18/5/2010 Post Exam Activities Day 2

Today was the day of the field trip. Since I'd lost my copy of the post exam activity form, I actually had no idea that there was a field trip scheduled for today until I asked a classmate. Well, no harm done.

We left the school around 8.30 a.m., after loitering around in the concourse for about 45 minutes. 303, 304, 306 ( my class ) and 308 were going to the Bedok NEWater treatment facility, while 301, 302, 305 and 307 were going to the Asian Civilizations Museum. I'd have preferred the ACM to the NEWater any day.....

On the bus, 306 was packed together with 308. I sat with MINGwei and played chess for about half an hour, then dosed for 15 minutes. When we finally arrived at the NEWater treatment facility, I was quite unimpressed. It's a squat, blocky white building with 2 wings and 2 large (water?) storage tanks to one side. At the front entrance, there is a colossal pool about 3/4 of a meter deep. It had fountains and stuff, but it wasn't very impressive, nonetheless.

When we were inside the facility, it was as boring as school. Ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, UV light - the way NEWater was treated was familiar to almost all of us. One strange thing is that our tour group was somehow absorbed into a small class of similarly touring nursery school students. The tour guide elicited more than a few murmurings of " pedo " over the course of the trip, as he was constantly asking the little children to " come nearer! ". I remember we treated him quite disrespectfully; at the reverse osmosis booth, when he asked if a truck was larger or smaller than a tennis ball ( viruses to the holes in the reverse osmosis membranes ), every secondary school student declared that trucks were smaller. Oh, one very interesting thing happened at the ultrafiltration booth. The tour guide showed us a video of water molecules being taken up into these " vessel elements ", and bacteria the size of 2 or 3 water molecules being deflected away. Imagine that! At a scale where hydrogen looks like a ping pong ball, these bacteria seemed like basketballs with flagella. Also, water was consistently represented as water molecules suspended in a blue liquid. Hmmm, I wonder what that liquid was........

After the tour, I bought a very passable curry puff for a dollar from a little stall located strategically outside the tour exit.

After that, it was time to return to school. Since it was only 10.30, and I'd been informed that the tour would end at 1, I was more than a little surprised. Oh well. We boarded the bus and reached NUSH at 11.15, where we were informed by Mr Ho that we would have to report to our mentor classrooms for some mentoring at 12. I played chess with MINGwei until 12, and then Ms Kong walked in.

She talked about the trip for some time, then she advised the persons who had had trouble with our Module Evaluation Surveys to report to the Computer Lab Techs to file a problem report to them, else we probably wouldn't get our progress reports back come Friday.

Being the obliging person I am, I followed Victor to the computer labs at 1. We knocked on all the doors to all the labs, but they weren't in. Must have been on their extravagant lunch breaks that they need to recover from the stress of doing nothing all day. I don't like the computer lab techs. I remember back in year 1 Teck Chye was playing Pac Man ( a more innocuous game you'd never find ), and they hauled Glenn, Gabriel, Teck Chye and I all in and harangued us for about 40 minutes. When I said that I had only been watching, they scolded me even more fiercely and compared my actions to being a silent witness at a murder. I was itching to shout that playing Pac Man was a victimless crime, but I restrained myself for fear of demerits and in the certain knowledge that I would have been wasting my time and energy. After all that crap, they said they'd send our names to the discipline master ( Mr Jeremy Ang at the time, and who'd caught Yu Fong, Teck Chye, and I playing computer games before and made nothing of it. ). Mr Ang was a better person than any of them.

Finally, I walked home and chionged what remained of my math tuition homework. Seems more like physics these days; I'm learning about impulse and connected particles. Mr Chan says he'll start me on Statistics in June, and I can't wait ( Ansel horror stories aside ).

I started walking to Mr Chan's place at about 3, arrived at 3.15, and read part of Different Seasons, by Stephen King. Then I went up till 5.30, then I went home.