Update Shmupdate

"You always steal the show," Nothin' On You by B.o.B feat. Bruno Mars.

Post-SUKMA now, and I was looking forward to just chillin' at my crib before the start of a new semester. Let me brief you about what the aforementioned chillin' brought me these few days.

Realisation.
While chillin', I realized that even though I'm one of the taller people anywhere I go at the moment, I will be of below average height once I get to Australia. And we're still not talking about the rugby people over there. They must be HUGE! So I'll be a midget in the team, reducing my chances of being able to play over there.

Now I could just go find a corner and cry (boohoo), but I have decided that I am going to do something about it to be counted in a team over there. I wouldn't mind playing scrum-half, just as long as I get to play, so I'll work on myself to become not-so-small.

Paper-marking.
I was asked to help mark a few English essay papers, 3 classes totaling up to almost a hundred papers. Easy right? Wrong! I got a taste of actually influencing the numbers that will end up on the persons' report cards. I felt an immense amount of responsibility on my shoulders and tried my very best to give fair scores to everybody, even if I knew that the end score will ultimately be determined by the person I was helping, a real professional.

I got my first taste of reading school-goers' essays, and I have to say, a fair few of them can't write in English. Most were writing using Malay grammar. If you translated the sentences into Malay word for word, they would make perfect Malay sentences. And these were city kids which are well-exposed to English. I can't imagine the challenge that we'll face teaching and marking the papers of those who lack English exposure. I need to prepare myself, mentally especially, for that.

Finding out that I have work (super late)
While I was happily browsing my Facebook homepage, I encountered a status from one of my chalkies asking if anybody has done their Linguistics portfolio yet. I sat up and said a little too loudly, "What Linguistics portfolio??" Luckily, no one was around. I decided to ignore it, thinking of it as a prank (even though the person who posted the status wasn't known to make jokes about Linguistics). Then a few facebook minutes later (2 hours in the real world), another chalkie asked me directly if I'd done anything on the Linguistics portfolio. I asked him what he was talking about. Then he said that while I was away on SUKMA training, a lecturer (won't say who) gave some work to be done during the holidays.

Great. I get to know about this 4 days before opening day while everybody else has known for at least 3 weeks. Now I need to know what to do, since each person got different assignments. I'm currently in the process of acquiring that piece of knowledge. I'm hoping it's not too heavy.

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Now to restock my song collection. Any suggestions for albums to download?

Cheers!