Mid-year results. Yes, they were released today, amidst a frenzy of nervous yet eager students, tormented by their imaginings, hopes and dreams. All held in an envelope slip. If you ask me? Just another hyped up event. People care so much, simply because they have nothing to put their caring hands on at the moment. Just like our very first SACs. How much weight did we feel they had? Studied for them like our lives were at stake. Now here we are, one too many SACs to count come and gone. Complacency is back. Looking at it on the grand scale of things, each little SAC counts for barely anything. And here we have the same phenomenon happening again, this time with mid-year results.

Firstly, not every subject has mid-year exams, just the sciences and one or two others like accounting and psychology. Secondly, the mid-year counts only for one third of the total subject's final score. So think about it. For people doing one or two subjects, how much weighting did the mid-year really carry overall? About a measly 10% on average. Yet here people are, biting nails, swarming over teachers for these white envelopes, opening them and dying. Mass hysteria can be such a wonderful tool powerful force.

Some might argue i'm not one to talk, being on of those quite satisfied with my results. Perhaps that is so. I won't try to explore what I would have done had this happened etc, as this would be dismissed in a similar fashion. So I will just say this. I do sympathise, even empathise very much in fact, with those who did feel any sense of disappointment, to put it lightly in some cases, spawning from their results. So I decided to try a little exercise. (Yes, another social exercise in a vain attempt to integrate myself further into social society again.)

I made it a point to talk to anyone who was in Year 12 on my friend's list today who I didn't already speak to, and make conversation. Which naturally shifted to results, some faster than others =P. The variation in responses was, I thought, quite interesting.

I do understand that this might be a biased/imbalanced test/experiment or whatever blah. It wasn't meant to be one. Just my observations. Of the guys I know and spoke to, it seems that the general consensus can be summarised in one word: "MEH." Rather, it's quite possible that they didn't want to talk about it, or frankly didn't care. I suspect the latter was true for the majority of cases, regardless of their performance.

For girls though, it was rather different. They seemed in general to feel more strongly towards obtaining less than satisfactory results for themselves, and feel less if they achieved their goals. What fluctuated a lot too was the variety of responses that came from those who felt they achieved less than they should have. Some seemed to accept it cooly, getting straight to the point, but upon further prompting opened up more, exposing their true emotions. Yet others appeared to take it very hard, coming across very strongly about their incompetent results, but when encouraged to expand, found that they really didn't care that much.

I thought this was interesting, as in many cultures in the world (as is still the case, sadly), it is the men who are shown to be the more academically inclined (sorry girls). And yet, what I observed here seems to depict females caring much more about their results, to the point that they are even affected adversely, mentally as well as emotionally, which males failed to express.

A plus side of this exercise was the opportunity for me to not only get to know people better, but work on my empathy skills, and expressing that. It felt good just to be able to lend an ear, or drop an encouraging word where it was needed most. I must say, I felt that as a result, I learnt a lot more about people, both as their own individual selves, and also in general.

You feel your empathy skill improve a little.

Now, to bed. Long day tomorrow, not pleasant. Well, it could be, but defeintely not in terms of the periods I have... Get home at 9pm for the loss.

Good night.