Clammy hands and cold sweat, the September School Holidays had just started. It was a bright and sunny Monday morning, the first day of our one week holiday and yet, I was in school, for the SMO competition.
SMO, also known as the Singapore Mathematical Olympiad was renowned for its challenging questions and one of the most difficult Math Olympiads on a national level. As just a Sec 1 student, I had experiences of Math Olympiads in the past and getting Distinction, Merit and Participation awards but I was still nervous as heck.
Secondary school was a whole different thing. Obviously it was not going to be easy at all. After joining the Math Infinity programme, which was the school’s programme that trained students from different levels for Math Olympiad, specifically SMO and also at the same time, have fun with math.
Since primary school, my parents and I always believed that Mathematics was only one of the many subjects that you could score 100% as long as we practiced it frequently. I still believed it but I understood that Math Olympiad was something…rather different I would say.
As a student who preferred calculation questions instead of theoretical ones. Behind the scenes, my friends and I who attended Math Infinity worked tirelessly through a whole pile of work that was assigned by the teacher. At first, there were physical and online sessions, with online being more stressful when the teacher was unable to guide us through the questions, instead we only had hints and question videos to help us. Teachers changed nearly every month before we got to adapt.
However, due to the continued COVID-19 pandemic, which has recently worsened, our classes in the afternoon were cancelled and all of us shifted to online mode. In times like these, we still did not get to know all our classmates in Math Infinity yet and were thus unwilling to really interact with “complete strangers”. Even during bonding session, I kept quiet and just did my work quietly. A group of quiet yet hardworking group of students, a new generation that tried to fight for glory, for themselves and the school as well.
The original date of the competition was 2 June 2021, but was postponed to further notice due to the tightening of COVID-19 restrictions. Home-based learning set in again during the period of July and we had totally no training sessions at all, which was missed out amid the HBL period.
Soon, we got to know that SMO had been moved to 6 September 2021, which is today. Although I did revise most parts of the notes, I had somehow lost the momentum of my Mathematics as Term 3 Common Tests were inching closer and closer day by day, I had nearly given up entirely but I did not entirely.
The day had come and I desperately took out my notes to revise one last time on the way to school. Soon, it was already time for the competition. Upon looking at the question paper, I immediately tried to piece those numbers together although they looked like Greek letters to me honestly. I scribbled those numbers and letters onto the piece of A4 paper I was provided, I slowly tried to decipher the writings and it literally took my more than 40 minutes just to finish the 5 MCQ questions in the paper. I continued with the paper, watching my confidence level dropping from 70 to straight 0. Progressively, I attempted the questions uneasily, pencil shaking in my hand. I had written random answers for nearly 5 questions and I had still skipped more than 8 questions when I finished the paper, and I only had 45 minutes left on the clock to complete the leftover questions.
Time was tight, I had nearly given up in the midst of making smart guesses to questions I had absolutely no idea how to do or comprehend. I scribbled hard on the second piece of A4 paper given, tearing a slight bit of it in the process. No stress, I comforted myself but I was just done, I sought to think of random numbers and put them as some of the answers and submitted the ORS (technically a kind of answer script) to the teacher. I had completed all the questions, quite in vain though. I had 2 hours and 30 minutes to complete the paper and I felt, it was not enough, quite shockingly. 90% chance I would get participation, 9.9% chance Honourable Mention, and probably 0.1% chance a bronze award, practically impossible.
At the time I am writing this, is also the day I took that "paper", and I am unsure of my sanity so... the competition ends with me sustaining "permanent brain damage" and probably hating math a little. So that's it, see you next time!...
-The Good Writer
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