The Harbours from Before: JC Life

I cannot and perhaps do not want to remember much about JC life.

I was still on the path of recovery … I continued to train hard, determined to climb back up the ladder which I had slipped from. The moments of clarity sustained my spirit and kept me hungry to come back. Guess it was something I had to go through, though I may have taken more time than I should have.

I suppose JC life did not make the path easier. There was great pressure in school where everybody seemed to be so anxious to do well. Conversations always revolved around tutorials, common tests, S-papers, overseas universities, scholarships etc … I detested it. I refused to engage in the milieu …

I was hardly awake in class and never quite kept up with my tutorials. I relied heavily on the notes and tutorials handed down to me from Weiting. Tutorial questions were still the same and on a few occasions, I actually handed up her work as mine. I kept away from school as much as possible and I was lucky to have a lenient class teacher who accepted many similar-sounding excuse letters endorsed by my very understanding mum.

I felt that too much focus was put into preparing us for the ‘A’ levels. Right after the first few months in JC1, we were constantly reminded of the impending examinations. We were constantly told that it would not be easy and we had to work hard for good results. Common tests were always made difficult so that half of the level could barely pass and the teachers would leverage on that to emphasize the need to study harder, or else we would not get our ‘A’s. That made many people very stressed.

I don’t know … I studied as much as I could with the time I had … I could more or less understand the basic concepts though I usually scored ‘O’s, ‘E’s and ‘F’s for my tests, especially for Further Maths. Yes, maybe there were some really bright students that needed extra challenging questions. And yes, maybe there was a need to differentiate the really good, good and average students. But there was no need to scare the majority of students and tell them that they were in risk of not doing well for the A levels when they did badly in a test that was set many times harder than the final examinations.

I remember this scene pretty well. I was in the lecture theatre listening to a particular Chemistry teacher who was flashing statistics of our prelim results. He was also comparing our results against the ‘A’ level results of the previous batch where about 80% scored an A. The 80% percentile for our batch scored a D in the prelim exam. I think I got a D too … Instead of encouraging us, he warned that we should not think such a high percentage would always score an A and those with Cs and below better pull up their socks and study harder. I think I sniggered at that remark but some of my classmates only got more stressed …

And I also remember walking out of the examination hall after one of the Chemistry papers wondering if I could have scored full marks for that paper.

Come on … 2 years of my life spent studying for an exam. An exam that could have been breezed through but instead made to seem so difficult. There was so much unnecessary pressure and fear. We could have been happier students.

It was as if failing to get 4 ‘A’s (and 2 distinctions) would cost one a bright future. In JC1, people scrambled to apply for S-papers, and in JC2 overseas universities …

I don’t know … on one hand, I felt some amount of pressure … on the other, I felt damn sick of the entire situation. In the end, I made no applications of any sort until I got my results. Then I sent in one application to NUS stating just that one course I wanted to take. I did not even bother to fill up the rest of the choices. However I made the effort to apply for a scholarship for financial reasons and I did get one.

Oh well, JC still leaves a distaste in my mouth … I guess I rather not think about it.