Confessions of a Cat-holic (83)

I knew changing environments would come with all sorts of downside since I didn't believe in a perfect school with sugar coated lollipop lies and happily ever after fairy tales anyways. There were still competition, jealousy and rivalry in my new class, but at least at a lesser degree when compared with my alma mater. And to be honest, even though academically I was encountering more friction and challenges, I still wouldn't trade it with another class. Overall, the atmosphere was friendly and harmonious.

Sarah and I were good friends as we sat next to each other for some time in F4. We shared some of our deepest secrets and we had a lot in common. She went out with a basketball player, Wong Yuen Dong, in class C. He was known to be fit, tall, handsome, yet academically incompetent. She told me she would be taking French in HKCEE as the tenth subject and asked me to buy her a Le Petit Prince in Francais version when I travelled to France. She asked me to join the pre-university camps for high school students organized by the Department of Architecture at CUHK so we got to experience life as a uni student for a week and tasted the life of an architect. It was an enjoyable summer, where I learned to build models and gave presentation for our construction projects. Deep down, I hoped some day that I could also be an architect, while also knowing that I could not draw or do physics calculations, let alone building bridges and skyscrappers on one of the most slender mountains in the busiest districts of Hong Kong. Sarah, nevertheless, had since become one of the rising architects in town with a lab and many projects on eco-friendly living in this urban wonderland. She was the only artsy student in our class, so architecture seemed to be the right fit for her.

Academically, I had to say I was studying with many of the smartest students in Hong Kong. But at that time, I didn't know. I just thought that I was dumb, when compared to my peers. I didn't know SPCC could produce up to 20 8As students in a year, almost like a pre-med factory. The subjects I had the most difficulties with were physics and mathematics. For physics, I had explained myself earlier. But for maths, actually if you looked at my transcript, my grades were consistently in the high 80s to low 90s, which was not bad. But the mean was 97. What could you say? Very quickly I noticed that the people in my class were all maths savvy to a point where they could easily get perfect scores in examinations that I would consider rather difficult. Even though I studied hard, one silly mistake or careless error could make me drop to the lowest rank in class, because everyone else was super good in giving flawless solutions.

Even though I struggled in maths, I excelled in calculus for some strange reasons. For the maths test, the teacher liked to throw at us some theoretical proof questions which only the future phd students could crack. But calculus was just mechanical practice which involved no abstract reasoning. I figured that maths was considered a relatively straight forward and easy subject, so everyone else did well in it like a piece of cake, while additional maths was an esoteric realm which stratified the class into the different clusters. I actually devoted an hour or two each day just to solve differential equations. Only after I enrolled at Columbia that I discovered that the maths book I was using for high school calculus was at a level more difficult than my training in university. The maths questions I was handling at Columbia, even as a teaching assistant at the mathematics department, were strictly two-dimensional. But the problems I encountered at SPCC involved differentiating and integrating the surface area or volume of the donut shaped containers revolving X, Y and Z axis.

Other than E class, I really could not see myself in any other places. There were no other options that I would rather prefer. E class was filled with smart people and intellect. Once I left the classroom, it was a whole different scene out there.