~The Road Less Taken~

Saturday, September 6, 2008

OMG I SO NEED TO UPDATE.

and so i will!

in chronological order, starting from thursday night (21/8) where things started getting interesting until friday night (the next post will cover the summit).

ok reflection time.

thursday (21/8):

thursday was really pretty stressful! had to start clearing all of my frontlog of homework so i could be a little more relaxed during the malay college youth development summit (mcyds) organised by malay college kuala kangsar (mckk).

but still i managed to find time to go watch what i expected to be the highlight of the night... the sec 3 drama challenge!

unfortunately, it didn't really live up to my expectations.

while not being a fantastic actor myself, having the outside eye and looking in on these productions as half-audience, half-critic allowed me to see what exactly went wrong in the plays.

for me, some basics of acting weren't observed, shockingly. things like voice projection and clarity, not turning your back on the audience (unless the situation absolutely requires it), and the delivery of lines was rather substandard.

the delivery of lines was significantly bad. some people weren't audible or clear enough, some just plowed through their lines as though they wanted to finish their job and get off-stage, and even when the delivery was ok, it wasn't milked for all it was worth with suitable pauses and intonation.

i don't even know whether some of the performances constituted a parody.

i did expect a good show from it (as did the secondary 4s who went for it, i'm sure) but i left feeling rather disappointed. and the teachers didn't look impressed.

the sec 3 batch seems to be less thoughtful and thought-provoking when inducing their laughter. easily a sizable chunk of the jokes had sexual innuendos to them, which is a good way to get a laugh, and everybody is entitled to use them, but it really was over-employed, to the extent i felt rather turned off by all of it.

steadily it became a chore for me to sit through it (and ms johnson was none too impressed either, especially with joshua's little filler, which i guess was the only way he could really get the atmosphere going again).

of course i'm not saying that all of them were rubbish. the top 2 plays were not too bad (nice use of the cast, good ideas that could have been taken further) and i guess it was a good reward for the effort they had put in. especially macbluff, whose group i saw almost every day in the week leading up to the performance, hard at rehearsing and refining.

but something which really hit home to me was that if this is the standard of the supposedly top 5 groups in secondary 3, what's the standard of the rest?

and where was the support from the sec 3 lit students? the lt was half-full, and even then i think a good number were acting later on.

it makes me wonder whether the beauty of literature, of prose, poetry and play have been lost somewhat on the sec 3 batch.

so anyway that was parody night.

and after that was something absolutely massive - my showcase portfolio.

up to that night i had done 2 pieces of reflection, and each one had taken me about 2-3 hours. i wanted to do 9, and i only had (given no sleep) 8 hours to complete 7 more.

all the more i felt parody night was a bit of a letdown, although i must say i did develop a more critical appreciation of drama.

but laments aside, i also had many other pieces of work to finish - primarily because i chose to complete them before i went to mckk, not after.

and so came a night of little sleep (eventually i dozed off for 2 hours, waking up very fortuitously at 4 and leaving me some time to scramble and finish some work), just sitting through the night and typing away at the keyboard.

and then came friday morning, when everything started to fall apart.

friday (22/8):

before i start, although you may point out that friday should have started 2 paragraphs ago, my showcase portfolio took way longer than a morning to complete. it really is a big thing not just to me, but almost all students. which would mean a sleepless night or two for most of them. ><

firstly, i barely remembered to bring my showcase portfolio file (since i had promised ms kuang i would hand it in that day, if i forgot i would have been skinned alive) and other files to submit. close shave, that one.

then, after coming to school, i realised something absolutely horrible -

i had left my worksheets and papers at home (in it were buried chem notes for the oba i was to take later that day, and some homework), and left my handphone in the car.

what a time for a double whammy.

it didn't help that the day was jam-packed (careers forum took up the whole afternoon, which would have otherwise majorly aided my predicament), even by some things non-academic (li jiawei was playing zhang yining for another guaranteed medal during recess).

and because i didn't complete all my work, i had to spend recess in the library, chionging my showcase portfolio and watching bits of the match.

in the end, though, the match gave me some kind of an excuse to be late (when i actually took the time to finish up the portfolio), so that was another close shave.

at this point, you may have noticed that i've talked about my showcase portfolio a lot, and that i was really focused on completing it.

well i am really proud of what i've done, and the lengths i went to in order to complete it. in the end i exceeded the requirements, and i easily could have barely met them, but that would not be a complete picture of what i did, especially in this last year. it's really been a blast.

...

well being without a phone for that day made me scramble to sort out my mess (probably caused due to stress and lack of sleep), and in the end i had to stay in school until 7.30 to file all the stuff and organise my homework and dump it into the correct places.

and i hadn't even started packing or doing my testimonial write-up.

but thanks to some new-found efficiency (which i didn't have the previous night/that morning) it was all done by 12.30! yay me =D

and then on saturday it would be off to malaysia for mckk! but that's for another post! =D

I stopped to rest at 6:46 PM

Two roads diverged,and I-
took the one less taken...