@the Pinnacle #1: The Transition...

@the Pinnacle #1: The Transition…

Posted by Prashanth | Filed under FIITJEE Pinnacle, It's My Life, School Life, Technology

Quite a few things have been changing in life for me lately. The biggest one being an year old fact which is yet to be documented properly. The recent one being that I managed to pass class XI and I am in class 12th since 2 weeks… What I actually want to talk about here is this huge turn over that happened to me approximately an year ago on the 7th of April, 2007. I officially became a student of FIITJEE Pinnacle, which I did mention in bits and pieces in my posts, as well as in a vague post here.

So this post is all about my transition to FIITJEE Pinnacle, a fairly new concept of education in this part of India as I see it. What this means is that now instead of going to school, I would be going to a full time coaching center. But then before I analyze that part, there was another transition with greater implications that I want to talk about. That is, my transition from class X to class XI. I have had a talk with quite a few of my seniors in class X and before when they moved from class X to XI. Many people I know felt really really nostalgic about class X and IX which I used to then hate and things ironically haven’t changed much even now… The same people said that I would prey pray to get back to class X again and would not have a good time at all. I have little idea about what made them say that, perhaps might be the school, pressures of coaching classes, or just the feeling of change or most probably the loss of easy-ness. Things have been a little different in my case may be because I am @the Pinnacle!

For once, let me make it very clear to you that I am very far away from even thinking about my class X forget missing it. I do miss my class classmates and my old school Ramjas, but not the academics. I wanted to get out of the mess of general studies way back in class VIII itself when Sansshit Sanskrit was first introduced to me. Social Sciences seemed pointless albiet interesting as I had decided to make my career in the science stream. But then lots of factors, especially those pertaining bad teaching and menial jobs such as copying stuff from the text book and submitting notes just for the heck of it, my interest in Social Sciences which included Geography, History and Economics faded big time. I had to be the happiest person on earth on the day when my Social Sciences bored exam got over. Coming to sciences, I had problems with the way CBSE narrowed down on the whole syllabus and literally showed no flexibility in the nature of problems. I was disgusted to find students mugging up methods to solve say - Problems of type #1, and then the next and actually scoring a lot! Understanding and analytical abilities played little role in the class X bored exam scores. All my score card of a so-called embarrassing 86.4% says is that I could just mug up that much portion of the syllabus. But then in reality, I mugged very little writing almost entirely correct answers (in my opinion atleast) only to get beaten in other stupid stuff like formatting the paper, maintaining order and presentation, etc. I used to and still feel pissed of the unnecessary emphasis CBSE puts on such criteria instead of core concepts.

Enough of CBSE bashing for now (will dedicate another post for this!) but then class XI at FIITJEE Pinnacle felt just great! For the first time in my 12 years of so-called education, I was actually tested for how much I understood stuff. Problems were far more elastic and flexible than many rubber bands and hence my mind was opened up to think, form new techniques of my own, develop short cuts and understand the concept in a much broader scope. That was something no plain CBSE student might have got a privilege to do. CBSE restricts a persons aptitude by limiting the methods you could use in the exam hall. Now all that mattered is how effectively I could think. This freedom of thought wasn’t just good for me, but also for the entire batch of extremely brilliant students who study along with me. It feels great when almost every student in the class is thinking and aiming to come up with something neat in the class. And finally, I have the same quality of classmates that I once dreamt of having earlier. No more nonsensical stuff that waste time and piss everyone off. Stiff competition constantly keeps filtering out ensuring that the quality of the batch remains.

But then, as the old saying says… there is another side to this coin. And another reason to post again…

Speaking of transition, I just shifted to Wordpress 2.5 and I am facing a few problems as I even migrated to Firefox 3 beta 5. The fluidity factor for the WYSIWYG editor seems to be working only till 1024*768 resolution for me. But otherwise, I guess I do see some neat changes. The AJAXed-WP plugin doesn’t work with version 2.5, or atleast my installation as yet.

Also, notice the change of template? I guess I needed some emphasis on typography and readability. Some globally acclaimed (chuckles!) web designers suggested me that the images on the sidebar (especially the one on the left!) and the bright header images along with prominent sidebar text made reading the blog a difficult task. So well, we both have now gone down to the ‘widgetized’ footer where the pics seem to be better placed than those sidebars. Speaking of sidebars, the text is greyed out a bit to increase prominance on the main content part… I am totally open for improvement suggestions and would love to hear more of them in the form of comments… for now, since I have even moved to class XII, books seems to be missing me more than they did a few weeks before!

© Prashanth Kanduri - visit the ...The LuminaR...™ for more. If you
liked this content, subscribe to the Entries RSS Feed or the Comments RSS Feed. You can even subscribe via email updates.

Permalink | April 17th, 2008

13 Responses to “@the Pinnacle #1: The Transition…”

Prateek Vijayavargia Says:
April 17th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Pinnacle seems to have worked with u - Thats great. Hope u crack JEE and follow ur dreams.
The Social Sciences are quite interesting but are made to seem dull because of the teachers, exams, notes, textbooks etc. All that is changing but.
Anyways, Economics is also a Science and I believe that CBSE might not have done full justice to it till Class X but it is interesting in Classes XI and XII. It has many direct applications with Maths, Statistics and Computer Science. Also, I agree with u on the CBSE view. They are not flexible on many counts which is quite sad but true. I have chosen Commerce with Maths as my stream for +2 - As u very well know because my interests and strengths lie in there.

The new theme is much better than the previous one and whoever (The globally acclaimed web designers) were…..
Are quite rite

Congrats on making in to Class XII?
Whats on the quizzing scene these days?
achyuth sanjay Says:
April 18th, 2008 at 7:54 am
hey! u stole the words out of my mouth!
i agree with ur post all the way. i did miss 9th and 10th, but only my friends and my school Cambridge Noida. But 11th and 12th were the most awesome 2 years of my life, in which both academics and school life/activities interested me. however, i should tell u, that towards the end (the last month), i got really bored and was just wishing that i could get done with JEE! studying Physics and Maths in 11th and 12th involves a lotta thinking, mostly out of the box. its interesting all the way.
in 10th, i did hate the Social Sciences, but i was interested in Economics(whatever little they had shown us) coz it was the only Social “Science” that was logical.

p.s. btw if u don’t know me, i am achyuth sanjay (now an) ex student of DPS Noida, who has given JEE this year. i am a diehard quizzer (though my IT quizzing is very low level) and know ur blog thru the great quizzard!
Ankur Banerjee Says:
April 18th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Too greyed out sidebar…but rest looks a lot fresher!
samar Says:
April 18th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I really feel bad that people sometime think this way, not that I am fully in agreement with what CBSE teaches, but trust me you won’t be ‘ranting’ such neat English, not perhaps even that much well aware if you studied in a FIITJEE system right from class 1. It is unfortunate that the crappy IIT fever is ruining 2 years of students like you. Trust me you will realize it sooner or later, that this system is not providing any real education but making you pattern recognizing machines and doing an even greater harm, contributing to the bigger than life JEE image. Then this is what I think, you have all the rights to think otherwise. Thanks for the suggestions on site though. I am working on your suggestions. Invitation to work on it still stands open, what you have to do is whatever you decide as far as it is technical and non-commercial. I chose people and they chose what they can/should do. Tell me anytime.
bye
achyuth sanjay Says:
April 19th, 2008 at 5:17 am
@samar: i m sorry if i cudn’t emphasize on my point clearly, but my point is very simple.
today, i love physics, and to think about it. and its not because of my physics teacher in school(who btw, adhere to ur “pattern recognizing” comment), but my sir in FIITJEE, who taught us to think logically abt physics. they never emphasize on any pattern, they just want u to understand everything, which is not the case in school, where u just learn the type of questions and theirr answers by rote!
and if u r talking abt english, does cbse allow us the freedom to air our views abt an issue. for eg. in a recent sample paper, i saw a question on children not getting enough outdoor activities to play. in this, we had to rant about the poor lifestyle of kids and all, but if we think carefully, its more because of lack of space to play, coz wherever there is a park, there are kids playing there. do u think i would have been rewarded if i had written this in my answer. the cbse system is too rigid, thats all i can say.

achyuth sanjay
Prashanth Says:
April 20th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
@Samar: Just which part of the teaching system of the CBSE are you happy with? The English part? Trust me… I am currently on the verge of getting half of my exam applications rejected because I scored a frigging 69.5 in my English bored exam… Why? Not because I didn’t know stuff… I could only guess that they didn’t get my language well. Humor, creative use of situations, as well as high vocabulary don’t appeal to these people. People with extreme amounts of uncreativity have a been scoring 98 in English despite not knowing enough to even converse in English…
And whatever English I have learnt, it is mostly due to television, newspaper and books that I read and not because of the sucky literature that is there in our school books…
@Achyuth and Samar: I will get back to you in sometime… Currently I am in Vizag.
Prashanth Says:
April 21st, 2008 at 1:09 am
@both you people:
In my case atleast, I am not really a pattern recognizing machine, but a person who knows exactly ‘how things work’. So JEE prep has broadened minds of me and my classmates in thinking openly the wide range or problems that could possibly be framed on a certain concept. Co-relating and deriving results out on our own from everything we study is something that I am experiencing for the first time. I always wanted this kind of a study environment where I already use my manipulative and reverse-engineering capacities to understand and better comprehend with stuff. JEE prep has made me a wider thinker than before, atleast in technical matters!
Prashanth Says:
April 21st, 2008 at 1:18 am
@Prateek: Yeah, and too bad that there aren’t too many ‘conceptual’ papers which relate to your commerce stream which is more of either direct application or the descriptive kind of a stream… But well, you would have fun thinking out-of-the-box when you learn programming and try and apply your maths concepts there and better understand both of them in the process.
And well, thanks for the nice words on the new theme… keep in mind that it is optimized for 1024*768 or greater resolutions only…
Prateek Vijayavargia Says:
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:20 am
Commerce Stream has Maths also. And Accountancy is a conceptual thing - U have to understand everything mate.
I suppose Business Studies ain’t much…But still.
BTW, I dont think i will be able to take computer Science
Annonymous Says:
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:23 am
i agree that cbse is bad but the way u go on and on abt ur so called great analytical, logical skills just pìššëš me off. If u get in JEE-09 then it is something but otherwise u are a moron who just shoots his mouth off at every opportunity. reading ur post it looks like FIITJEE are paying u for advertising them on ur blog the way u keep complimenting them on everything. oh yeah abt ur english let me tell u something, ur version is the way how people are writing nowadays and not like how it was written before so u should understand not to be some wannabe ripoff after reading the same type language in some book and writing it in ur english paper and then crying loudly that u didn’t deserve the marks given to u. u know the way u write it seems as if u are the new Albert Einstein but if u look into a mirror u will see a wannabe who wants to impress everybody with his image of a super intelligent geek which u are not. ur image might be huge but if u will really retrospect then ur actual self isn’t even be 1/100 of ur image. ur writing shows how arrogant u are and think that others are just dumb idiots. Mr.Prashanth please wake up from ur dream and see the real world and become humble. don’t take this comment the wrong way but it is the truth. u don’t know me so it is a hopeless task if u try finding out who i am.
Prashanth Says:
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:56 am
@Mr. Anonymous:
How well do you actually know me? It seems as if you have assumed that you have inferred just way too much just by reading this blog post of mine. And well, FIITJEE ain’t paying me off in anything, but well, that is how my classes in Pinnacle are. My close friends do know how happy or sad I actually might feel about this whole thing. I would be shortly posting about the šhìttÿ things that happen at FIITJEE as well. I speak my mind in my blog and I don’t really see too many boasts of my ‘analytical/logical’ skills anywhere…
And well, I don’t have an image of a super-intelligent geek and then I am no wannabe either. Please meet me sometime, get to know me better and then please make your statements. Speaking of arrogance in posts, this post is more about my transition towards IIT Prep syllabi from the purely CBSE trend that followed since a long time… and not really a FIITJEE promotion scheme there… neither is it something bashing non-FIITJEEians. I say that it is something any CBSE student would experience after his class 10th…
Also, I assume you haven’t ever read my writing in my examinations, so just don’t speak anything about it. Blog lingo and proper essay writing are two different things. I have my own distinct writing style which you can observe by reading a few more long posts on the blog.
If you are really someone whom I don’t know, please speak to me and get to know me better sometime. Be a better judge of people and frame a firm image of someone only after you have seen all sides of the same cube. Anyway, reading a few more posts on the blog could also help… I am not as arrogant as you might think!
Also, I am not deleting this comment because I know it is some immature kid in a bad mood just taking things out here…
Till then, cheers!
Prashanth Says:
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:12 am
@Prateek: Then that is good for you. For once I thought that you would be studying an SSt. like subjects throughout these 2 years. But then try for Computer Science, if you are really interested. If it isn’t available in your school, shifting to DPS VK (and joining an awesome quizzing team) wouldn’t be a bad idea at all… I guess Commerce cut-offs are lower there…
achyuth sanjay Says:
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:07 am
@anonymous: i m sorry to barge in, but ur recent tirade is absolutely unneedful here!! where da hëll has he (or have i) boasted of great logical/analytical skills!! i just said that i like it analytical/logical! by the way, since u r anonymous, ur comments are alreasy worthless, coz if u actually wanted to enter into a proper debate, identity won’t be a crisis for u!!