Or as it is correctly pronounced, Maths, was today’s GCSE of choice. 2 hours long and calculator-allowed, we navigated the stormy waters of quadratics, climbed the towering heights of function graphs and almost fell into the quicksand of compound interest. It wasn’t until the last 5 minutes that I realised I had described a bank with a 104.5% annual rate, pretty generous for a savings account. Luckily, it was corrected in time. Tomorrow’s exam is Science (or “The Bits We Didn’t Fit Into Part 1!”) and then there’s another break until the final GCSE of the lot – History – on Tuesday. It’s my birthday in the meantime as well. Yay!
Talking of school, here’s an anatomy of a letter I found when I got back.
Ooooh – good? bad? Am I expelled, or have I been selected for the football team? Go on…!
Oh OK, it can’t be that bad then.
Bloody hell, how geeky. Still – must be worth something though? An iPod perhaps?
Righty ho, that’s great, but I could get more than that by phoning into CBBC…
Oh, you tease. Significant eh? Well, surely the prize will be quite large then, since it only has to be given to one person! All right!
A book token? Yeah, it’s, um, what I’ve always wanted….
I’m joking really, I’m sure it’ll look sexy in a CV, but still – nobody claims the taxpayer is bribing young people over here!
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m writing a column on exams, given that I’ve only got a few more GCSE papers to sit before awaiting the results in August, but some outcomes are already guaranteed.
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My wonderful hosts enabled FreeType support this morning, and as a result a Captcha has been implemented with the comment form. It’s simple enough – simply copy the characters displayed in the image to get your comment submitted. And if you mistake, never fear, your comment is not lost and you can just try again.
This should bring an end to my anti-spam woes, and consequently instant commenting has been re-enabled on all posts from the last 7 days. Older ones still need pre-moderation, for now, while I assess how it’s all working.
Thanks for bearing with me as the spammers descended. Message to the vultures – it’s over, go home. And no, you don’t get your ball back.
I’m having trouble thinking about anything other than Doctor Who tonight… how on earth am I going to get through next week’s exams waiting for the conclusion now? Damn you Russell T. Davies!
The reality stuff was great, defying some expectations, and the scene where Rose was shot was brilliant – because you really didn’t see that coming. It’s TV, the heroes always dodge the fatal blasts at the last minute… but not here.
And now – the most important thing – theories. I know when a lot of people heard the voice on the ‘Next Time’ trailer they assumed Davros or the Emperor Dalek was back. However, to me, the Adam theory seems very neat. He hates the Doctor for abandoning him on Earth, he’s got advanced technology, knowledge of history – GG might be right – he might even be Davros!
That’d be perfect for me too – since the character in my English exam was called Adam and part of the Kaled clan. Enough for extra marks? 
Red Dalek says – EXTERMINATE!
English Paper 2 today. Section A was a bog standard piece of poetry comparison that, you know, I just did without too much thought. And then in Section B I made a choice – I could have done some incredibly easy letter about improvements to our school or something equally done, but I decided to do the much more fun “Describe a nightmare world.”
So then I spent 45 minutes having fun just doing some creative writing, following my well worn formula of writing a narrative featuring a character walking down a street (this time he gets to shoot someone, but she’s bleeding to death anyway, so what the hell) and then arrive at a camp to have a confrontation with a “chavvie” before being gassed by the metallic Wardens. Oh, it was cool. Although I can’t seem to stop putting in Doctor Who references – this time the ‘Kaled clan’.
I did wonder about making my ‘nightmare world’ a Tory party conference or something, but sci-fi seemed the way to go.
I also managed today to wrench PC2 off the horrible, resource-hogging and damn UGLY Norton onto the standardised McAfee that every other PC uses. And then I got terribly bored and re-branded it. How weird. (The file is oemlogo.gif if anyone cares enough.)
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
