Sunday 19 June 2011

Getting IN to being Emotionally INdependent


We’ve all been guilty of this, at some point.

To the day, whenever I experience any issue or problem or am confronted with that terrible thing called emotion – I run crying and screaming to somebody. This, I realized, has to stop. When someone asks me how I am, “Oh yeah, it’s chilled” – next second “BUT OMG I HAVE A PROBLEM…” and blah blah blah I rattle on. What’s wrong with us? It’s not a matter of lacking logic, I feel perhaps it’s an inability to apply such logic when the field involved is yourself.

This has to stop.

I’m growing up, and as time passes, I’m not going to have an array of people there to tolerate the crap that spurts out of my mouth. I’m preparing for my crazy cat lady future, where I’ll have 0 contacts on whatsApp because hey, everyone I know is either dead or changed their phone number to avoid my incessant blathering of personal issues.

In my life, I have 3 more or less longstanding pillar, to which I usually turn to for ‘advice’. Firstly, there’s a person I attended high school with, and have known since grade 8, who is presently ahead of me in university years. She’s always been around to listen and give me the best advice anyone can give ‘ it’s up to you’. Whilst there’s never any tangible plan of action, she tackles issues in a level headed manner, allowing me to give vent to my emotions and in doing so feel significantly better. Then she prompts soul-searching where I should do what I need to do : it’s my life, I should be making my own choices. In other words : grow the hell up, sunshine. I love her.

Next is my elder cousin, that I tell EVERYTHING to. He’s understanding and utterly hilarious. I’ll ask him if I should call a guy, or sms a guy and he’ll say something completely random and opposite to it. He helps me by essentially swearing people that hurt me and making me laugh like a psychotic lunatic. But, he also understands me thoroughly and has always been there…I mean, ALWAYS. Yet, he has his own life. Who am I to intrude and constantly shove my issues onto him? Well, I do it anyway – but it needs to stop at some point. At some point, I need to sort myself the hell out.

Lastly, I have an awesome guy friend who gives the best advice I’ve ever heard and is a neat amalgamation of the two other pillars. Yet he isn’t always mentally available, which is understandable. Sometimes he’ll be all STFU FO and I understand it. Because he has his own life, he’s human, and he helps me realize HEYYY WOMAN, THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE THAT HAVE LIVES AND DON’T WANNA BE LISTENING TO YO MOANING FOOL.

Which helps me realize, that I need to stop.

But it’s hard, living in a world where man experiences the testimony to Sartre’s ideology of man living in a hostile universe, where nothing really makes sense. We’re ultimately responsible for our own choices in life – therefore we can’t blame anyone when things go wrong. Yet, in living in this universe, do we not have a need to seek out help? To communicate with people, to laugh, to discuss problems and try to figure out our future? No man is an island – but, I think at the end of the day, we do need to keep some water between our islands at a reasonable level. Just to keep things level, and so we can appreciate how awesome people are when they voluntarily approach us to communicate.

Friday 17 June 2011

System.out.println("Epic life advice");

Some very wise programmer told me this:

"The past cannot change, the present is currently a set of unassigned variables that only YOU can give values, and the future depends on them.
Now you can make a call to the garbagecollector() method, give up and Application.Quit...or you can continue the while loop until success = true; "


......and what makes you so special is you'll understand that where a lot of people would look at me funny and walk away.

Stuff to Do To Pass Your NBT - Learning from Shreeya's Mistakes

The things I wish I knew before I wrote the National Benchmark Test…

Righto, lots of pressure, right? You want to get accepted into UCT / WITS / TUKS etc and are forced to write the Benchmark test in the hopes of getting a badass score and getting offered early acceptance. When I wrote mine in April, I was quite clueless. But I’ve complied some information to help you study for this test: yes, you have to study. Start now. There’s nothing in here that you don’t know already (or you should already know) but it’ll help if the information is reiterated. Start well in advance with your revision, it’ll help you.

Let’s establish the basics:

1. AQL

What nobody told me about the Academic Quantitative Literacy test was that it’s timed. That freaked me out. What happens is, your entire 3 hour test is broken down into a few questions, alternating quantitative literacy with English academic literacy. Once the time is up, you’re not permitted to turn back. So pace yourself well. NO CALCULATORS ALLOWED.

  1. Mathematics

This test is for the people applying to degrees that require mathematics as part of the degree course. It’s 3 hours, and is a free for all compared to the AQL. You work at your own pace for the 3 hours and can leave after about 2 hours, if you’re done early (geeks). NO CALCULATORS ALLOWED.

WHAT TO AIM FOR:

You’d be looking to aim for a ‘proficient’ level within the tests. That means you require the following skills (taken straight off the official NBT website) :

Academic Literacy:

Select and use a complex range of vocabulary; understand and interpret non-literal language; understand and critically evaluate the structure and organisation of texts and ideas within these texts; evaluate and use a complex range of different text genres; develop academic arguments; evaluate and interpret the evidence for claims.

Quantitative Literacy:

Select and use a range of quantitative terms and phrases; apply quantitative procedures in various situations; formulate and apply complex formulae; read and interpret complex tables, graphs, charts and text and integrate information from different sources; do advanced calculations involving multiple steps accurately; identify trends/ patterns in various situations; reason logically & competently interpret quantitative information.

Mathematics:

Demonstrate insight, and integrate knowledge and skills to solve non-routine problems and make competent use of logical skills (conjecture, deduction). Tasks typically require competence in multi-step procedures, represented in the framework outlined below:

Modelling, financial contexts, multiple representations of functions (including trigonometric), differential calculus, trigonometric and geometric problems (2D and 3D), measurement, representation and interpretation of statistical data,

So…how do we get there?

WORKING FOR THE AQL :

To achieve a proficient level (which we’re all aiming for) it’s a good idea to check out the NBT site’s specifications. Pretty demanding, eh?

Here’s some stuff I wish I did before the paper:

Academic Literacy :

- Try and get your English teacher to give you editing skill exercises, which are as close as you’re going to find to the syllabus manifest in the AQL test. Focus on questions where they ask you to provide synonyms / replace parts of the sentence to change it’s meaning

- They’re basically looking to test your understanding of text : they can provide you with an arbitrary sentence and ask you a comprehension question on it. Try reading through newspaper articles and pick out random words like ‘they’, ‘this’, ‘a study of’ and try to match what exactly these words pertain to in the greater context of the article.

Quantitative Literacy

- Grab a mathematical literacy paper and turn to the statistics section. Or look at some grade 9/8 papers involving long division and multiplication to brush up on your basic maths skills. It may seem demeaning, but lots of us forget our basics.

- You’re not going to have access to a calculator, so devise quick methods for manipulating decimals, percentages, fractions by all the BODMAS rules.

- Practise working with pie chart percentage values to two decimal places. Try and calculate the whole number each percentage represents in the chart out of the total amount of given data.

- There’s special conceptualization, too : how would this figure look from angle x,y,z

- Rewriting equations in different forms as per a word problem : if Person A earns x amount and x is 20% more than person B’s salary write Person B’s salary in terms of x blah blah

You can get a maths lit paper here : http://www.education.gov.za/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=2t55qj7lVmk%3D&tabid=528&mid=1484

Or get others by googling the exam paper name followed by dbe.

In that paper, questions to take note of are:

1.2

3.2

Question 4

Question 5

But practise the entire paper for your own benefit.

Mathematics:

- There’s nothing better than PAST YEAR PAPERS of any year. Take your school’s past year papers or download some of the department’s ones and work through them without a calculator.

- Memorise your special angles

- You’re given a formula sheet, though, so don’t stress about that

- Don’t neglect your trigonometry and graphs – how the graph would look as an inverse, if reflected about whichever line etc

Sunday 5 June 2011

Hiding Our True Dreams In a Cupboard Under the Stairs


There comes a time in ones life, where the question of the future must be answered - sometimes it’s in matric or it could start as early as grade 11. Everywhere we go, people inquire: what’re you going to study? What would you like to become when you grow up? Become. Are we not something at this moment in our lives? Do we need to moult our youthful skins or undergo a metamorphosis of sorts to ‘become’ something else?

Change in a person is inevitable, yes. But that’s not the topic of this post. What I’m questioning is: how honest have you been when answering the question of your future? When other people ask you – do you answer with your heart or your pre-programmed response? Or do you brush it off altogether with a sullen “Idunno”.

I think this is a response to the predetermined nature of humanity : judgemental. We are so afraid of failure, so afraid of being shunned that we give answers to cover up our true desires. Not all of us do this, but I know I’m a blatant victim of this sociological syndrome : hiding my dreams in a little cupboard under the stairs and hoping the Hagrid of reality doesn’t whisk it off to the open world. But, than again, my dreams are so far fetched that they probably DO belong in Hogwarts.

In the community from which I hail, some young ones are indoctrinated into assuming the role of ‘future doctor / accountant / engineer’. Is it fair to cloud a child’s reality with a preset future to ensure their monetary success? I’m not sure. I wish my mother did that. But she gave me these wings. And oh, how I long to fly and be free. But the mere thought of failure, the indomitable fear of failure makes me tremble.

So, when asked of my career options, I’ll dogmatically spout something socially acceptable, but nonetheless a solid career choice, “Comp Sci. Maybe law. Still deciding.”

Oh yes, I’ve decided a long time ago. But, Heaven forbid we admit the goals of our heart, lest they crumble. Why are we so ashamed of ourselves?

Moreover, why do we laugh when people fail? Perhaps that’s the real crux of the matter; not my childlike insecurities. We live in a society conditioned to giggle at gruelling failure. To make ourselves feel better.

Let’s all chill the hell out and do what we love. And if it doesn’t work out, do someone* you love. That is all.