OK, I haven’t been posting for like a week now so yeah. Many things have been happening lately, some affecting my life and some which do not. So here are my thoughts on current events:
First, the anti-Japanese protests in China. Easy solution to the problem, Japan: say sorry about what you did in WWII and stop trying to deny that you did. I mean the German government said sorry and paid compensation to the victims families, why can’t the Japanese government just do the same. And the Chinese should stop whining and they shouldn’t lash out at the Japanese individuals or boycott Japanese businesses, they should just be angry at the people responsible for not saying sorry.
Then, my school. We had a-waste-of-time-and-money walkathon last week and we needed to sponsor ourselves for the walk. The school wants the money to update our computers and stuff. I think it is a good cause but I don’t really want to give more money to the school that gets almost 6 million USD from students alone each year. Oh yeah, to attend this school, the average high schooler pays US$50 a DAY! You would think that they would have enough money to buy some mediocre Dells or something. Last time they did this, the bought some crappy monitors and recieved free old computers running Windows 2000 from the American Embassy in Hong Kong. That is all that really happened, so it is from experience. Let me tell, my school has a lot of work to do.
What can I say, last week was bad, and today I am going to the orthodontist to get the first step in putting in my braces. He has to put in some plastic things in the back of my mouth to stretch my teeth apart (spacers or something?). Well, that is all for today.
The following article was written by a friend who attends the same school as me and we share the same viewpoints about my school so I thought this would be interesting to post. You can visit my school’s website here: American International School
Not only are we paying 500 dollars a day to attend this school, but the classes here move too slowly. We get tested about twice a semester, and that amounts to up to 35% of our final grades. The only reason we don’t get tested much is because the teachers don’t teach anything worth testing over.
The administrators enforce stupidity and avoid the real problems. For example, you get sent home for not having proper uniform. They only give you a detention for not speaking in English. The reason that this school’s standards are so abysmal is because English is not enforced. The English speaking rule is not enforced in elementary school, and the teachers are very lax about it. Then the administrators claim that we should have pride in our school by wearing our uniform properly, and comments on Australian International School’s kids and their uniforms. I once tried showing pride at the princeton review, and when I told the kids there I was from AIS, they couldn’t believe it. They wondered what I was doing there.
Also note the lack of fiscal management. For example, we pay for EBSCO. EBSCO isn’t cheap to provide and the money is coming out of our pockets. However, did we have a consensus to implement EBSCO? No, we did not. The result is that we are paying ridiculous amounts of money for a subpar research facility, that nobody even uses.
The school also provides subpar lunch catering. Anyone who eats school lunch is a testament. Yesterday’s meal was rice (the only thing that looked decent on the plate) with a mix of beef, soggy potatoes, and what I can only describe as congealed mucus.
I would also like to know how this school can charge ridiculous amounts of money and still have subpar facilities. High schoolers pay an average of 85,000 dollars a year to attend. There are over 250 kids. That amounts to 21,250,000 HKD. Let me spell that out, that’s twenty-one million two hundred-fifty thousand dollars annually, for high school alone. Where does that money go? Does the rent cost the school twenty million dollars a year? Does the staff get paid twenty million dollars a year? No they do not.
We also pay ridiculous amounts of money for uniforms and text books. A complete uniform costs around 570 dollars, and we need at least two uniforms. Coupled with the fact that there are two different uniforms, we’re paying a full blown 2000 dollars on uniform per year. We also need to pay for textbooks. This year, the school had a lack of textbooks, so what happened? They charged us ridiculous amounts of money for the “usage fees”. This means that we do not own the books, but we still pay full price for the books (i.e, our Science text books cost us 675 dollars, but we don’t get to keep them. Last year, our science books cost 550 dollars, and we DID get to keep them). Not only that, but we aren’t even using the textbooks often. What’s the point of paying for things we don’t use?
I could get into how the detention system doesn’t work, or how the classrooms are too small, or how crappy the computers in our labs are, but I think you’re beginning to get the picture. AIS’ administrators need to start doing a better job managing the curriculum and money.
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It’s been on my computer for ages, but I never actually used it till yesterday. I had to use for an English project for school and man is it a great video-editing program or what. Earlier, I downloaded an almost 200 megabyte trial of Adobe Premiere 1.5 and found it pretty hard to use, and I didn’t have the time to find out how to do stuff. Then I remembered that I had Movie Maker 2. I always thought it was some piece of junk freebie that Microsoft threw in for its XP users, but I had to finish my project.
So, I got into the program, messed around with it for a little bit and in a matter of 30 minutes I practically knew everything to know about the program. There are quite a few effects and transitions you can use to make your videos better. You can add music and sound effects, pictures, transitions between clips or title slides, all kinds of digital effects like making the video look old and you can also add title and credit slides.
I would recommend this program for users who want an easy, enjoyable, fast and hassle-free video editing software. It is also free and can be used with Windows XP. If you need high quality video editing software, this program probably isn’t for you.
You can download Windows Movie Maker 2.1 by going to this link: Windows Movie Maker 2.1 Download
So today in Grade 9 English class we watched the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet which is supposed to be like the best version and it was good. There was one strange part about it though. In Act 3 Romeo’s butt was shown for like 2 minutes. The girls didn’t really have any reaction in my class, dunno why, but all the guys were laughing. Then the teacher was like: “OK, there is partial nudity in this movie.” We already heard that there would be from another class, but we didn’t know if the teacher would let us see it after that, but we did. Not only did this scene show Romeo’s butt… it showed Juliet’s (who was played by Olivia Hussey) boobs. That really got the guys going, even thought it was like 0.5 seconds long. Well, it was strange but I think that this scene dragged on for a bit too long. The freaky thing is that the woman who played Juliet must be like in her 50’s right now, not a good thought.
You guys may already have noticed, but if you haven’t, I have links at the top of my site. These links are my inner site links, meaning they are all site stuff, unlike links that point you to other websites. The links that I have there right now are the About page which is an introduction to me, the Free Gmail Invites Giveaway page where you can request to get a free invite to Google’s email service from this website, and also the Photo page, where you can see some of my amateur photography.
After that you have the login and register buttons. The login button is more for me (I moved it there because I am lazy to type in http://illya.sizzly.com/wp-admin). The register button is for new people to this site who would like to receive updates about this site or want to write comments to my articles.
This post was just to let all of you guys know what the buttons up there are for and that they are place of interest on my website. Thanks.
