How many of you people look forward to the holidays? I know I did. (note the past tense)

You work SO HARD during the school term to finish off all your essays, assignments and projects to make your teachers happy and proud of you so they give you good report marks to please your parents who will probably take a glance and use their SUPER SONIC F DETECTING EYESIGHT to skim through your piece of printed cardboard then when they detect no failures, tell you to put it away somewhere and continue with their pre-dinner activites.

You would think, after all this hard work, the holidays would be a time of relaxation and enjoying your non-homework/assignment period of 2 short weeks before we go back to the daily routine of being squished to death on the bus and working in that always-too-cold-due-to-the-air-con-always-being-on-18-degrees English room. Oh the excitement.

The truth is. This myth is absolutely false. (with exceptions to some holidays and the summer holidays).

As the teachers sense that the end of term is on the horizon of another week or so, they decide to set you an assignment to ease your “lack of things to do”. Oh thank you so much. ><

What is it about holidays that makes teachers think that students have nothing better to do than sit at a desk all day and tediously type “and I believe that this is why blah blah is such a good film” There’s some sort of instinctive behaviour that causes them to think holidays are made for more assignments, sometimes even more than usual.

EXHIBIT A
Last year, year 8, 07.
Assignment set to be due AFTER the holidays. To be completed DURING the holidays:
• VA assignment on famous architectures
• Essay for English
• Some other assignment that I probably don’t remember due to not wanting to remember it.

We had not had 3 assignments due all in the same week in the whole term until then.

And even after you decide to sacrifice that outing with old friends to the movies to stay home and finish off that profile on some French museum famous for its design. Oh what fun!

Us, as the conscientious students that we are, are at home sweating and making a watery mess on our table stressing about whether we’ll finish this in time to start the next one!

That is why I love the summer holidays-

Besides going to either:

1. Gold Coast at Dreamworld with big round eyes in amazement to all the Patrick soft toys they have mounted on the wall.

2. Hong Kong spending all my money due to the sudden profits received after landing in HK and going to the international currency part of their banks and finding out you have … five-times-ed your money. Oh the bliss of being rich! Jks.

3. Canada freezing my same-size-to-fred’s fingers off and getting frostbite on my nose. Not that I’ve been to Canada but I’ll be going sometime in the future. ^^

4. Uhh…nowhere… staying home and being a couch potato in watching TV and playing games and then decide to get some exercise but ending up turning on the Wii to play a bit of “tennis” on Wii Sports.

- you don’t get any holiday assignments!! Whoo hoo!! xD

(Unless you’re weird like Tom and you HATE the summer holidays cos all you can do is stay home and watch Pascal Savage on Johnny English and his “tower of Londen” accent so many times, you can practically recite the whole 2 hour movie. ^^)