Tuesday, April 24, 2007

The End is Nigh


Well, we just had our "Tree Planting" ceremony on Friday and it was loads of fun. Our grade are now unofficially Choueifati Alumni. We wore suits, dresses and robes and celebrated till the early hours of Saturday morning. Then we realised that we had three periodic exams on Sunday that we didn't get time to study for. (As you may have noticed, I've been really busy planning for the Tree Planting. So busy that I haven't been able to post on my beloved blog for an entire two weeks :p)

Choueifat doesn't care what the students are doing. Exams will always stick. If the student is sick, he or she takes a much more difficult substitute test on the weekend. Even for our last ever weeklies (Chemistry, Java and Biology), they were too stubborn to even smile at the fact that they would never see our grade in the exam hall for a weekly periodic exam again.

Nice way to say goodbye, don't you think?

Monday, April 09, 2007

The SABIS Regional Tournament



So I just got back from the SABIS Regional Tournament in Amman, Jordan. It was loads of fun in general for our team and school, and I 'm sure everyone else involved could say the same. I got the rare oppurtunity to meet Victor Saad, the vice president of the SABIS network and to meet hundreds of other students from other schools. All in all, an amazing experience and probably my most memorable time at Choueifat.

Too bad it's all just a facade. The only real reason I can see Choueifat doing all this is to impress others and convince them that Choueifat is a school that actually cares about sports and the health of their students. In reality, we've had to ask and push the school administration time and time again to allow us time to train. Instead of supporting us, they just act as a barrier we have to pass through. All this because Choueifat views sport and physical activity as a deterrent to the learning process.

The tournament itself was great, but only something like 600/29000 students attended. That's about 2%. SABIS is publicising 2% of their students. They're putting 2% of their fittest students on show just to advertise the school. It's not a majority, nor is it anywhere near an accurate representation of what Choueifatis are really like. It's just blatantly false advertising.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

The Books. (Part 2)


Out of all subjects, Choueifat prides itself most in its Physics course. By the end of the twelfth grade, an average 12S (sciences section) student would have finished the better part of a two or three year university course in general Physics. Also, for some odd reason, Physics is compulsory for the sciences section students while Biology and Chemistry are not. It's almost as if they want us all to grow up to become little Physicists and Mathematicians!

But that's not the issue I'm going to address today. This morning, while we were revising Physics (or trying to), we realised that we were flipping through eight different books. EIGHT different books. "University Physics 11E", "Physics Level N Core Questions", "Physics Level N Course Extra Practice Questions", "Physics Level N Electricity and Relativity", "Physics Level N Mechanics M2", "Physics Level N Kinematics and Waves", "Physics Level O Core Course" and "Physics Course Level N/O Basic Questions". Usually I wouldn't mind so much, but the thing is that EVERYTHING in the last five books was already in the first textbook.

Why do we buy so many books then? The only reasonable explanation I can logically deduce is that Choueifat wants revenue. They want to profit as much as possible. At times, they seem to be more like a firm than a school. I understand that it's a private school, but shouldn't the students' educations still be their primary concern?