This may not be goodbye, but farewell. Adieu SPM !
Not that word, you dirty little minded human being.
No, not that too. God.
It starts with K. And ends with a T.
KBAT.
*time to move to Timbuktu to sell scarves and hats to cattle herders.
At the time of writing, the SPM candidates has managed to survive one full week which I will gladly applaud them for. It just leaves them with the rest of the month to go before getting their freedom. Hundreds of hours and thousands of minutes of studying when it is probably already too late. *chuckles evilly. Sorry but I can't help myself. From my point of view, it hasn't been smooth sailing for the 2015 candidates. Just go on Twitter and type #spm2015 . Downright hilarious. From the mention of Ferdinand Magellan to predicting the goddamn future by looking at 4 pictures, the entertainment is never short in supply.
Yet funnily enough, it has all happened before to me. You might even call it a dejavu moment. Brings me back to about the same date, last year. The year of 2014. Where Germany was crowned world champions, MH370 became a global sensation, Ebola became the biggest health fear and of course who can forget, THAT music video by Nicki Minaj about a certain snake species.
Back when I was a young kid of 17 years and taking the SPM examination wasn't a done thing just yet, those were good times. But I'll be real here for a second. I absolutely wasted 8 months of 2014. Not wasted, in terms of not doing anything . Far from it. I did quite a lot in the lead up to SPM. I went to Famine 30 for the very first time which is quite an achievement, paying RM100 to go hungry for 30 hours - for charity of course. Went to Penang with my classmates which was very well-spent. I even got to cross out visiting China off my bucket list as I went to Zhangjiajie for a week or so. And all of that lies the problem.
I was doing everything BUT studying. So yeah. Not really the attitude you want heading into SPM. And it really did show in my SPM trials result. Got a C+ for Biology and pretty much crashed and burned in most of my weak subjects.
You would think it would have been a wake up call, wouldn't you? And it was. Sort of. I started to decrease the amount of movies I was watching in cinemas and soon it stopped altogether. Put off a number of futsal matches that I was invited to join. Kept repeating to myself it was a sacrifice I had to make. Yet, I didn't stop skipping certain classes to play basketball with the ever enthusiastic Soon Fatt in our humble little school basketball court. The biggest change was definitely my approach to Biology. The poor result drove me insane with guilt. I started doing anything I can to improve my below par knowledge of the subject of Biology. I was making notes, doing exercises, reading Biology on my free time and simply making Biology my closest friend in the final weeks.
I am a really bad person to be a role model of for exams. Every teacher I've met always gave that overused speech about never ever ever ever ever ever study for SPM at the last minute.
So I studied 3 weeks before the big day.
A rebel, I am.
It really wasn't the best idea ever. I'll rank it between the invention of the Nintendo Virtual Boy and the invention of spam e-mails. The problem with SPM is the amount of subjects you are expected to take. Nine to ten subjects, in fact. Creates more problems than it solves. It creates a workload like no other which will contribute to stress that is most definitely unhealthy to the cerebellum. Studying was a real fucking pain in the ass too as deciding on what to study first was a monumental challenge. I was up to my neck with stuff I really couldn't care less but stuff that was so immensely important that the mere mention of failure would mean an absolute destruction of the life I had ahead. That's basically the SPM examination condensed in a single beautifully stringed-up sentence.
At the end, the day arrived before I could even count to infinity. The first day. Bahasa Melayu. Fucking hell, I thought to myself. Never really liked the subject at all and it being so tough to score made it even worse. I was up all night in the night before to get as much information into my skull before the big day. Alas, it was only up to 1 am.
Let that be an advice to all. Never stay up to late. Or you're fucked before you even started.
Obviously, I was a bag of nerves heading to the first paper, struggling to remember every peribahasa I could before heading to my seat right next to the door. It came, it went and I was done with the first day.
And then SPM ended. Just like that.
The first day is the hardest. Once you finished the first one, it slowly becomes a routine and soon it passes by quite harmlessly. Maybe harmlessly isn't the best word to describe it. But, rest assured, the hardest part of SPM is the anticipation and the build-up to it. The fear of failure creeping in and the pressure on your shoulders starting to mount up is all over in a matter of an hour or so of exams.
What if you screwed up your exams then ? Well, the feeling of being screwed up is absolutely devastating. To me at least. It isn't something that goes away with a few bottles of beer and a knife on your hand. It takes time . Unfortunately, in this month-long examination, time is something you don't have the luxury of having. I screwed up my Accounts exam really badly and I had like a week or so of exams to go. I'll be honest, I was furious and sad at the same time. Cursing the Education Ministry, myself and of course blaming Einstein for not building a time machine when he was alive. No one is safe.
But then, I actually did something about it. What did I do, I hear you cry.
Well, I stopped being so GODDAMN SORRY for myself. I had to redeem myself in some type of way for the remaining tests in SPM. There was the goddamn Biology papers to go and I'll be damned if I let myself be discouraged by an elective subject that I didn't really want to take at the first place. A dumb elective subject to be more exact.
I dug down deep in my reserves and worked doubly hard. Or maybe it was the same level of work I put in . Who knows? And guess what? I didn't do too well in Physics and barely scraped the Biology paper. Yet, I still had a good feeling about it because I went in thinking I could really do it.
Soon, it was over and I found myself in the month of December. 2014 was ending and I had spent most of it studying for an exam that I spent nearly 2 years striving towards. The feeling of ending those hardships was definitely short-lived as I soon found out but I was absolutely buzzing. I never took drugs ever but I guessed that was the closest I've ever been to being high.
A huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. All those SPM reference books and notes I've made in the past 2 years or so was confined to the nearest recycling bin as a huge chapter of my life closed on me. I was finally free from the constraints of life. For the moment at least. It was bittersweet of course. I didn't want to leave my fellow friends behind whom I made plenty of lasting memories with but the 5 years of hardship was finally ending.
My SPM results? Well, life move in strange ways. That Accounts paper that got me all suicidal (sort of ) ? I got an A+ . Biology? A +. How? I really don't fucking know. I didn't balance my balance sheet , barely understood the experiments in Biology and so much more.
Maybe there is a god. Or maybe I god lucky. Ohhh !
That was a pun. Not a typo. I demand laughter.
Oh well....
And then college happened. Oh yeah. That actually happened.
But to my fellow juniors out there tackling this big bad examination, I bid you good luck and adieu as I've reach the end of this post. May you pick the the right multiple choice answer instead of the wrong one.
And yeah, relax. It's not the end of the world. Not yet.
Quote of the day :
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.''
Winston Churchill - Prime Minister of The United Kingdom ( 1940-45, 1951-55 )
Comments
Post a Comment