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They should be careful, or it will be a repeat of the exotic animal escape in Zanesville a while back.

LOL! So THAT'S how Prometheus did it!

Last edited by Albirea on 26 Jan 2012, 9:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.

The other WP says that whether the ancient Greeks knew or not is disputed.

kevinjh: (Get ready, I'm going to try using BBCode here.)
I agree with what you've been saying about anti-learning kids at your school. It's the same at my school - most of the valedictorians and "high-achieving students" at my school are grade grubbers. Instead of actually learning and liking to learn, they do everything for the grade and compete with other people. [sarcasm] Oh, and don't forget about colleges. EVERYTHING goes to colleges. Their resumes need to be filled up to the brim with supposedly "constructive" activities that "prove" they're "independently learning". [/sarcasm] It's disgusting. (I guess that's why none of them got into UChicago. One of them even got into Wharton, but got deferred at UChicago.)
And I know about HIN because I did an internship with a microbiology lab over the summer. Two months of heaven. XD

Last edited by Albirea on 26 Jan 2012, 9:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't have to be like everybody else, just because it's 2012.

Well you made me homesick with that picture twice in one day I took the train today don't get me started (how bad are the trains here if you prefer to take a bus) what up with that?



Anyways not sure if I can go back to CH I wouldn't know how to be Swiss.





Well actually I do recycle everything, don't play loud music until 3 am (or at any time) go for morning walks through the forest and pick some berries or non hallucinogenic mushrooms and come winter time ski your heart out

And here I am sweating like a pig


Actually I could sell up my modest inner city 2 bedroom apartment and buy a big farm house on acreage in JB .

Who knows ?

Jeramy Clarkson made a "joke" (Top Gear) he often does when it comes to Switzerland he said a snowflake fell on the road it got promply arrested

To be precise, square brackets are associated with BBCode (Bulletin Board, I presume), not that it matters.

About the valedictorians, they use unweighted grades at this school, so students that actually try to take the more challenging courses (with more challenging teachers) are disadvantaged when trying to be valedictorian. Add that to the departments' shared quiz material and block schedule (odd periods one day, even the next) and the result is a student body that generally tries to score higher grades by what would be illegal on a standardized test. My weighted GPA is actually above 4, but my unweighted GPA was dragged down by two years of blood and sweat (specifically, blood pressure) and was not helped much by my tendency to understand deadlines as being somewhat loose.

Concerning the activities, I heard (or maybe read) that good schools actually prefer seeing a few worthwhile activities to a long list of menial service serving only a résumé stuffing, so there have been some improvements. However, the independent learning part is extremely lacking, and some of the questions on Yahoos* Ask can be traced to this particular school (and how can seniors not know how to spell, "villian [sic]," after four years of reading and 'riting!?) and somehow, it seems odd that a multiple choice spelling test had a mean score of somewhere around 60% (and I know I received 99%, so something very low must have been scored.

Relating to the internship, I probably should try my hand (or rather, mind) at one. It would be fun (the kind) and useful for graduate school (but still, try not to worry too much about HIN because most students would probably say something about one of the numerous influenza viri or a certain condition prevalent in a certain royal family. It is already beyond most students to italicize the binomial names [redundancy?] and further beyond them to use the first letter of the genus and first two letters of the species.)

* From Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Please Help Me I've drunk A LOT Of Caffeine
Now It's Bed-Time

I thought it was rather sad their was no need to kill those animals, humans are such arrogant pricks.

I used to get that way with energy drinks. Perhaps some relaxation music might help.

I like ocean sounds, but haven't been able to find any without new age music mixed in.
Any Ideas of where to look?

You might be able to find some ocean sounds without the music on YouTube.

I want to adopt a water puppy. They're so cute and cuddly looking.

Haha I know, I edited XML to BBCode after I posted initially.
...Wow... That's a lot of text. *inhales*

Since GPAs are weighted at my school, people have started taking AP classes starting freshman year, when traditionally they're not offered for freshmen or even sophomores (for example, one of my friends started taking AP Calculus freshman year). While they can make the excuse that they're doing it "to challenge themselves", they know they're all doing it for the inflated GPA. I admit that I'm guilty of this myself, because left to my own devices I wouldn't have taken any AP history or government classes, but I did it anyways for the GPA boost and "curriculum attractiveness". But these days, it's all about working the system and putting on a façade for the colleges. So my high school has implemented a ridiculous grading system to bring everyone's weighted GPA down (which further aggravates the problem). We have a block schedule on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and like most other schools, classes are offered in different periods, so there is a ton of cheating and "test previews". My GPA is 4.15, not the highest but still fairly competitive. And I'm sorry that your blood pressure prevented you from doing your best in school; it was not your fault and colleges should understand.

Most of the high-achieving students do internships and "leadership" activities, but most of them get nothing out of it. Like I said before, students are making an effort in their schoolwork and activities not to actually learn, but to get into a prestigious college and make a lot of money later on in life (i.e. the stereotypical Asian parents forcing their child to pursue medicine to become rich). Yes, the economy's not the best right now, but it's not worth pursuing a disliked career. It's a shame to see what high school academics and the college application process have become.

I find it hard to comprehend why people still can't spell or write in correct basic grammar. Every time I see this on the Internet, this is my reaction:


Oh, and did I mention affirmative action? I know it affects me personally (in a negative way), but I'm not going to elaborate on it because I prefer to remain safe from the people that will accuse me of "political incorrectness". You see where this would go if I did talk about it, though. That's enough from me.

EDIT: Also, I'm considered an international student because I don't have a green card in the US. It takes many years for people born in China or India to get their green cards because of the rate of immigration in these groups. I've been in the US for nearly six years now, and I'm still in the application process. My family and I are not illegal immigrants; we are here on a temporary visa and we are Canadian citizens. But the sad fact is, we were born in China and thus have to wait for an unknown amount of time before we get our green cards. Meanwhile, it's harder for me to get into certain US colleges (*cough* MIT *cough*) because their international applicant pool is large and includes international science competition winners and the like, and they can only admit less than 5% of them. In the domestic pool, however, a person of Asian descent with roughly the same stats as me would probably get in. The difference between getting accepted and getting rejected from my dream school is just one green card away.

Forgive me people. I've been feeling a little high strung, today. I'm hopeful that tomorrow will be a better day for me and a better day for all of us.

AP classes got abused there? How well do the other students do on the exams? Do a lot of the students take AP exams without enrollment in the classes? (From personal experience: do not take extra AP exams unless the subject was highly interesting in the AS special interest way for at least a whole month.)

About the grading policy, that does sound like trying to remove weeds by pruning them. Of course, there is no easy solution with the root of the cause, the aggregate mentality of the students and probably households, remaining. Perhaps, it would benefit the students (and the schools) if they would promote the universities and colleges that are not as famous but are still selective and cover a lot of need-based aid (e.g. Vanderbilt, Pepperdine, Davidson, et cetera). I should think that finding the best school requires a larger sample size than what is merely well known, and graduate school should be a higher priority than simply college because of the adage that it is harder to graduate than enroll in most colleges.

Concerning blood pressure, I meant that about PE, because the phrase about sweat and blood would not be completely accurate if there was no detail about high blood pressure and genetics.

The image describes my thoughts about Answers for Yahoos perfectly, what with the shamelessly false or confabulated responses to anything.

On the subject of affirmative action, I know of its damaging effects to me (regardless of AS, because of the new racism) and wish more people distinguished what is just from what is fair. What is just will provide regardless of immutable condition or status even if it benefits a previously disadvantaged demographic. What is fair will try to, "make it up," even without clear rules on how much will finally establish equality. Other minorities at my school complain about why I am, "hateful and bigoted," to other minorities when I am simply demanding equal treatment that neither favors nor hurts any group. Of course, that could be a consequence of being blind (in practice) due to a lack of eye contact or gaze direction and consequent bias based on appearance, but I would think that justice is a higher virtue than fairness.