Making Mr Love Proud: Chasing A* (23-24)

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Oxbridge/Med UCAS internal deadline coming up next week. I've finished UCAS, it just needs to be reviewed and approved by the teachers. Most people haven't even started their personal statement yet, so I've been drafted in to help people. At least they have until December.

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Apparently the timetables are changing AGAIN next week. Can you really not just fix it all at once and then leave it the hell alone 😭

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TMUA prep is going pretty well. At the moment I'm mostly working on just doing the questions (it being non-calculator actually makes it way harder than I thought it would, and I don't even use my calculator that much) and starting to add a bit of time pressure.

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People who failed their end of years last year are resitting them. It's nice to see a bit of karma going around, since the people resitting are the exact same people who disrupt lessons and wasted everyone's time last year. Turns out making fun of me for revising wasn't the way to pass your exams. The guy who tried to cheat off me for all of last year (and still tries now) is one of the people who failed AS Physics. This makes me this year's only remaining Oxbridge applicant.

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Downside of this is that they're making all of chemistry resit. Only one person actually failed (well, two, but one dropped chem), but since we're such a small class (4 students) they're like wElL wE cAn'T SiNgLe PeOpLe oUt even though literally everyone knows who the person who failed is. Everyone knows who failed in the larger classes too, and they're not making those entire classes resit. So I get to do a resit mock next week with a whole 1.5 weeks of notice. Yay. At least it's only one paper. We chose AS Depth.

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I succumbed to the touch screen and bought myself a tablet. It's a Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+, which I got on offer for £850 with 5G and the keyboard case (usually £150) included for free. I've managed to buy all the supplies (tablet, insurance, case, screen protector, etc) for less than the normal price of just the tablet (would normally be £1500 with the keyboard, I got everything for less than 1k). It's arriving on Sunday and I'm looking forward to being able to do practice questions without decimating the entire Amazon Rainforest.

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Theory test attempt 2 today. Wish me luck at 13:00, hopefully I don't fail by one mark again. Ego still mildly wounded from that.

Tag List:
@hyacinth77

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Good news first: my tablet came and I absolutely LOVE it. It's so convenient for studying - I no longer have to carry around 3 giant thick ringbinders of past papers in 2 extra bags whenever I plan to revise, I can just bring this thing instead. I can split screen mark schemes when marking. I can combine doing past papers with other digital revision methods. I can switch between subjects on a whim when my brain decides it wants to do something else now. My productivity has increased by 200%. I am a studying machine thanks to this tablet. I'll also be taking it to uni with me when that time comes. Also the pre-installed colouring app called PENUP is super relaxing.

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Bit more good news: It's student interview panel season! I actually really like doing these, and it's also a super interesting insight into job interviews for me, as although the questions are obviously a bit different it's still really interesting and educational to see how people approach different things in an interview setting. We're interviewing candidates for the KS5 SSO position as our previous one quit at the end of last year and has left the education sector, and we actually have some very promising candidates. Although I've done loads of interview panels before, this is actually my first time interviewing applicants for a non-teaching position.

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Did I mention I've been asked by the school (read: conscripted) to do the British Physics Olympiad? Because that's a thing I'm doing now. Pray for me everyone. 10 November.

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Now the bad news. Remember how all of chemistry had to resit the mock because of one person failing and their rich parents kicking up a giant fuss about it? Yeah so that happened today. The person who failed and had their parents force the school to make us all to resit this test didn't even fucking turn up. Literally the peak of entitled brat. They also gave us THE WRONG GODDAMN PAPER. Which meant half of our revision was totally wasted, because we've been revising for a depth paper this whole time and got handed a breadth paper. Even the deputy exams officer was absolutely livid when she found out we're all resitting because of one person (especially since they also didn't tell her that we were all resitting, so I nearly wasn't able to do the exam as the time slot we were given couldn't accommodate my extra time), she nearly refused to administer the exam and we only sat it because the principal overruled her. It basically looks like nobody told anyone all of chemistry was resitting because they knew it would make a lot of people very mad. And it did.

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Just the sheer amount of time that I have wasted revising for this absolutely POINTLESS resit (I GOT AN A* HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO IMPROVE) that could've been better spent on TMUA or BPhO prep is staggering. I'm now a week and a half behind in TMUA prep purely because someone's rich bastard parents decided their kid can do no wrong and can certainly never fail a subject they do 0 work for, so clearly everyone in that subject should be punished for their kid's failure. And then the kid doesn't even turn up for the resit that they caused. The amount of self-control it's required to not punch this girl in the face whenever I see her is beyond description. This is absolutely ridiculous.

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If anything good has come from this, it's that this girl has now VERY publicly blown her cover of being an innocent little weakling sickly child who can do no wrong. She turned all of my chemistry class against me using stuff she made up that never happened, but I do think a couple of tables turned today. People have spent the last year not believing me when I tell them that I was manipulated, bullied and threatened by this person because she's just so incapable and innocent and could never do something like that. It's my turn to have the upper hand now that people have seen it for themselves. Isn't karma just brilliant? Her chances of going into medicine are now also close to 0, thank god for that.