Posts Tagged ‘xyrael.net’
The destructive power of exams
For many years I loved it when exams came around. They were a lot more fun than normal lessons for me (easier and nice when completed) and so I loved them through primary school all the way up to Y9 SATs. The main reason they were so much fun was that revision, if it existed at all, was minimal and so I could enjoy the whole atmosphere. I love the clacking of the invigilator’s shoes (obviously I only got this once I got to secondary school), the ticking clock, the scratching of pens. But while I can still appreciate these and the whole exam zone now, they are no longer my favourite time of the year. I have joined the ranks of Everyone Else in dreading exams coming along, and why? For three simple reasons: having to revise, and because the exams matter, and because I can’t just get high marks easily anymore.
It has of course been increasingly in the news of late that school pupils in this country are thought to be seriously over-tested, and for a long time I didn’t think this was an issue because actually, people around me did realise when the tests mattered and when they didn’t. But I’ve realised this is no longer the case, or I was ignorant to others in the past. My sister has recently done her Y9 SATs at the age of fourteen, and in the run up to this became incredibly worked up. She did hours and hours of revision, she worried about them, she struggled through past exam papers. I told her multiple times that this didn’t make sense, that the exams mattered only for the school and not the individual at this stage. But she insisted that they decided her set for GCSE and thus she must do as well as possible. To me it seems highly probably that an unfair image has been impressed upon her by her teachers and realistically if she didn’t get what she was capable of then they would surely set her appropriately for the next year. It is unreasonable to make a yeargroup of children feel this way about something that is so insignificant.
But that is about an exam that doesn’t matter, and obviously my AS level modules do. Revision and exams though have really spoilt in many ways my lower sixth year. Consider my subject of History. For most of secondary school it was my absolute favourite subject, above even maths, and it was only superceded by RE (religious education) during the latter part of GCSE when I gained my present philosophy teacher for this subject, who made RE into a philosophy lesson in many ways. But as GCSE exams drew closer and once I started this year I have come to almost hate it; it has caused many hours of misery. This is because I cannot enjoy the subject when I am continuously having to think about how whatever exercise or reading I am doing is going to help me with my exams. When I read something academic that isn’t for school, it’s wonderously enjoyable and I can get a lot out of it. But that ceases to be the case once you bring in the fact that I need to get an A in this subject to go to the university I want to go to.
In addition to this I am useless at revision, and am useless at keeping pure knowledge in my head. I can think of the ideas, I can debate the bigger picture and get to the heart of the matter. But I can’t remember the date Hitler became Chancellor of Germany or when the first Jews were gassed at Auschwitz without a lot of effort. And of course as seems to be the case with most people I have lots of useless (for exam purposes, there we go again: an eternal focus) knowledge floating around in my head. I can still sing through the vast majority of Les Misérables, for example. So I get more and more worked up about how I can’t revise and am never going to keep it in my head, and then I get unworked up by the fact that I do actually seem to remember more than others and in any case one always remembers more in the actual exam once in the zone. But it still makes my life unpleasant in the run up to the day.
So I hope that I have demonstrated how in my life, exams seem to have great destructive power. They stop me from exploring subjects, they become the sole focus (I hate myself when I ask teachers, “right, which bit of this do I need to know for the exam” but I know I can’t remember it all). At the heart of all this is the fact that I am far too bothered about getting to the university I want to go to and thus concentrate so much energy and thought into those grades. I try not to judge myself as a person based on exam results, but that doesn’t stop me continually checking that my academic path, which I may not even get onto anyway, is not hindered in anyway by the way my work is focussed.
You may have observed that I’ve made two changes to this blog lately. Firstly, I changed the design yesterday because I was getting annoyed with the fact that my posts looked shorter than they are because they aren’t in the thin column they are now; this also makes them easier to read. Secondly, I’m posting more regularly and more, er, personally; it’s becoming more like a diary than a logbook. Hopefully this will make my posts more pleasant and interesting to read, for the few people that do.
Rare geekery
Term has finally been winding down at school this week; we finished at lunchtime and spent the morning of history lessons watching relevant videos. So for yesterday and tonight I decided to do some alternative activities to school work due to not having much to do, and in order to have a change. I will be commencing my holiday homework tomorrow if all goes to plan, and then of course it is on to revision. I also intend to try and catch up on my e-mails and other related activities but I fear already this is not going to happen. Really, I should have spent this time doing that rather than this.
I have opted to yet again redesign my website, seanwhitton.com – I think this is about version five. While this blog is presently as it has been for some time due to the comparative difficulty I will have trying to convert the blog’s complex template to the new layout, the new site didn’t take me too long to re-layout and I am pleased with the result. I did a direct transfer of the old site to the new by simply replacing the old template with my new code and this means that not all pages look quite as they should. Since I now have a site map on the home page, I was tempted to add some more pages to the listing and thus I have some things to fill in. It seems I naturally have site content now without having to work too hard to make it up which is a good thing. This blog has always been my main source of writing and so I aim to transfer this over eventually. It will be far from easy, however. My new design is supposed to be easy to use, simple and clean, so I would appreciate any feedback on whether it is this.
About a week and a half ago I decided to purchase a ’slug’ or what is actually called a Linksys NSLU2. It is a device designed to serve files with a built-in FTP and web server, that can easily be mounted on network machines. The idea is to add storage to a smallish network that can easily be accessed. However, since the thing is based on Linux anyway is has been hacked somewhat by fans and is now officially supported by Debian – in other words, I now have a mini-server with low power consumption that I can run useful things off and leave on all the time. It took me some time to get it working because my router was feeding it false information meaning it couldn’t properly connect to the Debian mirrors to get hold of the operating system files (I had to open another shell and edit /etc/resolv.conf manually). Getting the router to forward web, SSH and FTP ports was not easy either. Now it is running, with its cute 120GB WD Passport Drive, absolutely fine and you can see a picture here. I am very happy with this purchase.
I have decided to actually be a proper unix geek and learn how to use vi(m) efficiently. In general I use it on SilentFlame only because nano isn’t installed, but I realise that I am wasting keystrokes and vim is a good idea. I just need to work through vimtutor methodically and try to use the different methods presented where they are going to speed me up most. I need to get used to editing my site and other such things in SSH as it is a lot easier. Eventually I could of course set up Wikipedia to use vim for all editing, but this may be a bit far. Not sure at this stage – still trying to absorb.
Ringing and revision
I may have noted it before on here, but over the past few months I’m much more enthusiastic about ringing than I was. This does not mean that my skill has got better; I’m progressing just as slowly as I was before (but I am progressing). However, I’m no longer really concerned about causing damage (or so I tell myself) and look forward to the next session. I’ve realised that I’m way more interested in the theory, too, and have been doing some research. It’s fascinating how much maths is involved in it all, and apparently it all swings on group theory, for those of you that means something to. For those who do not, like me, the idea of ringing is to change the order in which the bells chime, because this produces some form of music as all the bells are tuned to a scale. They are way too heavy to just ring a tune as one hasn’t got enough control, so change ringing involves changing the order of the bells to a planned algorithm, or something the conductor is calling out (more on that later). Thus, once bell handling is mastered or something close to that, it becomes simply a matter of mental concentration, more towards the end of pure wit a lot of the time. Also, I have observed that there are many areas the hobby can be taken to: the maintenance of bells and ropes themselves, conducting a proper algorithmic method, composing a new method (frighteningly hard, apparently, and unlike most music almost no creativity ^_^) or learning a new manual skill such as handling two bells at once. I’m also branching into hand bells which involves swinging two small bells back and forth, obviously being 95% about mind rather than the required physical movements, which I’m keen on for that reason.
On myself, as I said before I’m interested in the theory and in the future putting this into practice with methods etc. I’m far less good at actually ringing the bells, and this is I suppose due to the fact that I’ve never put any real time in my life into physical activity, leaving me unfit. However, I’m confident that I can get over this. Apparently if I learn to ring more efficiently and well I can overcome my general arm weakness, which will mean I can concentrate on the execution of changes, which is where it will become a lot more fun, I hope. I’ve acquired a small ‘One-per-Learner’ book and progress chart that, while designed for those a few years younger than me, puts me around the middle of the book with a lot of good material to work forward into, which is great. I’m glad to have a copy of it.
My current stage of learning is following changes called out by another ringer, which is a bit false in terms of preparing for methods as in one of those you change every pull, but helps with handling, following another bell and of course changing positions. I’m also taking advantage of the fact that I’m learning in a cathedral: I can practice ringing on higher numbers of bells which requires slower ringing than in a typical village church which may only have six bells. I consider myself pretty privileged to be learning in this way as I’m learning things like this early on. For the record, I have rung on five, six, eight and ten bells. Throughout all this I remain supervised for safety, which is great for me as I don’t have to be concerned about that. However, last Sunday there were only eight of us there and so we did some rounds (straight round the room, no changes) on eight, and of course I therefore had to be unsupervised. I rung better than I often do so that was an accomplishment, seeing as though I was on my own and had mother and sister dearest watching.
As part of these call changes I tried yesterday to call (some would call it conducting, but it isn’t really) the bells around. Unfortunately it failed miserably and I had to get my teacher, Simon, to advise me on why we were further away from rounds than I thought. This was annoying to say it was my first go and that I had messed it up quite badly, but I hope to try again next week with a new strategy for keeping the order straight in my head. I’m also ringing on a Sunday now and this is generally a step behind what I do on practice night because it has to sound good. However, I did some call changes lately on a Sunday and so this shows I’m not doing badly with it. The big thing I can’t do with regard to this is lead, that is ring in first place, and so I aim to learn this soonish so that I can call people around in a more interesting way, and without worrying about not putting myself in the lead.
I’m revising hard in the final few days before my main block of exams now, and I’m not doing so well. I’m finding that a lot of the revision I have done so far hasn’t been as effective as I thought it would be, meaning that although I haven’t completely wasted my time I would have liked to use it a bit better than I did. I am now shoving fact-based stuff into my head hard because I’m stronger it seems with regard to skills. Hopefully, I can pull it off. With all the exams I have had so far I’m happy with the result. I was going for 100% in RE as I had to live up to someone getting that last year, and while I think I am pretty sure of getting A*, I don’t know if I managed that. English Literature was a lot easier than I expected, and ICT wasn’t that bad in the end, with some nice questions. I’m so glad I revised for it, though. This is another example of not doing my revision as well as I wanted because I spent too much time on RE, really.
Coming up: I took a trip to Cambridge this week with my grandfather for two nights and so I will be blogging about that shortly 
You’ve probably noticed you are being redirected to a temporary blog address. Apologies for this, I’m working on moving the blog to blog.seanwhitton.com so I can put general pages on the root seanwhitton.com, but Blogger is behaving badly and so it’s not working quite right yet.
Online identity
I’ve recently started to move away from using a pseudonym on ’serious’ sites and communities to using my real name. The main effect of this was my Wikimedia accounts needed changing, which I got done quickly enough. However, I am now experiencing the pain of having to move links over, and also getting non-MediaWiki usernames changed requires lots of running around and finding people who can get it done. I knew this would happen, but in general it is way easier to use your real name for things like this – if you consider that at some points in the project you are going to have to use your real name, it just simplifies things by allowing you to simply use one thing all the way through. I’m getting other usernames changed to swhitton or spwhitton, and intend to use these in the future, mainly.
I’ve also changed my main IRC nickname on all networks from xyr to seanw which has been even harder as it is more difficult to leave redirects etc. I’ve had to edit my cloak (leading to a few believing that I’d left fn staff, for a reason I cannot fathom as yet) and get privileges moved over from old stuff. As RichiH pointed out, a lot can happen in a year and so it’s better to change now (roughly one year in to Wikimedia and freenode) than later, and that it’ll all be forgotten about in a year (metaphorically speaking, of course).
As my exams roll up closer, I’m starting to be more and more concerned that I’m not doing enough to ensure that I get the grades I should be getting. For this reason I’ve marked myself as restricting myself to a few more important jobs with Wikimedia, and this should allow me more time. I’ve realised that I need to be careful to avoid whittling away time on things such as messing around with this blog’s name and design (ahem) and that I need to manage my time better to ensure that I get everything done. Now, this may seem strange coming from me because as far as homework and coursework is concerned I always (i.e. 99.9% of the time) get it in, but revision is often forced to the bottom of the pile. This is why I need to be more careful with how I lay my time out. Unfortunately, activities like general chatter on IRC are likely to decrease, but I intend to get more actual freenode staffing done by simply remembering to go ‘on duty’ more often.
With all this name changing I realised that xyrael.net wasn’t really an appropriate domain anymore, and so I’ve changed over to using seanwhitton.com for my main blog, and as you can probably see a new design has been introduced, which I’m now pretty happy with but may tweak a bit. And yes, I didn’t do it – it was a Blogger template. I’ve created a space for static pages, because I do still want some form of a website. That’s hosted over on SilentFlame whilst this is on Blogger’s servers. I think I’m pretty happy with my setup now, once I get those static pages working and somewhat organised (and transferred over at least partially from the old xyrael.net, which aside from the front page is still fully operational).
I’m also trying to move more towards intelligent discussion on here, and as I’ve recently got a new way of keeping up with the news I think this is going to be easier. I need to stop talking about this blog and actually do some of the stuff I have planned! In life in general, I’m trying to balance my arguments and opinions well and argue them fairly. This is of course something that the debating society helps with (particularly Debating X-treme, a special club for a more formal style held after school). I’m fond of well-written persuasive, balanced writing, the kind found in commentary sections of newspapers. I hope that I can improve my skill in this, which will help with the kind of things I want to do in life. It’ll also help with my contributions to Wikimedia Planet, which picks up posts that I tag with ‘wiki’. Look forward to a selection of things I intend to write about in the near future (I have a list of titles at the ready).