Term 2 english book review (It dint appear the last time!! aaah!)

ok this is very screwy. very early this month i thought i had posted this post. it hung at the "publish succeeded!" page so i thought that it had already been posted. but when i checked back today (yes my blog is dead.. i know) i realised that it WASN"T THERE! aaaah of all the posts it had to be my blog assignment!!

Term 2 English Blog Assignment

Article 3, Education
Title: Students of top schools worry more about elitism
Date: Friday, 18th May 2007

According to a survey conducted by the Straits Times, students in top schools are taking the topic of elitism more seriously than those in neighbourhood schools. The most common concept of elitist behaviour is to look down on academic weaklings.

As a student in a top school with friends in neighbourhood schools, I feel that being in a top school breeds a certain level of competition within students. The main reason that elitism is more of a worry in top schools is that students in top schools are more concerned about results than those in neighbourhood schools. Being more competitive, students in top schools tend to compare their results with each other, resulting in the weaker students being picked on, whereas such a problem is less seen in neighbourhood schools. Elitism is a very serious issue that must be addressed quickly, especially if students with a mindset that they are better than others take it with them into the working world. We have to realize that results are not everything, and that many other things are taken into account to determine what makes a person.

Article 4, Social
Title: The ayes of the beholder
Date: Sunday, 3rd June 2007

Often, we tend to judge other people based on appearances and first impressions. We judge people by the way they look, speak, smell, talk and walk. We jump to conclusions about people based on the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the degrees they have, the company they keep, the colour of their skin, the size of their girth.
In fact, according to a study conducted by Princeton University in the United States last year, people decide whether another person is trustworthy within a tenth of a second just by looking at his or her face. It’s really not a very nice thing to do, judging especially when you don’t know the facts.


This article has made me reflect and think about how often I have made and still make this mistake. Very often when meeting new people I tend to decide whether or not to like them just by looking at them. I remember a time when I had a teacher who looked very fierce, and from the way I saw her scolding other boys I had already written her down as scary. However as time passed, I began to discover the nicer side to her and my perception changed for the better. So when I meet secondary one students who are now taken by this teacher, I tell them not to fear her, as well as to recount incidents that showed what a nice person she could be. Often they do not really believe me but I trust that after spending enough time being taught by her they too will also see.

However, I too, have been judged by others based on my appearance. Due to my utter laziness, I tend to leave my haircuts till the very last moment, where I would already have received warnings from prefects. As such, my hair would sometimes grow unkempt and long, occasionally even past my eye. Also due to my laziness, I dress myself by just picking the clothes on the top of the pile in my closet, and as such my dress code is almost always to wear black. All this coupled with the fact that my teeth arrangement have somewhat affected my jaw, giving me a perpetually pissed of look, make the word “emo” pop up in the minds of strangers whom I meet. In this case, emo would refer to emotional, like those punks who wear makeup, think too much about how their lives are miserable and keep on contemplating suicide. Well for those who know me better, I am not really like that. I also give off this vibe of a quiet, shy boy, but to those who know me better I can be quite talkative and wacky.

I have been trying to correct this nasty habit of mine but so far it has not been a very successful venture. At least once a day, I find myself passing an uninformed and uncharitable opinion about someone I do not know. If I haven’t walked in her shoes, lived his life, seen what they have seen so what gives me the right to be the supreme arbiter of what’s right or wrong, good or bad? It’s not an easy problem to fix. From now on I will try to bite my tongue each time I want to say something nasty.