Post a Comment