The gates to The Great Hall of Salvation has long been closed, but she managed to enter unseen.
The aircon was powerful, and so no one noticed the faint ruffle of foolscap paper that hinted of her presence.
The Tutor of the class was as stately and elegant in her poise as ever, but those koyoks on her back, plus her packets of Panadol, betrayed to the intruder the intense punishment her frail, lithe body was subjected to.
The atmosphere in the room was intense, as The Tutor launched wave after wave of 殺人不眨眼的 TYS/exam papers/school exam/customized worksheet questions, like flying daggers, battering her students to the point of
Arrrrrgh! Miss Loi! My principal says “When you’re tired you should take a short break”. Right now I’m going to take his advice and sleep!
Sensing the opportunity, the uninvited guest weaved her way among the students like a wraith, disrupting their concentration one by one with whispers of blasphemous anti-mathematical identities like a2+b2 = (a+b)(a−b) and lg(x+y) = lg x+lg y into their ears.
Alerted by the disturbance in the metaphysical mathematical fields flowing through the room, the Tutor stopped throwing her flying daggers and snapped:
Sadako! Leave them alone! We have already found the solution to your Plane Geometry question!
‘Screamed’ Miss Loi as she began her telepathic conversation with the intruder.
With that, the psychic conversation ended. A gust of cold wind swept through the chamber as Sadako’s spirit left the room, messing up Miss Loi’s hair and sending stacks of foolscap paper flying in its wake (and revealing all the naughty cartoons the students have been drawing for the past hour 😕 ) …
Yes. These are turbulent times – a time when the dreaded Week of Mathematical Armageddon is less than two weeks away, a time to Teach Less, DO More, and a time when wandering spirits can anyhow fly in and out of The Temple 😕
As the storm clouds gathered rapidly in the skies above, Miss Loi silently hopes that, in addition to the stuff she had said in the past (like this, this and this) students should by now be …
- Spending 2-3 hours (YMMV, depending on whether you’re taking single or double maths) daily to practice selected questions from a variety of topics, NOT just your favourite topic. You should be polishing up your timing and consistency now.
- Refraining from focussing your energy in just a couple of topics or question types that are supposedly ‘sure to come out‘, because you will have nothing to fall back on if they didn’t appear as you expected, or ‘it came out but it was too difficult’.
- Recognizing that it’s TYS FTW (!!!), and that the ‘top school’ prelim papers you have painstakingly gotten from your friend may be too difficult for O-Level standards and/or may not have adequately covered all topics.
- Acknowledging that there aren’t enough questions in the TYS (not in the latest edition anyway) for new syllabus topics like Curves & Circles, R-formula, Partial Fractions etc., and that you’ll need to re-visit the questions in your teacher’s notes, exercises, old TYS, and perhaps websites like this for comprehensive practice.
- Wise enough to get your teacher/tutor/friend to pick questions for you to practice if you’re short of time.
- Knowing that there are other subjects to revise for your O-Levels, though it’s tempting to spend all your time on Maths since it’s all Maths on the opening week but please, please take care of your L1R5 (hence the relatively short revision duration suggested in Point 1 above). Don’t study your maths till 走火入魔!
Last but not least, every year, there will be those who, by virtue of taking a romance a step too far, playing a Facebook game too many, or procrastinating a day too long, will inevitably leave it a little late.
And it’s this group, the last of the Last-Minute Buddha Foot Huggers, they who are most vulnerable to Sadako-controlled examiners, they who are still pounding on the Temple Gates, that’s foremost on Miss Loi’s mind as she created her O Level 2009 LMBFH Support Group on Facebook, in the little hope that this shall be a place for mutual support, where all may find solace and comfort in one another, and to clasp each other’s (virtual) hand tightly in the face of the looming storm.
