day 36

It's been a pretty good week. Most of it cruised by. I spent the weekend over at the Brereton's. We had a nice chat Saturday night. Slept in a bit on Sunday morning and woke up to a yummy breakfast/ brunch. Oats, and the works: Bacon, eggs, beans, white pudding, toast...

School's okay. I'm starting to find linguistics classes slightly underwhelming though. Partly because I've learnt most of what they are teaching now, but also because the expectations for school seems lower.

It was a bit of a shock when I first started classes and the lecturers were talking about how to pass the module. There were mentions of past failures. I guess students and the school culture here play a large part in that. There's hardly a hint of that self-pressurising schizophrenia that characterises Singaporean mugging.

But yeah. That really struck me; in not many modules at nus do you hear professors and lectures talk about passing. Passing is a taboo – an awkward consolation for not getting an A – the narrowly inevitable misfortune of the cursed bell curve.

I can only think of one exception: Algebra I. My professor even explicitly encouraged everyone to drop the module due to high failure rates... but then again that's an extreme. Algebra was tough.

The same challenge with math has carried over here too. I'm barely keeping pace with Topology classes. There seems so many things I need to read up on, because I don't have the backing of other topics that our lessons seems to relate to. I can't tell if I'm the only one struggling, or if my classmates are too.

On the bright side, things do balance out. I can redirect my time and energy from linguistics to math.

Please contact me if you understand this

One thing about studying here though: it seems old-fashioned. I've noticed most local students use paper notebooks, not electronic ones. Stationery here isn't very varied. A good half of the classrooms that I have lessons in have a black- not white- board. One of my lecturers has a tendency to call the projector the ohp. What's more backward is there actually are ohps around in school.

So it's oddly nostalgic being in class here. The last time I saw such technologies in a classroom was about fifteen years ago. It's understandable that the architecture of ucd kind of old (it's actually relatively modern), but it's slightly odd that its people and equipment are too.

Don't mistake this as complaining though; in fact it's quite the opposite. Being one late to catch on to smart gadgets and the latest apps, the tables are finally turned and alas! I am finally technologically advanced.