How did I survive that?

Whenever I think about the fact that I am in IIT Madras, a top notch engineering institute in the country, I always wonder how I survived through my school education.

I was a Tamil Nadu State Board student right from my class 1 to 12. Why do I hate it so much? Well consider this:

When I came out of the examination hall from my tenth grade Chemistry board Exam, everyone was complaining about an 'out of syllabus' question. But I never realized anything like that in the paper. Then one of my friends told me the question number and it was a question about what ethane gets converted to in some specific setup. I do remember reading about it in the book. Then I checked it out and voila! The book explains what happens to propane. And it is exactly the same for ethane in that case with appropriate extra carbon and hydrogen added. God! How can that be considered as an out of syllabus question? To my surprise, it is mentioned as an out of syllabus question in all newspapers in the first page the very next day! Same story in television news...And the worst part is that it was finally announced that anyone who has attempted that question will get the full marks for that question!

This is how I was supposed to learn physics and chemistry - I have to literally mug the entire book if I need to get a good score. Yes, all that they ask is theory and only theory! We never think about solving problems. Most of the people just mug the entire book without even understanding the concept. I have seen students who can tell the page number and paragraph number given a sentence from the book!

And the story is a little better in mathematics. Yes we have problems in our exams but guess what, they must be only from the books. No change of data even. In the best case, we might have around 5% of the questions which are a bit different from the book problems. Most of the girls in my class can tell the final answer right away without any calculation if I give them a question from the book. ( Sorry girls.No offense! )

Schools makes it even worse. The schools want their kids to be top rankers in the district/state and so they load our days with infinite exams and extra classes. I have to attend classes from morning 7 to evening 7 on weekdays and from 8.30 to 5.30 on weekends. There are schools which are much worse. Some schools with hostel facilities drills the students for about 16 hours a day.

On top of that, there are many schools which never teach 11 grade syllabus. So for two years the students are supposed to literally mug the 12 grade books with no knowledge of the prerequisites!

Well, the worst part is not done yet: There is no entrance examination for admission to colleges. Only your 12th grade marks matters. This means the success formula is straight forward: Join a school with hostel facility in your 11th grade. MUG the 12th grade books for two years. Get good marks and there you go! You are a mechanical engineering student without knowing Newton's laws of motion! ( that is covered in 11 th grade! ). You are Computer Engineer student without knowing how to write a program which can generate the first few prime numbers! And you are a medical student with no clue about human anatomy!

The competition to get high marks is immensely huge. So if you forget the exact wordings from the book for some topic in the examination hall, you can forget getting into a good college. The madness so bad that even if you get full score in all the subjects, you may still not make into the top branch in top college since the number of people who get a perfect score is usually more than the number of seats available!

Seriously, how did I survive that? That is real crap! I wish this scenario changes soon enough. To be honest, most of my school time is a total waste if I think about it now. All that matters now is how much I understood my subjects. Guys who are struck like me now! Wake up! This education is of no use to you in any way!

One more pair of feet on the world...

Nowadays whenever I open my gmail account, I see only links in my friends status. And when I open it, I wonder...So he also started?

Yes, almost all my friends started blogging, suddenly this summer...

What is happening?
Is this some new way to relax after that hectic fourth semester?
Does writing blogs add something to their resume? ( That sounds like a good reasoning...given my friends are from IIT )

Why don't I also join the list?

But other questions started emerging...
Why blogging?
What to blog about?
What if others don't like it?
What if it is just plain stupid?

I started reading my friends blogs...
Hmmm....Some of them were superb, some were really silly.

Then I asked my room mate... 'Hey, why are you blogging?'

I was afraid if he will start irritating me with his PJ's. ( He does a lot. Sadly being his room mate I have to bear them ) . But he was very enthusiastic after I asked him that. He gave me some nice links which talk about ' Why should I blog?' . Most of my questions were answered.

Its a place to express yourself...What if no one reads? ( Well, at last you came to the rescue. ) Doesn't matter...You just express your thoughts...

People just don't think about others...They just blog...And there is always someone out there who will like the blog...

OK. That is motivational enough.Fine then. I shall start blogging....

I started creating an account in blogger and stuff and it was ready....But wait. What am I gonna blog about?

Nothing came to my mind...Time kept passing by... Well nothing....

Later that day, it strike me:
Why don't I start with my experience of how I decided to blog....

And that's how it all started...

I am planning to write more. ( Even if you have decided to never come back here... :))
I will share my thoughts, experiences. Hope you had nice time reading this.

Waiting for your comments...

For those who wanted to know where I got the 'motivation', here are some of the links:

http://weblogs.about.com/od/startingablog/tp/Top-Ten-Reasons-to-Blog.htm
http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller/2008/01/26/should-i-blog/