Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

Eek! This looks even more anti-thesis than I thought: I recall myself as a very good procrastinator: pushing all my weekend homework till Sunday evening, and then scramble to dig out those assignments to do them. I wouldn’t be panicked while scribbling on my homework, but I feel fear.

I fear what would happen if I couldn’t finish that pile of maths homework due on the very first lesson on Monday morning. You know, when the maths representative would go around the class collecting the worksheets, along with a ballpoint and the class roll. She marks down the names of the homework-less with the same sleepy eyes as the rest whom managed to finish it on Sunday evening. Darn, we are all the same!

“Quadratic equations part 1…” she held the tiny pile at table level so that I could place mine on top.

“Nah, there you go!” I handed mine in, the ink barely dry.

You see, sometimes when I have problems with those assignments that I love to do on Sunday evening, I skip them, and pop into class early morning to copy the answers from more competent classmates. It was kind of a cool arrangement, since I could let them copy the English comprehension answers, while I scribbled down their math sums.

Of course, as any teacher would find out, the frenzied xerox spree can lead to problems with the duplications, like situations where the handwriting in the source copy is undecipherable, or where the source copy answer does not match the one in the teacher’s hands, and this often leads to undesirable results.

Because of that, we students marvel at the teacher’s detective skills, and they can always pinpoint the perpetrator…

“Mr X, you let your classmates copy your homework again, eh?”

“No ‘cher (cutsey form of calling a teacher), I swear I didn’t! I just left it on the table”

“I am sure. Detention for those who copied his homework. You know who you are.”

That is one of the top reasons why I pick my suppliers carefully, and only the very elite in mathematics tests catch my critical glance. Quite a few of my classmates catch on later in the semester year, which makes class tests a time for talent-hunters to scout for their next targets…

“Ooooooiii! You got 85 for the test! Next time homework I copy from you har?”

Even so, I realised that direct copying from the professionals do not escape the sharp eyes of the law. I nearly got sent to detention for that, so I decided to modify the modus operandi.

I found out that teachers have a tendency to distrust students with un-stellar test results, yet turn in excellent results, so my tactic was to copy from the best, yet purposefully sprinkle mistakes around the assignment to bring down the overall competency level of the homework. I called that “moderation”, as a joke on the official system of adjusting the grading system based on the competency level of the tested year on a bell curve.

[MEDIA=5]A product arising out of laziness

In retrospect, that was one of the worst abuse of my analytical powers, but it brought homework-cheating to a whole new level. Not only was my method barely detectable, it also made me think even harder than usual, since I had to worry about where to insert my slip-ups… I would say that doing so has raised my maths competency, though it wasn’t through the way those people in their ivory towers originally intended Since then, I have wondered whether I could have achieved better by using my power on the problem itself, as my favourite teacher would say.

Which is why, when I return to school back in April, I resolve to blow all my competition away by drilling into the heart of the problem. Doing so takes quite a bit of resolve, because that would mean spending time to solve problems, and to do that, I need to eliminate procrastination!

It won’t be easy. With 24/7 Internet cable, plus a whole lot of distraction from games, and outings, I have my table quite full. That is where a new pacing method I have just developed will come in.

When tackling a problem, I would dedicate all my resources to that problem itself, and promise myself a reward (or a break) for having completed the solution. If I can’t solve it by the time limit of my attention span, I will drop it, and go do something else (like play a short game). After that, I will come back to the problem again, and tackle it again, this time with the experts I would have identified like I did back in secondary school. I figure that this would give me more motivation to do my work, and mould my playing time around tough problems. The simple ones I would save for last, and hit them in a sprint (say around 40 minutes a session). Take a 20 min break, and then hit it again.

Inserting playtime in between study sessions is a new thing for most people from my generation, since we are so used to being taken to task for playing before the homework is done. However, given the problem of holding back on homework until the last minute, I couldn’t come up with a better game plan to brutalise the required curriculum; I would most likely tweak my study plan again, so this is how it looks as of this time.

Stay tuned for updates on the game plan… most likely when my school officially starts. I have resolved to murder the competition, and blow them away, I shall

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