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May 30 Finally!I'm done, I'm finished with exams (for this year anyway)! This is one happy Lucy :)
I had a lie-in this morning, waking up at 11am. If it hadn't been for noisy people on the landing, that might have been even later. I don't think I've had a lie-in since... sometime in Epiphany term, probably? It was goood!
Less good was the fact that some people on my landing crashed in from a night out at 3.30am, and proceeded to shout across from one room to another, banging doors, laughing at the top of their voices, and at one point, actually banged on my wall (the one next to my bed) directly. I went out and told them in no uncertain terms to shut up. I had a piece of paper under my door this morning: "It's a free world, YOU shut the fuck up". I actually feel worse for Jess, another girl on the group of six, who woke up and is in an exam as I type. I am consdering exercising my freedom to do some clarinet practice at 8am tomorrow morning.. something tells me this might not improve mattters, exactly..!
Programming went better than I was expecting it to. Still not well, but hopefully I've passed (as opposed to my expected guarenteed failure). I think that the cramming on Sunday and Monday (and the first hour of Tuesday..!) paid off... I was certainly better prepared for the theory part of the paper than I would have been, and I reminded myself of quite a few useful methods as well (- fortunately, as they didn't give us any API references this year, completely without warning! Bastards!). I am actually getting reasonably at coding, but I still code way too slowly; I reckon I could have done my knowledge of Java more justice with an extra half-hour. But so long as I've passed.. fingers crossed.
No more exams, no more exams, three weeks of partying! :D
Having said that, now that I am free to procrastinate as much as I like, I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself!
I might continue to indulge my inner geek and have a look at all of those new application-thingys which have been popping up all over Facebook.. May 24 Erm..My favourites (or the ones that apply to me, anyway!) are: 1, 6, 7, 8, 16, 17, 28 (sometimes), 33, 35!!!, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52 (surely that goes for everyone?!), 59, 60 (verbal fights, anyway!), 63
No, I'm not bored. In the slightest. Or avoiding revision. What gave you that idea? May 23 It Works!!!Shall I tell you what I have been doing today? In one last desperate endeavour not to fail my Programming module come Tuesday, I sat down to an (optional) exercise that had been set by the CompSci department not long before we broke up for Easter. This exercise was all to do with GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces - frames and windows and buttons and what have you, rather than just purely text-operated programs. A step closer to actual software, if you like.).
An exercise in a previous block had been to make a text-based word game: using a text file list of 77000-odd words, provided for us by the department, the task was to make a program that brought up all of the words matching a certain pattern entered by the user (not from scratch, I hasten to add. They provided the structure, and we had to fill the rest of the code in). So entering the String "hello" would just return "hello"; but entering "h*lo" would return "halo", "hello", "hermosillo", "hilo", "hollo" and "hullo". The challenge in this new exercise was to make a GUI-based version of this game; so create a window, with a text-entry box and panel frame, and create all of the necessary code so that when the user entered a pattern and pressed the Enter key, it would list all of the words in the panel frame, with a scroller bar if needs be. I'd got the text-based word game completed; just before Easter, I'd created the basic GUI, the first photo at the bottom of this entry (and that was from scratch! Well, from scratch using the Java class libraries, anyway!). However at that stage it didn't respond to anything: today's task was to link the two.
And bloody hell, it was hard.. I started at about 11 o'clock, having got back from my habitual two-mile morning walk. I took an hour out for lunch, half an hour out watching Henry play PS2 games, various odd slots of time having a back break or giving up and going on Facebook.. and at 5.17pm exactly, victory was mine! Henry (one of my friends who actually does Computer Science) gave me a little help on a couple of occasions, suggesting an alternative method or pointing me in the right direction of the appropriate online tutorial, but essentially, I slogged it out and I got there! The satisfaction of completing a task like that is huge, and in a minute I am going to see whether Henry has yet returned to his room in order to jump up and down squeaking at him, "It works! It works! It works!"
I'll tell you one thing. I have so much respect for software engineers having done this module. I will endeavor not to curse Microsoft so much in the future, because programming is HARD, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise! *nods*
Photos: to come.. May 21 DrinkingI had an alcohol-incident last night. I needed to be helped from my chair, escorted up to my bedroom, and have my bed cleared and pyjamas passed to me by Helen and Pippa. Then, on remembering that my computer still needed turning off, I found my way onto Facebook and sent a particularly incriminating message to someone of the sort that I wouldn't normally dare send - the sort that no-one sends when they're sober! The one redemption is that the recipient of the said Facebook message had seen me descend into my pitiful state, so at least knew I wasn't all there at the time! A year ago, even, I would have been horrified at myself. At it is, I actually found it rather fun..!
But I'll tell you what had rendered me into this state - one Malibu and Coke and one JD and lemonade. Half pints! Singles! I think the dictionary definition of that is 'lightweight'!
I've had that happen to me before - photos of me asleep on the landing with a newspaper pillow (it was psychologically more comfortable, OK?!) wended their way onto Facebook before I'd even woken up the next morning! - but alcohol only really seems to affect me like that when I'm tired already. Otherwise, my head may tell me that I've been drinking after the third or fourth drink, but I have yet to find my outer limit by some considerable margin. In the normal course of events, I seem to react to alcohol remarkably well, especially given my (lack of) drinking history.
I find this quite bizzare! And I think I have an explanation to make to someone..! May 19 Excitement!And singing!
Just been to a Trevs' Choir rehearsal. We're preparing for a CD recording (to give to Maggie, the Senior Tutor, who's leaving this summer :( ), and also Trevstock on the 20th June, and we're doing BOHEMIAM RHAPSODY!!! It's the arrangement I've done many times before with Bournville, and it never ceases to be amazing! Ian Williamson got the top Bb.. and no, I'm not exaggerating!
I love being in choirs! Concerts and good rehearsals just send me onto this crazy happy sugar-high, only without the need for any sugar! I am currently singing in the college computer room (where I'm typing this), having been wandering through the corridors with Stephen and Pippa, all going "So you think you can love me and leave me to di-i-ieee...!" at the top of our voices.
O-oh, baby.. Can't do this to me baby-y.. Just gotta get out, just gotta get right outta here..! The Grammar DebateThis morning's been a catch-up morning! After supper yesterday evening, all of the B2-and-other-exams-related-pressure finally dropped, the caffeine high from the previous evening of cramming collapsed, and I was just useless! Eleanor, Paul, Max and I watched West Side Story on Eleanor's laptop, before I fell into bed at 11 o'clock, a good hour earlier than I've been going to bed for the past week. My next exam isn't 'til next Friday, so I figured that I could take today off, at least!
B2 was.. well.. hard. I reckon I've passed, which is the main thing, and I did answer 5½ questions to various degrees of success, so they do have something to mark, but it wasn't great.
So this morning I went back to bed for an hour after breakfast, which was a bit of a treat, and I've been doing all the stupid domestic tasks that have been building up - washing, including the hand-washing I've been avoiding for ages, ironing, a bit of tidying, filing notes from modules that have now gone, sending off a couple of emails that were overdue.. Later on I plan to clear my desk and clean that as well. I'm not naturally tidy by any means (that might be a bit of an understatement..!), but it does make a difference if you come in to a vaguely clean room where you can see what you're doing! It just makes life calmer!
I was browsing the BBC News website, catching up with one or two headlines, when I came across this article, the 'Confessions of a Pushy Parent' - a woman trying to get her daughter into their local grammar school, in reference to David Cameron's recent policy to turn his back on grammars, despite the traditional Conservative stance that favours selective education.
I've argued this one out with myself (and a few others!) over the years, and I still don't know where I stand on the whole selective education thing. In principle at least, I have always been instinctively against grammar schools. They are divisive, in many cases elitist, and ultimately, do not benefit the secondary school population as a whole.
For one thing, how do you devise a fair entry test? In most cases, the 11+ consists of verbal and non-verbal reasoning papers. The Birmingham ones introduced an additional Maths paper two or three years ago, along with some 'miscellaneous questions' which were meant to distinguish kids with natural ability from those who had been coached up. I remember that the test sat by those currently in either Y8 or Y9 contained Geography, some horrified kids reported to their parents. In fact they had been given a basic map of Egypt and been asked to identify the Suez Canal - the key to getting the answer right was knowing that canals are man-made and therefore straight. I'm not so sure about having Maths in there, 'cos that depends much more on teaching, but if you are going to try and select on the basis of aptitude rather than knowledge, then that's probably the fairest type of paper you can set. But it's still not fair.
Some children develop at different rates from others - just as some people react better to GCSEs and others react better to A-Levels, some 11-yr-olds have already had their mental growthspurt, as it were, and others won't have it for another couple of years. Does the test favour boys' or girls' way of thinking? Five Ways might be a good case study for that one. And what about the child who has been born on 31st August who is up against the early September babies? Yes, they weight it a bit, but is that enough? I don't know - and as a January baby, I wasn't really affected either way, but if you are trying to devise the perfect fair test, it's a consideration. What about people with different 'types' of intelligence? What about people with different levels of support from home? Should you be actively using positive discrimination? A grammar school experience isn't right for everybody, even of a certain intelligence - how do you work out who would benefit the system the most?
And that's only the start of it. Even if you have the perfect entry test - even if everyone who should have got in did do, and vice versa - there are still the borderline cases. Those kids who would have been near the top elsewhere suddenly find themselves at the bottom of the ability spectrum. Those kids who only just didn't get in find themselves as fishes out of water, because all of their like-minded friends have headed off to the grammar school - and then their schools don't provide the academic stimulus that they would benefit from, 'cos it's not seen as a requirement. It's a misconception that we have comprehensive schools round us at home, 'cos we don't - a comprehensive school takes everyone from the local area, the full ability range. Round us, the so-called comprehensives take everyone minus the grammars' 5% and minus those kids whose parents have bought out into the private sector. Yeah, don't get me started on private schools. The net result, though, is that the academically-inclined kids remaining in their local school get a worse deal then they would in a truly comprehensive school, where their needs would be acknowledged and catered for. That's before you start on the psychological damage caused by labelling a kid a failure at the age of eleven.
Grammars are divisive. They are perceived as posh, the kids who got to them as snotty and arrogant. I know this from having had coins thrown at the back of my head on the 18 bus, just for wearing a blazer. But it was also really interesting to hear the perspectives of people who joined our sixth form from elsewhere after GCSEs. I remember Paula saying how surprised she was when she found out that it was actually quite 'normal', 'cos she'd always thought that everyone would be super-super-intelligent and really stuck-up! But I can understand the resentment of people in Bartley Green (where our school was, a council estate) - all these clever kids being bussed in, to a good school with good facilities that a lot of their kids had been turned down from, even if their perception of it was slightly more sugar-coated than the reality.
And from the perspective of the kids actually at the grammar school, in a lot of cases, a broader education in the true sense of the word would have been obtained elsewhere, particularly socially. I say that not so much with reference to my own experience - seven years of bussing through Northfield to Bartley Green could hardly be classed as a sheltered existence, and I reckon that by going a mixed school with an intake from all over and outside of Birmingham, I actually met a broader range of people than I would have done at the predominantly white girls' school where I would have gone had I failed the 11+. But Helen, one of my university friends who went to a girls' grammar in the centre of Reading, has come up through a system which has very little idea even of the concept of Maintenance Grants.
So just from a perspective of working for the common good, I am against grammar schools. Yet the alternative solution of selection by postcode is by no means without its faults. And let's face it - I went to a grammar school, I loved it, and I know that I would have not received the same level of education and academic opportunity elsewhere. I had some great teachers, met many like-minded people who I probably would not have met otherwise, and owe a lot to that stupid, divisive, unfair test that I passed at eleven. Without wanting to sound horribly arrogant, it's people in my situation that the system was designed for.
So for or against? I don't know. I really don't know.
Apologies for the über-long post, I've just re-read that! Congratulations if you made it this far! May 16 Core A Paper 1, went well. :) If I haven't made any really stupid mistakes, I reckon I'll have got in the 80s or 90s percent-wise - definitely a first, and hopefully enough to pull up the Algebra and Probability as well. Not that there's a lot that I can do about either in any case, but, you know..!
B2 on Friday is the one that I'm really terrified of. Well, Programming as well, but at least with Programming I'll have had more time to prepare, and at the end of the day, that's not my main degree subject. And yes, I'll still have to come back for a resit in August if I fail it, but if I'm going to fail one, I'd rather it didn't have repercussions into the later years of my degree.. OK, it makes sense to me! I'd much rather not have to resit either. But failing B2 is a very real possibility, just as failing STEP was a very real possibility. It's not anywhere as bad as STEP III, admittedly, but it's the same principle - that I'm not being melodramatic when I say "I might easily fail this", that I actually mean it.
It's at times like this that I get envious of arts students. If you know your stuff, it's a lot harder to get a first in an English essay, say, than it is in a Maths paper, but it's a lot harder to fail altogether - 'cos at the end of the day, you can write waffle in an essay and it might be a crap essay but it's an essay nonetheless. In Maths, either you can do it or you can't. Waffle doesn't come into it!
I've cut the idea of revision for tonight in the hope that I will actually use tomorrow productively. If you see me on Facebook, or MSN, or anything like that tomorrow, tell me where to go please. Nicely, of course!
I'm quite relieved to see that a couple of people commenting on the last post plumped for the 'altruism' option. That was my attitude - that people are essentially concerned about their fellow human beings, and that even if fear of being taken to court was a thought on the side, there is goodness in the world. The people who I was having the discussion with at the time looked at me pityingly as if I was completely naïve! May 15 Matters ArisingStraw poll time!
So, we were discussing theme parks at breakfast, as you do, and the proposed 'Trevs on Tour' visit to Alton Towers sometime in June. Aside from the fact that the idea of travelling all the way from Durham to go to Alton Towers is a bit of a bizarre one (168 miles!!), we were then discussing rides, and rollercoasters and stuff... and the question is this:
A lot of rides contain restrictions (- apparently. I don't know, I've never been to a theme park if you don't count Legoland, which I don't. But it seems reasonable and likely). You can't go on them if you are under a certain height, if you are pregnant, or if you have a bad back (I have found my excuse not to go on fast things that turn you upside down - wooo!). This is so that women don't have miscarriages, children aren't terrified, and people's backs aren't screwed up even more than they already are. But is the prime motivation for those restrictions being in place
a) altruistic. Miscarriages etc. are not to be wished on anybody, and theme park people are human too.
or b) mercenary. Imagine the amount of people who would sue! ?
Vote now! May 14 Core A Paper 2, this afternoon. Went OK. Could have been better, could have been a hell of a lot worse. 2:1, I reckon? Maybe. As predicted, Algebra went considerably better than Probability, but it's one of these ones where they take your best six questions out of eight. I answered seven, two of which were slightly iffy - so that should be OK overall.
Gotta get revising again now. Calculus and Geometry should be fine, but I haven't looked at the material in a while for just that reason - and it would be too ironic to mess up because of that!
I'm not in a room by myself, I'm glad to say. I am in seat 1, rather than at the back as specified, but it's seat 1 in a room of about eight Concessions students, most of whom also have concessions which involve walking/ stretching breaks. This means that there are people walking in and out (supervised by an invigilator, obviously) quite regularly, but everyone does their best to be considerate. There is one girl who has a broken leg stretched out on a chair - that's really bad luck! It was quite funny, actually - people were waiting outside the seminar rooms in Elvet Riverside that they're using for us, asking each other why they were *special* students! Some dyslexic, some dyspraxic, a couple of others with iffy backs.. all sorts of reasons. And of course, a complete mix of years and subjects - I almost felt bad for sitting there tapping away at my calculator, while no doubt others were trying to write flowing essays. But it can't be helped.
Purely by coincidence, Brett (my college tutor) was one of my invigilators! He had mentioned about a week ago that he was going to be doing Concessions students - for obvious reasons, he won't be invigilating any of the main Maths exams. As it happened, it was the other invigilator who took me out both times today - Brett says that theoretically he could have done, though obviously it's easier from a professional point of view if he doesn't. He was not impressed when I walked past him in college this evening. He'd been invigilating non-stop from 8.45am 'til 6.40pm, in that tiny, airless room with ten minutes cigarette break all day, due to a couple of the individual cases - and then to cap it all off he'd got up to college too late for supper. At least when we are in there we are actually doing the exams, then that's it!
I will post the photos on the previous entry, as intended, when MSN stops being retarded. Not that it hugely matters, but having said I would..! May 13 Thoughts on Revision: Part 2Exams. I'm not stressed. It's all good. Nothing is going to go wrong. I am going to pass B2 with flying colours. Everything is fine..
B2 (on Friday) is easily the hardest of my Maths exams, reputedly the most failed in the university. It is made up of Reasoning and Dynamics - half the paper on each. Reasoning is a notoriously difficult topic. I have been getting better at it with practice, but it is more conceptually difficult, rather than just a question of memorising strings of equations. The papers themselves are also very finicky. You have to be able to prove results exactly, not just use them, and I often get very frustrated by the whole what-constitutes-an-airtight-proof-and-what-doesn't thing - things that appear obvious takes lines and lines to prove, and then some proofs you look at and think, "Surely it can't be as simple as that?". We haven't had a very good lecturer for this part of the course, and that doesn't help to say the least.
Dynamics is basically Classical Mechanics, up to the scope of what I imagine is about M4 standard, though obviously having only done up to M3 I couldn't say for certain. I find this topic reasonable - thanks, no doubt, to the awesome teaching skills of My Oakley - and actually quite enjoy it. The lecturer for this one is also reasonable (and on Wikipedia!! Yes, it is out-of-date.), but he doesn't seem to have much grasp of what first-year undergraduates are capable of. After going through a paper that most of us would have been pressed to answer in three hours, forget the given two, he remarked that he thought it was a bit easy - had he been writing it, he wouldn't have spoon-fed the derivation methods so much as all of the proofs have been in our notes. He is writing the exam this year. We are all screwed!
Core A (the papers this Monday and Wednesday) will touch-wood be OK. I still don't like Probability but I reckon that I can now answer enough of it to back up the Algebra, which I am considerably better at. On Tuesday I will cram Calculus and Geometry, which is a bit of a risky strategy, but hopefully it will pay off and I'm definitely not in danger of failing that altogether. Then B2 on Friday, and then I have a week to prepare for B1 and Programming. *breathes*
If there's one thing that I have really appreciated recently when going through my notes and trying to make sense of everything, it is just how amazing a teacher KDO actually is. Seriously. I sort of appreciated it at the time, but the more I learn here, the more I appreciate - and I suspect that that is the same for everyone continuing with Maths in some way at university. When I first heard that a guy from KEFW some years ago had dedicated his PhD thesis to him, I thought it was kinda sweet.. a little sucking up, maybe! But now I know and I understand why!
He taught us about Q8 ! For those who are interested, Q8 = {±1,±i,±j,±k} is a group under multiplication (the quaternion group), obeying its own set of specific rules which define the 3-D Euclidean vector space. OK, so he didn't call it that at the time, or get involved with group theory or what have you, but essentially he taught us it - that ji = -k, for instance, or that k4 = 1, even though he didn't explicitely say that k therefore had an order of 4. Algebra lesson over for now!
Little things like that, though, and all of Mechanics.. he was (is!) awesome! And a Maths teacher in the true sense of the description.
Photo Update: (to come) Revision got a little too much.. May 08 Thoughts on RevisionSo. Revision.
Yesterday went fantastically! I went down to the college library for most of the day, and without any of the distractions of my own room, nailed Algebra. I came out feeling all headachey and woozy, but like I could tackle any question that they choose to throw at me on that part of Core A Paper 2. I was powerful!
Today I sat down to a practice paper. I hate 'bookwork' questions. And what the hell is C* when it's at home? And the thing is, after today, I have to leave Algebra and attack Probability, or I won't know anything for any of my papers in time. *sigh*
40%. 40%. And while I know that I'm not in danger of getting kicked out of university, I'd rather get a bit more than 40%. There's still that school-Lucy striving to get firsts! I'm trying not to admit it too much out loud, because the chances of it happening across the board are, well, slim to say the least!
I've had my final version of the timetable. I already knew when my exams were going to be, and theoretically where, but our own personal versions are more precise - and in my case, shows that I won't be all over Durham like most of the Maths students, I'll be in ER203 (down at Elvet Riverside) because I'm listed down as a 'Concessions' student.
All that means is that as a result of the several attempts to get the right medical evidence through to the right people, I get five minutes every hour to walk around, stretch, put myself in strange positions while trying not to give them sexual connotations etc... basically five minutes of back break, multiplied by three for each hour of exam. Obviously I can't write in those five-minute periods, and while I can technically think about the questions, I will very probably spend at least five minutes out of each writing hour thinking, "Ow. My back hurts. Ow. Please make it go away...", so to my mind, that's fair enough.
As with A-Levels, I suggested that I be put at the back of each exam hall to cause minimum disturbance to those around me. They've clearly got a policy for stuff like this, though, and probably the extra fifteen minutes and what have you meant that they decided it was simpler to just put me elsewhere. Interpretation of the seat numbers would suggest that I will be in effective isolation for three out of five of my exams. In a way, this is somewhat sucky, but I guess it's preferable to not getting any concession at all. More sucky for the extra invigilator they'll have had to lay on for me. Oops. Ah well.
Supper. Then cosets, permutations, and orders of the elements in the additive groups modulo n. To victory! May 04 SatisfactionHa.
Just got back from today's five-hour lecture run at Elvet, the last of the year! In Maths, we've had two weeks of revision lectures, but we get next week as a study week before exams start - I'm actually quite grateful for those two weeks, though a lot of subjects have had barely any/ no contact time this term whatsoever.
Either way, I am as tired as I normally am after a Friday timetable, I am eating dark chocolate (Bournville variety :D) in an attempt to up my sugar levels (even though I'm about to go to supper) as I have a two-hour orchestra rehearsal from quarter to seven onwards, and no, I didn't understand that last half hour of Dynamics. But I don't care! I'm done! May 03 FauréJust got back from a college choir rehearsal, the last before the day of the concert (Saturday). We are singing Fauré's Requiem, which is most definitely very beautiful, and things are going well! :)
College choir always frustrates me slightly. Most of the people there can read music to some degree, though by no means all can sight-read - so through no fault of anybody's, those of us that can sight-read always get slightly fed up when it takes ten minutes to get through an eight-bar phrase. And then five minutes to go through the same phrase the next time, and so on. This is one of the reasons why I was particularly happy to get into Choral Soc. - I get the social side and the light repertoire from Trevs' Choir, along with the more difficult music and the good singing from Choral Soc.. College choir also suffers from what I call 'soprano syndrome'. If you are on a harmony part, basically, you have to be able to sing from the music to at least some degree, because it's not always obvious where the part goes (this is probably partly why I am strong at sight-reading, because I have sung alto since the age of ten!). If you are a soprano, however, and have the tune a lot of the time, reading the music is less crucial - what I call 'soprano syndrome' is when the sopranos are so used to having the tune and the part being obvious that they can't or don't bother to read the music when they actually need to. So you are more likely to get the wrong rhythms or peculiar entry notes, or stuff like that from the sopranos, and they are less likely to notice when it's wrong. Which gets annoying! But in all fairness, I realise that it's easy for me to talk 'cos I can do it. And getting it right all the time isn't the point of college choir, so..!
Actually the Fauré frustrates me slightly as well. I love it as a piece overall, but the alto part, like so many, is not great. Rubbish alto parts fall into two categories. Either it's stuff like Handel, where they're really easy (and I mean really easy. With Handel, if the piece is in D major, which it generally is, a good proportion of the alto part is on an A. For the entire thing. For every work. I'm not even joking..), and that gets boring. A lot of Christmas carols fall into that category. Or it's stuff like.. say.. quite a lot of jazz pieces, where in order to provide that harmonic crunch, the alto part is pretty obscure. I mean, sure it works overall, but pitching a G flat after a C major triad is bloody hard to get right, especially if it's followed by a B natural! Fauré's writing is a frustrating mixture of the two. For a lot of the time we're silent - there's even an entire movement which is sopranos, tenors, and basses save for the last two notes - and to be fair, there are some nice bits (mostly when we're singing the tune in unison with everyone else, haha!). But then there are enough of the slightly awkward moments, in conjunction with the really boring bits, to render the whole thing.. well, just slightly dissatisfying.
But I am still really enjoying doing the singing, so it's all good! (I just need to vent now and again.. and not really knowing any of the other altos, my friends in choir don't always really understand where I'm coming from!)
In other news, I paid £2 in library fines today - for two books, each overdue by a day. That seems a bit steep to me? |
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