Summer Two Face

Yay! Summa is a coming!
Vacation is coming!
Two months of pleasure and boredom coming up! Beaches, trees, picnics, camping trips, popsicles, biking trips, movie outings, green grass, sailing, blue skies, thunder storms, swimming pools.

Yes, indeed, but before that, welcome to HELL!
It isn't even officially summer yet, but we've hit 30 degrees or so today. It's bliss to have the full force of the sunshine smashing into your face. Your skin is in ecstasy with all the Vitamin D. Of course, inside CSL, it's another story. If outside was like heaven, inside is hell.

First off: it isn't normal how the building, already small for a school, and even though comparing classrooms on the same floor, with the windows facing the same direction, there is a gargantuan different in temperature. One class will be rather comfortable, while in another, it's enough to bake dough. This is the reason why we don't have cooking classes. As I've said before, it is hardly appropriate to be cooking with the food you're preparing.

Oh, and it isn't CSL if without the wonderful smell of old building, old books, humidity and eau-de-csl. Combined with the heat, it's as if giant stuck his ass through the windows and saturated the place with his flatulence. I would not be at all surprised if somebody with a match caused a huge fireball.

In step with tradition/coincidence, the first hot day of the summer semester is marked by chic day. We shed our uniforms for something a little more comfortable and revealing. However, we still cooked and took baths in our own sweat.
Omigod, what is going to happen tomorrow when we're back in our uniforms!?
Worse, omigod what is going to happen during the end of the year tests?!
You bath in sweat, come up to a question you have no idea how to answer. And bam! You sweat even more, and feel that familiar wave of heat and desperation and panic shoot all the way to the roots of your hair. No doubt everybody else is also sweating the problem, and their body heat is combining with yours. You look at your watch, see the time ticking by twice as fast as usual and you start sweating a torrent enough to put out a small fire.

On a totally different subject, the green tickets to a new world arrived as well. Some people rejoice, some people bitch. Most often, those with high results laugh at the people with low results, and the people with low results, claim to have been shafted by lazy or incompetent teachers. (Could be true) I despise the way society is placing so much weight on time consuming, questionable, and definitely fallible, methods of evaluating the performance of someone. Sometimes, the evals are so poorly conceived, a total retard spewing gibberish may very well get the same result as somebody who studied hard. Screw this, save some time, instead, pitch them into a snake pit, or leave them on a deserted island, or parachute them into a warzone. The person who comes out alive is the one I will respect. Written tests are important, but overeliance on it results in a shitload of people who can't do shit except spew out Bureaucratic Sheeshkabab.
(Think back, at least half of what you learn is about mixing bullshit with information, and hiding it into thick paragraphs of text whereas a simple bullet point listing would've sufficed.)

Weekly Double:

During dinner....someone arrives
"Care to join us?"
"Why did u guys fall apart?"

'Did you hear about the guy who ate twenty pancakes for breakfast?'
'How waffle.'

We've been IB-ed!

Yesterday and today were the days when, if the we were a corporation (we kind of are, but I mean if we were one with money), the executives would arrive in their bizjets from the land of the rich and prosperous and appropriately hygienic and visit the pawns to examine how production is coming.
Minus the bizjet, this is an accurate description: they're strolling through the factory in their expensive suit & tie outfit, talking to nervous engineers with calculators in belt holsters, sub execs wearing cheap suits, and mechanics in dirty blue coveralls. They would have their clipboard and pen, making mysterious notes, questioning, poking, prodding, probing, investigating.

We, the students, are the product they are performing their quality checks on.
They're pretty innovative if you think about it: they've managed to create a product that actually talks back and tells 'em what is wrong.

The IB is the clearest image of corporate level bureaucracy for us at this point in our [pointless] lives, and were in contact with it on a daily basis. Every project, every activity, every teacher, will invariably somehow incorporate IB BS (stands for bullshit but also for bureaucratic sheeshkabab—the food that keeps bureaucracy going) relating to making links with the areas of interaction and [insert more BS here]. Nobody likes it, but we've been stupid enough to hold still, so now, we're used to it. Since mindless bureaucracy does exist, and will be part of the lives of a majority of us for the rest of our lives since the majority of us have gotten our minds dulled and our imagination vaporized, we tolerate it and have become pretty good at it.

What brings a faint smile to your face and an evil snicker from your soul is when you listen to the exchange as the executives question the products. We praise the teachers, express indifference as to the IB program and projects, but we demolish, vilify, and figuratively (although I'm sure some people also literally) poop on the attempted imitation of the IB program by the CSMB which is called the 'reform' !

It is an horrible attempt at copying the IB process. We end up with questions like: How do you think your personality has helped you get through this project?
not to mention the absence of proper class material and their only excuse is: We're still trying to iron out the wrinkles, you're the lab rats, hang in there.

I don't know about you, but I don't find that comforting. To my knowledge, lab rats end up dead well before reaching their average lifespan.

Again, they've given themselves the privilege of playing God. They're risking our future to perfect a new way of teaching, which is supposed to reduce dropout rates, heighten interest, and 'produce' smarter generations of kids ready for the adult world!
So far, it's raised dropout rates, lowered interest, increased teacher workload, decrease amount of knowledge students receive.

Probably their utopian vision will happen one day, but how many more generations will be sacrificed before they hit the magical combination? Why did they opt for a one shot total revamp instead of a gradual implementation? We aren't short of time, at last check, we still had a few hundred years before our sun explodes/implodes.


PS: Something that worries me is their general philosophy which can be summed up as so:

They don't need to know anything by heart (specifically definitions, formulas) because it's all written down, and documented by previous generations, so they can just look it up on the internet or in books if and when they need it.

Oh, is that right? What have you been snorting? What if the power goes out? What if we're stranded on an deserted island? What if an EMP takes out every electronic device and the internet? What if there's a nuclear holocaust? What if a giant piece of shit shat by god, aka, an asteroid, impacted with the earth and caused a worldwide extinction? What if there is an zombie invasion?
I don't know about you, but I don't walk around with a few dozen volumes of encyclopedias strapped to my ass waiting for the Apocalypse.