COS' WE ARE WINNERS FOREVER
Friday, October 20, 2006
lala
:D EXAMS ARE OVER
Honestly I am not feeling as excited as i thought i would be feeling (from now on i think i will try to type in proper english, my english teacher said i had some weak grammar -.- OMG are you very sure grr my english is ownage, so shut up) Anyway i think the reason why im not feeling as excited as i thought i would be, is because the tension slowly drained away throughout the course of cts, and the feeling of freedom increased towards the end. So much so that i hardly studied for history, and many people ended up reading their comics or playing games too. HAHAHA but i think i did history moderately okay. I NEED AN 85%.
So far i have screwed up majorly (MAJOR) in a lot of my CAs in sem 2 and a few of my CTs. But i think i can still pull through, and i have faith. I have faith that he will get me through.
Aiya now that there is no more pressure of exams, nothing much left to do in school, i have to worry about swimming! yay. I went to watch prestige yesterday. I didnt find it really nice =/ But a lot of people like it. Ah well. Oh i didn't get into LDP. Actually im not really surprised. This is the first year that they are opening it to the mainstreamers too and i think 6 out of 11 of them were mainstreamers. I was quite sad i guessed haha seeing so many of my old friends from tao nan, now in hwa chong, getting in. Sucks. What happened?
Anyway im actually quite sad over this abolishing of gep. But thankfully im in the last batch that's gonna graduate with 7 years in gep. YAY. I think everyone's sad about it but ah well. Truthfully, anyone (in a gep school) can see a difference between the gep students and the special stream. I dont know how to describe it, perhaps i can show a tiny part of it with an example
"Weeks ago, my class went to the gep room for our CLE. Surprisingly there was another mainstream class in the gep room, uh so okay we shared the class with them cause we were watching the same video. At the end of the video, the teacher asked us to stay back and help to tidy up and put everthing back (cause we had shifted everything to the side to make space). And it was the teacher of the other class. But right away, their whole class left, and my class stayed behind to tidy up and rearrange everything."
I dont know. And perhaps it is something like how our teachers told us before, that they had tried to combine both streams before in big activities, and the mainstreamers ended up bullying the gepers. I dont know, call it emotional capacity or the diverse range of innate creativity and abilities, or perhaps it is the potential to read people and empathise or the common sense. Why is there a marked difference between the two groups?
Hoho and i shall kope smth from tom's blog again :D since he did such a longlong essay.
Tom:
"K anyway all the talk about GEP being abolished has really raked up some emotions within me, so I thought I'd just take a short break (break?! I havent even started zzzz haha) and come here to say something.
I think it's pretty much something to note that, despite me being unaffected by this abolishment of GEP, I'm still feeling quite an immense sense of loss. This year's my amazing 6th year in GEP, and I think after all this while, we've really forged some kind of a common identity that been quietly layered over this period of time.
It's just a massive sense of belonging. It's the kind of feeling you get on the basketball court, in the classroom. It's something like, during the lit parody, you don't really care if you win or not but you would just prefer a gep play to strike gold. Or the deep sense of disappointment you get when you watch 1J'04 lose to 1C'04 in the 2004 sec 1 interclass 3rd/4th placing match, when you see Slau getting oled by the winning penalty. Right after that moment you could really feel that deep grief amongst the gepers on the astro steps.
I think that's what really defines us as a gep batch. Perhaps it's not exactly about GEP as a whole, but more of us as a GEP batch. Or at least more so. It's this forged unity that carries us along, not the different class of academic or non-academic intellect, or the talent that you will never fail to discover.
I have this feeling that entering this programme is more than just about your intellectual capability alone. I think MOE has some sort of amazing method to sieve out a certain group of people, although it's inevitable that anything of this sort has it's loopholes. I know of this senior from my primary school who was pretty ownage in her academics and was somewhat dubbed the 'sure get into GEP one' kind of thing, but she didnt. A few years later, she was the top mainstream pupil in nyps with a psle score of 278, and went for the gep test again. But again, she didnt make it.
I can take a look at the people around in class, and although their giftedness isnt exactly reflected in their academic prowess all the time, they are still displayed in some other way. I remember my math teacher in P4 (our first year in GEP) telling us, we were all 'potentially gifted', but whether we were or not, remained to be seen. Haha come to think of it, how do you even define the word 'gifted'? To me it's more than a measure of academic intellect. It's like a certain quality that's kinda impossible for me to explain, something like a level of acuteness, but I dont know how MOE does it. Haha I dunno, they could be just tyco. But I think it's pretty certain that they don't just sieve out this group from the scores alone. They dwell into the details and research is very probably involved.
By saying this, I'm definitely not denying the talent we can find outside of the GEP that can, once in a while, even equal or surprass that of the former. I don't like it when GEP people get 'streamist'. Haha I don't like to use 'elitist' cos I feel that both streams are champions in their own right. Anyway, I think it's a pity when people are disillusioned by the fact that they are receiving privileges and all, and start to have a strong belief that they are a class above the rest. Haha even so in the express, it's inevitable that we find people who are very against the GEP stream. I think it's hard for us to blame them, cos after all, we're the ones who have been enjoying the shower of privileges that this amazing programme brings about. But that fact that we're the minority definitely brings about a high possibility for such things, and we've just gotta learn to deal with it.
I think there will always be, to a certain extent, some sort of division between the express and gep, as long as the programme stays in existence. I think one main reason as to why we're feeling this sense of loss, is because we sort of cannot bear to part ways with the many headstarts that this programme has offered us, and we feel some sort of pity that future batches cannot enjoy what we have enjoyed. Hopefully, the new system will bring us all down to earth, patch up the gaps between the streams, and provide an equally or even more holistic environment for the development of our nation's future forerunners.
For me, I think the GEP has allowed a very very fair bit of my potential to surface. I guess I'm still in deep, raw stages of development and this cloud behind my ability is still being slowly blown away by the winds of discovery and time. One thing great about this programme is that it really does nurture, as it promises. Although I topped the nyps level in p3, I really felt really outclassed the following year when gep people from all over the island joined nyps and started interacting in the same classrooms and discussions. But after adapting to this new change, I think I was propelled to take greater steps forward. I dont really remember ever working very very hard just to 'catch up' with the better people in front of me, but I think at this point in my 6th year in GEP, I more or less am pretty much on par and working in good pace relative to everyone else. Sometimes I think it's pretty unfair that I get this opportunity and others don't, because no matter how MOE has their supersense, I dont think you can every fully detect a person's giftedness through the means of a few test papers.
So at the end of the day, we'll have to wave goodbye to the GEP pretty soon. Count us lucky, cos we still have a year left. It's amazing that we're the last batch to graduate from 7 years of GEP. It has definitely benefited us in many undescribable ways, and at the end of next year, it will definitely be hard to part. I just hope all of us can make use of what we have achieved within this programme to go out there and help others achieve what we have. Throughout these 6 years, we have had many resources taht have been unavailable to the majority. Let us appreciate this."
Honestly I am not feeling as excited as i thought i would be feeling (from now on i think i will try to type in proper english, my english teacher said i had some weak grammar -.- OMG are you very sure grr my english is ownage, so shut up) Anyway i think the reason why im not feeling as excited as i thought i would be, is because the tension slowly drained away throughout the course of cts, and the feeling of freedom increased towards the end. So much so that i hardly studied for history, and many people ended up reading their comics or playing games too. HAHAHA but i think i did history moderately okay. I NEED AN 85%.
So far i have screwed up majorly (MAJOR) in a lot of my CAs in sem 2 and a few of my CTs. But i think i can still pull through, and i have faith. I have faith that he will get me through.
Aiya now that there is no more pressure of exams, nothing much left to do in school, i have to worry about swimming! yay. I went to watch prestige yesterday. I didnt find it really nice =/ But a lot of people like it. Ah well. Oh i didn't get into LDP. Actually im not really surprised. This is the first year that they are opening it to the mainstreamers too and i think 6 out of 11 of them were mainstreamers. I was quite sad i guessed haha seeing so many of my old friends from tao nan, now in hwa chong, getting in. Sucks. What happened?
Anyway im actually quite sad over this abolishing of gep. But thankfully im in the last batch that's gonna graduate with 7 years in gep. YAY. I think everyone's sad about it but ah well. Truthfully, anyone (in a gep school) can see a difference between the gep students and the special stream. I dont know how to describe it, perhaps i can show a tiny part of it with an example
"Weeks ago, my class went to the gep room for our CLE. Surprisingly there was another mainstream class in the gep room, uh so okay we shared the class with them cause we were watching the same video. At the end of the video, the teacher asked us to stay back and help to tidy up and put everthing back (cause we had shifted everything to the side to make space). And it was the teacher of the other class. But right away, their whole class left, and my class stayed behind to tidy up and rearrange everything."
I dont know. And perhaps it is something like how our teachers told us before, that they had tried to combine both streams before in big activities, and the mainstreamers ended up bullying the gepers. I dont know, call it emotional capacity or the diverse range of innate creativity and abilities, or perhaps it is the potential to read people and empathise or the common sense. Why is there a marked difference between the two groups?
Hoho and i shall kope smth from tom's blog again :D since he did such a longlong essay.
Tom:
"K anyway all the talk about GEP being abolished has really raked up some emotions within me, so I thought I'd just take a short break (break?! I havent even started zzzz haha) and come here to say something.
I think it's pretty much something to note that, despite me being unaffected by this abolishment of GEP, I'm still feeling quite an immense sense of loss. This year's my amazing 6th year in GEP, and I think after all this while, we've really forged some kind of a common identity that been quietly layered over this period of time.
It's just a massive sense of belonging. It's the kind of feeling you get on the basketball court, in the classroom. It's something like, during the lit parody, you don't really care if you win or not but you would just prefer a gep play to strike gold. Or the deep sense of disappointment you get when you watch 1J'04 lose to 1C'04 in the 2004 sec 1 interclass 3rd/4th placing match, when you see Slau getting oled by the winning penalty. Right after that moment you could really feel that deep grief amongst the gepers on the astro steps.
I think that's what really defines us as a gep batch. Perhaps it's not exactly about GEP as a whole, but more of us as a GEP batch. Or at least more so. It's this forged unity that carries us along, not the different class of academic or non-academic intellect, or the talent that you will never fail to discover.
I have this feeling that entering this programme is more than just about your intellectual capability alone. I think MOE has some sort of amazing method to sieve out a certain group of people, although it's inevitable that anything of this sort has it's loopholes. I know of this senior from my primary school who was pretty ownage in her academics and was somewhat dubbed the 'sure get into GEP one' kind of thing, but she didnt. A few years later, she was the top mainstream pupil in nyps with a psle score of 278, and went for the gep test again. But again, she didnt make it.
I can take a look at the people around in class, and although their giftedness isnt exactly reflected in their academic prowess all the time, they are still displayed in some other way. I remember my math teacher in P4 (our first year in GEP) telling us, we were all 'potentially gifted', but whether we were or not, remained to be seen. Haha come to think of it, how do you even define the word 'gifted'? To me it's more than a measure of academic intellect. It's like a certain quality that's kinda impossible for me to explain, something like a level of acuteness, but I dont know how MOE does it. Haha I dunno, they could be just tyco. But I think it's pretty certain that they don't just sieve out this group from the scores alone. They dwell into the details and research is very probably involved.
By saying this, I'm definitely not denying the talent we can find outside of the GEP that can, once in a while, even equal or surprass that of the former. I don't like it when GEP people get 'streamist'. Haha I don't like to use 'elitist' cos I feel that both streams are champions in their own right. Anyway, I think it's a pity when people are disillusioned by the fact that they are receiving privileges and all, and start to have a strong belief that they are a class above the rest. Haha even so in the express, it's inevitable that we find people who are very against the GEP stream. I think it's hard for us to blame them, cos after all, we're the ones who have been enjoying the shower of privileges that this amazing programme brings about. But that fact that we're the minority definitely brings about a high possibility for such things, and we've just gotta learn to deal with it.
I think there will always be, to a certain extent, some sort of division between the express and gep, as long as the programme stays in existence. I think one main reason as to why we're feeling this sense of loss, is because we sort of cannot bear to part ways with the many headstarts that this programme has offered us, and we feel some sort of pity that future batches cannot enjoy what we have enjoyed. Hopefully, the new system will bring us all down to earth, patch up the gaps between the streams, and provide an equally or even more holistic environment for the development of our nation's future forerunners.
For me, I think the GEP has allowed a very very fair bit of my potential to surface. I guess I'm still in deep, raw stages of development and this cloud behind my ability is still being slowly blown away by the winds of discovery and time. One thing great about this programme is that it really does nurture, as it promises. Although I topped the nyps level in p3, I really felt really outclassed the following year when gep people from all over the island joined nyps and started interacting in the same classrooms and discussions. But after adapting to this new change, I think I was propelled to take greater steps forward. I dont really remember ever working very very hard just to 'catch up' with the better people in front of me, but I think at this point in my 6th year in GEP, I more or less am pretty much on par and working in good pace relative to everyone else. Sometimes I think it's pretty unfair that I get this opportunity and others don't, because no matter how MOE has their supersense, I dont think you can every fully detect a person's giftedness through the means of a few test papers.
So at the end of the day, we'll have to wave goodbye to the GEP pretty soon. Count us lucky, cos we still have a year left. It's amazing that we're the last batch to graduate from 7 years of GEP. It has definitely benefited us in many undescribable ways, and at the end of next year, it will definitely be hard to part. I just hope all of us can make use of what we have achieved within this programme to go out there and help others achieve what we have. Throughout these 6 years, we have had many resources taht have been unavailable to the majority. Let us appreciate this."
posted by yao. # 12:58 PM 
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