LEO FINAL BLOG

Hello Blogger and good morning to this wonderfully jocular day! Today is the assignment of our final blog! Hooray! Today, after a beautifully swift round of Contexto (this is a lie), we were told to begin doing our final blog, also known as the blog of the year, also known as try not to forget anything you did blog, also known as try not to remember that one embarrassing thing in your head you did two months ago blog!

Moving on from that humorous introduction (I hope it was), and now that I probably caught your attention, let's move onto the most serious of all serious questions: have we learnt something? Now, multiple choice question, is the answer A? We didn't. B? Had we? Or is the answer C? We did ... but proceeded to forget. If you answered C, that is wrong! The answer is D, that we did! Yay! Fireworks! Fireworks! Celebrations!

So, going over everything that's happened so far, we've done plethora of activities this year from beginning to start, but before that, I want to share a little bit about the genesis of my coming! I was a little boy in the middle of nowhere ... in China, and then suddenly I was like, "I don't want to live in this wretched, lonely, barren place anymore!" (I wasn't, I was very much wanting to, I just want to make it more interesting.) and then I was enrolled into Fountain International School and brought to another wretched place, just make it 10 times hotter (I'm thankful, honestly, because there's no cold season, but still!). Then, as far as I can remember, I was nervous, scared, fearing for my life, but then this divine angel of AEP comes forth as I lay all my burdens to rest!

During the first term, if I can actually remember it well, I began still living in the edge of China, begging my parents that I can go face to face. It was an awful beginning for me, having to constantly go online and pitifully bawl my eyes out at the sight of not being able to go and meet my classmates. It was a pretty grouse-y time, a time full of whiplashes of the word "face-to-face" shredding the back of my brain and slowly moving forward and forward until the brain is completely shredded, flying in the wind. Maybe I never had one in the first place, but sans the weird crying and yelling, I'm glad that I got the chance to go online. Having to do AEP online, it was just listening to the lessons seated upon my bed, listening to everything and everyone do things without me, as I sit in solitude wondering if I was forgotten in the classroom, just staring at the screen until someone calls out my name. (Apparently Chloe had just told me I was). One thing I missed while I was still online was the rain during scrabble days, since the terms after that was all barren of humidity and rainfall, which makes me think that whoever the god of weather is hates me. It would be great to hear the pitter patter of the little raindrops and smell the petrichor while playing scrabble ... and also not be seated with a partner who probably didn't like doing the job either (sorry Sayum!). As for the main lessons, the tenses were pretty simple to learn. I can still recall most of what I had learnt because it got embedded in my head after doing a few assignments, such as present continuous (I'm going to do ...) or future perfect (I will have to do ...). So, that's a good thing. I think the project was pretty good as well, as being assigned the director of the project had allowed me to connect with my classmates.

During the second term, I spent half of it in utter boredom, watching empty vestigial atoms of air float around my empty room since most of my personal functions are gone, moved to a new country, while I haven't been yet shipped to the pearly gates of the Philippines. I just sat there, staring at a tiny, yet blaring screen that hurt my eyes every 20 seconds of just staring ... menacingly. Then, ever-so magically, I just teleport! The day after, I'm seated in class, doing assignments along with the rest of the class! For the first half of doing absolutely nothing in my room without anything but the chipping blue-painted walls and laying on a dreary plain-white mattress that sat on a wooden frame, we did passives (The work was being finished, the place was being cleaned, etc.). Passives were lessons I had had in the past so I was well acquainted with it, but however, I did learn a bit more than just plain old passive, which included different tenses in the active with replacements of passives, and those were a tad bit more challenging, but I liked it nonetheless. I just wished I hadn't been behind the screen all the time like a prisoner in a jail cell. The second half of me actually being there were for causatives (I had him run, He helped me finish, etc.). Those were okay, though I think I had learnt about confusing the teacher with grammar (Sorry Ms. Disa!). But, all jokes aside, I had learnt some new grammatical techniques which I had definitely learned to use in real life day-to-day languages. As for the project, a poem! Yay! I did say I was experienced in it, but never said I was an expert...! (I say I am, but we move on.)

During the third term, which is currently ending, it was packed with some of the better lessons and activities that we have done. Most prominently, we did the 14-day challenge! Hooray! Woo! Celebrations! Applause! But what was the 14-day challenge? Well, the 14-day challenge was just a challenge for 14 days. It was an extraordinary turning point, a change in everyone's lives, that one speck of happiness earned to fulfill your lives! As challenging as it sounds, it was challenging. The main goal given was to break out old, bad habits to make anew. It was a whole list of questions we had to answer for a fortnight, which involved some things such as an act of pure kindness, a change in a deathly diet, or, most importantly, had you finished what you tasked yourself to do in the morning? It was a fun time to count and recall what you've done during the day, and I enjoyed it. Maybe having it while the camping trip happened isn't so bad in retrospect, since I got to answer it in my head before I slept. But anyway, as for the lessons, there were many. For example, we had done conditionals (if, when, whenever ...) and a lesson for when your rent is due (before, by, until ...) and then our project, which is about finding that one tiny little mishap in everyone's daily speech and using it to create a detailed description like those children who correct anyone who mistaken "your" and "you're" every-so often on the internet. I did a poem, since I did say I was experienced! But sadly, I did go a little bit overboard with the editing and lost the premise of the project.

Recalling about some of the activities we did, which weren't lesson-specific but it was part of AEP, there was oral activities in which we go on DOGO News and read out a short, yet super shocking, headline that Ms. Disa personally chooses out for us! In the end, it's usually a short trivia like jeopardy where the one who gets the answer right will get a trillion dollars! Yes, you heard that! Right on the spot. So during the final parts of the oral lesson, we just have a short discussion of facts where each of us brings out an non-aforementioned fact, and if they don't that means they didn't listen and that means we get to read another news article, woo! But we usually just read until our heart's content. Another thing we had often was the games. My personal favorite is word bomb because I naturally type fast, so I just snatch wins every game! It's fun to play because of the adrenaline rush you get as the bomb comes towards you then threatens you by merely just ticking and ticking and ticking and ticking and BOOM! you're gone. I use that adrenaline to pour my heart out into supercalifragilisticexpialidocious but it always goes into vain because only now I realize word bomb has a letter limit which doesn't make lots of sense. But anyway, the other thing we did was Scrabble, and honestly, not my favorite. Despite the fact that I'm a conqueror in word bomb, I lose in scrabble every time. I'm starting to think it may not be me and the game just hates giving me letters that work together or it's my teammates' faults because I'm always grouped with them and losing, then when I play solo I'm second overall (sorry Sayum and Janek, but it's true!). Moving on, we did morning word exercises everyday; my personal favorite? Hurdle! The others are fairly easy to do, except Contexto because that game is rigged, and bore me since we usually finish them quickly. Hurdle is the only one I actually feel like challenges me as we have to go and make notes and think and all that stuff while some of us are probably screaming out a word in spite of the game.

To conclude, maybe if I had joined earlier during the pandemic, I think I would've been killed during the middle of it, since I couldn't move around for such a long time. I mean, having to wake up, go to sleep, wake up, sleep again, then brush my teeth for lunch and sleep again, then wake up, then sleep for another 3 or 4 hours, then shower, then sleep, then sleep ... and sleep. Though, the thought of it sounds very, very pleasing, the reality of it only gets spoiled when you account for the duration of it's entirety. For 6 months, there I was, sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking and magically going outside into the world, but apparently, it's a dream, and then I wake and sleep and wake and sleep and ... it just becomes a completely endless and quotidian cycle of the waking and sleeping and ... yeah. It only gets attenuated as you realize time is fleeting, and soon enough you'll be present in modern day society, with all the traffic, people, papers, lots and lots of papers, hand-worked projects, and a lot more which you had reminisced in the dissuasion of the virtual life. My advice for next year, don't go online! Some better advice, meh ... there's not much to say other than the year was pretty great, and I had enjoyed throughout. I am completely content with the flow of the three terms, and I think the extra additions such as pre-class activities and oral make school life surmountable. Though, I definitely will miss being the cynosure of the classroom when I can sit still, look pretty on Ms. Disa's phone.