Piano exam coming up

Piano lessons have been ongoing from the beginning. The exam will be in mid-to-late November (though I haven't received notice of the exact date or venue yet) which means only a few weeks are left to prepare. The timetable my teacher and I are going by is rather tight, and I'm currently not sure whether I'll be able to perform well for the exam. I took the same exam, with the same pieces, some one and a half years previous, in May 2009, and failed by a few marks to pass. I worry that I may once again fail to pass, as I don't feel I've put enough time and effort into preparing and will be left still hanging by my climbing rope by the time November rolls around, rather than safely at the top of the mountain. Either way, the coming weeks will no doubt have to be full of piano practice among other things if I want to achieve a good result in the coming exams.

Oh yes, the pieces I'm playing are four in number. J.S.Bach's Toccata and Fugue in E minor, Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 5 in C Minor Opus 10 No. 1, Debussy's Sarabande No. 2 in C# Minor from his _Pour le Piano_, and Chopin's Waltz in E flat Major Opus 18. These total a 30-something minute-long recital.

I should actually elaborate more on my exam, shouldn't I? The exam I'm taking is the ATCL Performance exam by Trinity Guildhall. It's ostensibly, according to the website, equal to one year of university study. "ATCL" stands for something like Associateship of Trinity College London. Does that mean that, if I make this exam, I'll become part of some sort of Associateship? Probably not, but, heh, it's a pretty cool name. Beyond ATCL is LTCL (Licentiateship) and then FTCL (Fellowship). The "Performance" part simply means that the diploma is for piano _performance_ as opposed to something like teaching (which is yet another diploma). I'm also taking the Recital format, which means that I just go in, hand over my programme notes (which is basically a short essay analysing the pieces to show I understand them) play, and go out.

So. (Gets back to practicing)

Update. IB week 6

Debating, 27th Sep

So. Unfortunately, I missed debating last week (20th) due to some timetable clash with a piano lesson. This Monday, though, we had another impromptu debate with the motion, "This House believes that it is irresponsible for women over the age of 50 to have children." Our team won by 8 points. One of the people at the debating club has an amusing tendency to argue, unintendedly, for the other side when he delivers his speech. On the other hand, I've finally had the wonderful opportunity to watch/listen to Tiffany Chung debate. After Paul Lau, Prakash Sanker, and Nicky Gordon left, she is, without a doubt, the most skillful debater we have. My own speech was... alright, I suppose. I'm coming to find the fast pace of thinking required for debating rather daunting on my meager mental capacity. I do hope, of course, that I adapt to it.

In the impromptu on the first day of the activity, I was Third Speaker for our team, the person who analyses all the points made throughout the debate before the Captain summarises. This Monday was the first time I spoke as Second Speaker. The role of a Second Speaker is drastically different from that of the Third Speaker, as the Second Speaker is expected to make new points while the Third Speaker should not. I find that it is much harder to present my own argument than it is to simply take down or back up arguments others have put out.

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Untitled Post

The student magazine project Victor, Emmanuel, Audrey, and I have been working on has now been tentatively titled the "Untitled Post", pending name change after the survey results come in. Meeting once a week, we've created a form for writer's to apply to write for the magazine, but our attempt at doing a survey during tutor period failed before it even started. We'd thought that House Assemblies had all been finished last week, so we emailed form tutors on Monday asking them to help us with the survey during pastoral on Tuesday. Guess what? Yeah. We got replies telling us that there were House Assemblies. And so, we intend to conduct our survey NEXT Tuesday instead.

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English Tutoring

I assisted at my second Year 11 extra English session today. Today. the students were doing corrections on the past-paper they had done in class previously. I just went around and helped out where I could. Ms Egan is starting to get worried that some of the students aren't taking these extra lessons seriously, since the actually _actual_, _real_ GCSE Eng Lit exam is coming up in November for them. It does seem to me, too, that some of the boys don't exactly want to be there and aren't ashamed of showing it. Well, what can one do about that?

First meetings: Part 5

First training session for student librarian duties, today at lunch. Awesome. Learned how to loan and return books and how to charge for overdue books. It's more complicated than I'd thought.

Feels so cool to be on the other side of the counter.

Another training session next week, and then it'll be time for the real duties. ::excitement::

First House Assembly

First house assembly yesterday. How as it? Not bad. :)

I presented the section about our new House website, and about the Facebook page and Twitter.

We had music playing, and handed out candy to everyone as they came in... (an idea we stole from our predecessors!)

We actually had a piano performance lined up, too, but there were difficulties actually _getting_ a piano, since we were in the sports hall. 

It's really quite a feeling to be standing on the other side of the microphone and actually _delivering_ an assembly.

All in all, it went smoothly, but I was told that I spoke to softly - in my defense, I couldn't really tell what my voice sounded like because the microphone made everything echo from my perspective...

Next House Assembly is in February.

ESF Swimming Gala

It has been two weeks since the Swimming Team training sessions began. I have found that after I stopped training with my swimming team outside school, I have seriously lost endurance. Yet, during Interhouse Swimming heats last Thursday, I attained personal best times in both 50m freestyle (26.73s) and 50m butterfly (30.44), with an A-grade (age 16-19) school record in the freestyle over the previous mark of 26.89 set about 20 years ago, which was a _very_ pleasant surprise.

Today, I swam in the ESF Swimming Gala, where I improved my 50m butterfly time again to 30.26 seconds. Although compared to the swimmers i raced against today, I am still about half a second slower, it is a fantastic achievement for me personally to have been able to lower my time from 32 last year to 30 this year. My aim now is to increase the volume of training I do at school in order to improve my endurance and break the 30-second barrier at HKSSF swimming next month; that should allow me to get an ok place at the Finals of that event, according to the past results.

First meetings: Part 4

My English teacher last year, Ms. Hartcher, offered to let me be an assistant teacher this year in some English classes. Unfortunately, it turned out to be infeasible, so she redirected me to Ms. Egan.

I helped out in Ms. Egan's English class for the first time last Wednesday, period 3, originally one of my free study periods. It's an "extra English" class for year 11 students who are struggling with their GCSE English. Though I didn't find the 2-hour session particularly productive, especially since the main point that Ms. Egan put a lot of emphasis on was trying to get the students to 'answer the question' rather than going off and writing irrelevant things in their answer, after checking the work of a few of them, I realized that Ms. Egan's seemingly excessive emphasis of that point really was very appropriate, since the issue with the few essays I checked was exactly that: they weren't addressing the question.

I hope that in the coming weeks, I can work with Ms. Egan to supplement these year 11 students' usual English classes and drastically raise their level of ability in English. Since the current year 11s will be taking their Literature exams in November rather than the usual may, it is particularly important for them to improve their English in the coming weeks.

Debating. Week 2

Second session of Debating club. Motion: This House believes that rescue servicemen/women should have the power to strike. I'm opposition. We did some planning and discussion, and Tiffany Chung, as an experienced debater, imparted some cool debating knowledge to us. No, we need to do some research. The debate will be next week. I'm the first speaker.

I suppose I'm looking forward to the debate next week, seeing as how we'll be much more prepared and thus can have a more... quality debate.

First meetings: Part 3

I gave Adrian Ma his first tutoring lesson this afternoon. We went over the entire first unit (out of 14, if I remember correctly).

The pace of progress was a little slower than I expected for the first unit, to be honest, but I hope that we will be able to cover 1 unit every lesson on average. With hard work, frequent revision, and doing many past papers, I'm sure Adrian can raise his Economics grade from a D to an A*.

I also helped out at my first Inter-House event yesterday. It was Year 10 dodgeball. I think I expected it to be a little more fun than it turned out to be; seems there isn't really much for a volunteer to do in House events! It was still a rather interesting experience to see the House dynamics between the year 10s and how House spirit is distributed in their year group in comparison to ours.

And on Monday, I also went to my first Debating club meeting; I forgot to post this earlier. Debating started off average, but it was okay-interesting. What I found most surprising was that I was the only member above year 10 even though t club is open to all year 9 and above. We started off immediately with an impromptu debate. The motion was that "This House believes that Facebook is a hazard to personal security." Our team won. One of the more experienced debaters from year 10, Madhav, complimented me on my debating skill, saying he would talk to Mr. Evershed, the teacher who manages Debating at SIS, about letting me compete in tournaments. I was quite pleased about that. I hope Mr. Evershed really does let me do some tournaments.

First meetings: Part 2 - Piggybank

Today was a great day. Victor, Audrey, Emmanuel and I met Mrs. Curran after school to discuss the School Magazine. This project is the third incarnation of the Piggybank, first started two years ago as a print magazine to channel the student voice.

Our new project was inspired by the Piggybank student magazine. Now, however, the new Student Council "Student Voice" forums have provided a new medium for student voice, so our magazine will have a completely different aim. Also, past attempts ran into cost difficulties, so we aim to take advantage of the student Laptop program to take the Piggybank online for a broader readership.

Our first meeting addressed the issue of genre and timetable. We decided that we would enlist the help of tutors to collect data by way of surveys in order to determine what sort of content to publish. We also set a vague timetable.

This project excites me. I have always been surprised that SIS, a school that has existed for 30+ years, does not have a student newspaper. It is my hope that this new project, currently nameless, will take that role down the future of SIS.