Recovered from Facebook Notes, posted Sep 18, 2008, written even before that
A-Levels – a completely new journey altogether – in the alien world of Mastermind! It’s been quite a while since we started this life and we have become totally used to it, but trust me, that took quite a while!
The biggest “new experience” was the immense number of students. You probably won’t find a single person who knows everybody in his/her batch, let alone in the school, which used to be the case in many schools. On the very first day, break had been a tremendous shock – to see students pouring down from various doorways into the vast sea of unknown faces. But this “vast sea” is made up of quite a variety of students. Starting from the prim goody-two-shoes, properly dressed with proper shoes and proper sweaters (in winter), to the more rebellious students with hair spiked up with gel, lots of make-up and jewellery. There are any number of piercings around – nose piercings, multiple ear piercings, even eyebrow piercings! We have the extremely trend conscious people, always careful to dress and accessorise fashionably, some never seen without the eyeliner. And we have an equally large number of “good students”, whose only purpose in life is to study and be the first to finish the sum in maths classes. We have such exceptionally high scorers in exams that even the average high scorers don’t stand the chance of getting the tuition waver for six months if you get a position in the exams. Then there are also the “clowns” who would disrupt classes and annoy teachers by constantly asking stupid or irrelevant questions (and its actually fun to see the teachers pick on them), and more “Johnny Bravos” who would flirt with almost anyone. The best thing is, it’s really easy to fit in here. It’s not long before you’re one of the mass in the sea of people and everything falls into place the first week.
Another difference most of us faced in here in Mastermind was no more fixed classrooms. Not that we’ve always had classes in a single room back in school, but few of us have had to change rooms for every single class and attend classes in a wide range of rooms. The A-level classes take place on the ground and first floors. On the first day, we were so lost when looking for classrooms, and climbing narrow staircases and spiral stairways and crossing the steel plank joining one part of the building to another in the first floor. We are still discovering new routes throughout the place. Each room is interesting in its own way. Even in the most boring classes, you can keep yourself entertained by reading the graffiti on the desks. Not an inch of any desk seems to have been spared. All sorts of stuff are written on these and you can actually have “conversations” with “unknown” people from different section or batch. If you leave any interesting message on a desk, somebody is sure to comment on it or add to it, and you can reply back!
With fewer subjects for A levels, there are more free periods. Free periods in this place can be spent whatever way you want – gossiping in the girls’ room, playing, studying in the library or simply roaming around the place, during which you’re sure to be questioned “Are you free?” The school has definitely paid attention to providing sports facilities for cricket, basketball, table-tennis and even carom and chess.
As to academic differences – the studies are of course getting more difficult – but let’s not go into that. An interesting difference in academics would be lab classes. There being no practicals in the O Levels, this is a completely new experience for many of us. In the Physics lab, despite the fact the questions contain the words ‘the apparatus has already been set up for you’, it never really is. It’s a real pain to deal with the clamp stand, masses and strings. Sometimes metre rules won’t balance on tipsy pivots, and we would literally start praying that it would for once, do so. And of course, if favourable readings are not obtained, one can always “manipulate” figures here and there. But that happens more in the Chemistry lab. During the O Levels we were told of the deadly, disastrous, dangerous acids and alkalis. We were taught the terrible effects it would have on our skin and tissues, and we had made up our minds to be extremely careful and cautious during practicals. Here, at first, it was quite funny to see students shriek if a mere drop of alkali or acid fell on their hands, but now we all realised that nothing happens even if a lot of this super-diluted chemicals come in contact with your skin. But don’t be careless – you’d still get plenty of acid burns or hot-test-tube burns!
Mastermind is full of ECA clubs, all completely student-run. The students are in charge of everything, so there’s a lot more responsibility involved. It’s all up to the students how they’d organize an event or a community service project – the hard part though is getting the approval and permission of Neera Miss.
Is it Mastermind, or is it just us, but we all have changed. Even the most serious of students are seen bunking, coming to school late, or trying to slip away quietly by hoodwinking the admins. The thing about Mastermind is, you have to get involved to really enjoy it here and there are plenty of opportunities here for that. It’s gonna be just two years – this A level life, so we should just have fun while we can before we have to really “grow up”.
Written by: Tushmit Mehruba Hasan, Amreen Rahman, Mahia Khan, Sahel Muhammad Fardeen Fayez, XI B
Tushmit's Stream of Consciousness 