14 of December - Monday

Lucas has been admitted into Columbia University in New York!
WE HAVE AN IVY LEAGUE PAULEAN IN THE U6!

Of course, Lucas wasn't gonna get off lightly. Break time was filled with the sound of electrical shavers are we shaved all of Lucas's hair off.

Photos are below but if thats' not enough for you, here's the video footage of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL9apVw4_c0

21 of October - Wednesday

Unfortunately for Jacobs University in Germany, the talk was scheduled during our morning maths lesson. I'm sure that most students (if not all) were unable to miss out their maths lessons for a college talk. Yes, as incredible as it may seem, nobody went to the Jackson University talk.

On the other hand two very prestigious and renown universities came to talk to us during our after-lunch tutorial period: Duke University and Brown University. ITB, the computer room where the talks too place was absolutely stuffed! I don't think we've ever had a university talk with so many people! of course, the L6 were present as well as the U6.

The lunch name today also gave all of us a scare when they gave us what was called "Kung Pou Chicken". It was quite comic when many students, including myself, went to Google Images to sort of predict what sort of chicken it actually was.

Turns out it was the same chicken that we get with the Yakisoba: chiken chopped into small chunks, surrounded by vegetables and some other spices. It was pretty good; though the Meringue that was for desert still looked like it was going to sprout legs and walk off our plates. As usual. I've still never had the guts to try it. Mark my words, by the end of U6 I'll have tried it.

20 of October - Tuesday

For the first time in the term, our TOK lessons took place in the classrooms. Up until now, all our lessons took place in the Chapel downstairs where we had the students doing their oral presentations. The orals shall continue but in the classrooms.

This seems to be college week! Only today, we had talks at lunch time from Boston University and Chaplan University. After school there were 6 Universities including Babson, Hofstra and the University of Miami.

I say it's college week because of the fact that tomorrow and Friday are also going to host a series of other colleges.

30 of September - Wednesday

The end of the second month of term is pulling up. Expect to get a lot of "A pinch and a punch and the first of the month!"'s tomorrow, my dear readers!

Both the Form 5's and the Upper 6th Grade round was today. In tutorial this morning some students got terrible news, some got fairly normal news and some got spectacular news. Those who were not in the morning tutorial for any reason (such as myself) received them after lunch in the tutorial period then. (By the way, I imagine that the Wednesday tutorial period which has been around since probably ever is to consider the tutorial period lost once a week for assemblies.) Your guess is as good as mine but I think it seems like a logical explanation for it.

Pre-contested events today included the popular hurdles and the oh-so-longed-for high jump.

During the lunch break, Walsh University came for a talk although, unfortunately, very few students attended the talk. Although we are going to be getting some more college talks soon it does seem that their number is decreasing, what with all the college applications and all.

Following straight after the Walsh talk we had Mr. Mugan explaining to us and giving us more information about the dreaded Extended Essay. The presentation focused more on the actual details of it, like the layouts and the abstracts...

Oh, and as as final note: Sodexho concocted a new desert for us today. Actually, it was more of a change from one of the regular deserts. Instead of using "Sonho de Valsa" bomboms to coat the pavê we have, they used "Negresco" cookies. Whilst I do prefer the Sonho de Valsa Pavê I confess I rather enjoyed this new desert. Oh, and why do they insist on mixing the best deserts with the worst main dishes and vice-versa? We had pavê for desert but the damn battered fish as the main course!

16 of September - Wednesday

Halfway through the week and I already feel like I'm going to collapse...oh well, fazer o que, né?

Anyway, we had two Varsity victories yesterday: the Boy's team beat PACA 3x0 whilst the girls beat PACA too with an impressive 6x0.

The science Group 4 Project began today. It'll be very, very annoying having to come into school at 9 am on Saturday to do our project. An entire triple period was devoted to getting into our groups and deciding what we're supposed to do. The positive side is, of course, that it will only take Saturday to finish it; as soon as we're done on Saturday the Group 4 Project will be over.

Mrs. Obi gave us another one of her interactive lessons today. It seems Mr. Cooper Blanks is not feeling too well so Mrs. Obi stepped in. It was all about currency exchange with Cashflow money representing the currency of one country and "Class Bucks" representing Mrs. Obi's money. Everyone had different amounts of money but the Cashflow money was only used to buy Class Bucks. Class Bucks, on the other hand, were used to buy chocolates. Clearly there was a mad dash of people wanting to get Class Bucks. Whilst the original cost of 1 Class Buck was about 1500 Cashflow Dollars, by the end the demand for Class Bucks was so high that I bought a Class Buck for 4 Million and 100 Cashflow Dollars whilst Brian bought it for 17 million!

Of course, in the interest of fairness, everybody got a chocolate at the end regardless of having bought Class Bucks or not.

15 of September - Tuesday

All that happened today was a set of games.

Football games, basketball games, etc...

I believe that we were up against Graded school but I'm not sure what others, if any, were there too.

I'll try to get results tomorrow and put 'em up here.

14 of September - Monday

What a day! So much work for a Monday. Economics, we had a test. Chemistry, a practical and lots of exercises. Maths, don't even get me started...

As you've undoubtedly noticed, this blog is aimed at writing about Upper 6 life and not about the lessons but, to be honest, lessons are practically all that's been going on.

I'll just write up 3 things that I've learned today.

First off, a few of my classmates have gone on a Geography field trip. They'll be back on Wednesday. I'll be sure to ask a few of them what they went through and post that here later.

Swine flu has been slowing down at school it seems. Whilst in the first week alone we had at least 3 infected pupils, now in the 4th week we're still at (I believe) 10. Unfortunately it's spread to the Lower 6 so now infections don't seem to be limited to the prep and pre-prep school alone.

Apparently the school is looking to recruit new teachers too. In the Estadão newspaper, there was an enormous add sent by school looking for new teachers. Someone sent an e-mail with a photo taken of the newspaper and they even printed out a copy and put it up on our Upper 6 board! Go figure!

10 of September - Thursday

I must say that the only interesting thing that happened today was the Northeastern University talk that we had this morning at 9 am. Pity there's not much to be said here again.

One minor change though; at the start of the term, the school used to post the school lunches from Tuesday to the following Monday on the school's Intranet. That was great since we knew what to expect for that day and the following week. Now that's been changed and now we only get the daily school lunch. Now I have no idea as to why they changed that but....you know....

9 of September - Wednesday

It sure seems this week is being quite uneventful.

During maths today (our first lesson) many of my classmates came in to talk to Mr. White in order to get a permission slip to go to Graded. I didn't go, so I'm unsure how the talk went, but I'm pretty sure it was some sort of university talk too.

Lunch time was a tense one where, all of a sudden, one of the puffs would come out of nowhere and smash you or the person next to you on the head. Yes, it was an all-out war of puffs. It sort of reminded me of how dogs fight. One second they're just staring at each other and, out of the blue, they're tearing at each others throats. Similarly, there we all were, just sitting on the sofas when one person would get up and randomly attack another. This usually led to a collective attack on the surprised, assaulted individual.

Suffice to say that all was going great and it was lots of fun until some people came down, decided to lie on the puffs and spoil our fun. Oh well...c'est la vie.

Ah, yes. I might as well talk about something I read in the newspaper this morning. Well, today is the 9/09/2009. I read in the newspaper that a hospital near my house has 23 caesarean sections reserved for today because some parents think that it will be cute for their children to be born on the 9/09/2009....999.

8 of September - Tuesday

What happened today? Hmm...a big load of nothing, really.

Apocalyptic weather was really the highlight.

This morning the sky was darker than usual. All was good until people started arriving in school. Then the rain started. The sky darkened until it seemed it was 10 at night. Sometimes the rain would stop for a few minutes but during most of the day it seemed like the end of humanity was arriving...and in a lot of style I have to add.

7 of September - Monday

Holidays!

The 7th of September is the Brazilian Independance day and, as usual, no school for us today. Yaay for us.

4 of September - Friday

Three main events happened today. First off, Alberto told us, in assembly, a little extract of the speech he had given the McCann Society the day before. It was about Economics and credit. I think we will all agree with the fact that this was a very good speech and we hope to hear similar extracts from the other speakers in the McCann Society ECA.

Film today was quite unique experience: no teacher came to the class to teach us. Robbie, Zhao and myself stayed in the classroom and worked on our Film Courseworks. At 9:15 (15 minutes before the end of class), Mr. Burnside, our film teacher, walks in and asjs us what we are doing. We were then asked what lesson we are supposed to be having. The answer? "Film, sir...with you..."
All 3 of us were given Bene's by Mr. Burnside; I think it's my first Bene in about 3 years...

Extended Essay's were due in today and many people were in a drastic hurry to finish them off and hand them in. 4000 is a lot more than it seems, for some people.

With the large amount of rain we had, P.E. was a very limited class. We had the option of Table Tennis, Dodgeball, Futsal or work in the 6th form centre. Dodgeball and Table Tennis were abandoned as nobody showed up for them.

3 of September - Thursday

The second draft of everyone's Extended Essay is due in tomorrow. From what my friends have been telling me and from what I've seen lately, Extended Essay drafts are very similar to the TOK essays. We're given ages to do it (in the case of TOK essays; a month) so people who don't do it immediately end up forgetting about it until the week (or weekend if you're lucky) before it's due when a friend reminds you about it. Then most people react in a "Holy Sxxx" attitude and work their sorry little asses off to get it done. Yeah...this Extended Essay deadline is not the final draft; but people are scrambling to get it done nonetheless.

On a lighter note; we've had a visit from a great friend of ours today! SteVe came by to visit us in the few weeks he has left before he goes back to England to face another brutal term of school. Hell, it's great to have good friends who live abroad suddenly come to visit the school again. In case you're reading this Steve, your surprise visits are awesome! Keep 'em up! And this blog is just as much for you as an ex-student as it is for us current U6.

Basketball game against Chapel today after school. I don't know the results yet again; but here's a photo to inspire you guys.

2 of September - Wednesday

With the Brazilian Independance Day coming up, we had the usual annual Assembly about the important date. It was pretty much the same as every year; an address by the Headmaster, a video about the country, the inspiring speech by Mr. Assis and, finally, the singing of the Hino Da Independência.

We won't have classes on Monday; but we will have them on Tuesday.

It seems our U6 board is going to constantly be under changes. We've had another picture added today. Matheus together with Hugo Chavez. (Matheus is in the place of Evo Morales; well, Matheus is Evo Morales) It looks great. I'll try to put the picture up here some time! No offense meant, of course, Matheus!

Yeah; I also got the scores from yesterday:

Girls won 1x0.

Boys lost 0x3.

1 of September - Tuesday

It seems someone didn't like Megan Fox being put back up again without Michael...she was kidnapped once again. This time, though, there was no random note, and no indication thatshe will ever be put back.

In fact, it almost seems she's been given up on: Matheus put up a picture of his idol Wormtail (Peter Pettigrew) from the Harry Potter series in her place.

We had 2 football games today after school against Graded School. Unfortunately I'm not aware of the results yet. They shall be put up in tomorrow's post.

It seems also that there was history test going on sometime during the day. Apparently, Teti just got up without saying anything, walked up to Mr. Thomas and did the good old "A Pinch and a Punch for the First of the Month". It was random. Random, but brilliant nonetheless.

31 of August - Monday

Economics is usually a good way to start the week; except when we have a test at 8:15 in the morning...well, that's what we get from convincing Mr. Cooper Blanks to put the test forward from Wednesday to the next Monday...

We had a college talk today, we had nuggest for lunch.

Other than that, nothing went on today? What news? No news. Boring...boring day; boring beginning of the week.

Oh...by the way; today's word of the day is Quizzical.

27 of August - Thursday

Probably the most interesting thing that happened today was the confusion over lunch. We had grilled chicken today, but many people thught it was strogonoff. Others thought it was Chicken Nuggets.

Let me clear up the confusion:

• We'll have strogonoff tomorrow,
• and chicken nuggets on Monday.

Other than that, not much happened; so I'll just stick a random photo down here...

26 of August - Wednesday

At many points last year, when we were in the Lower 6, we had periods when we were locked out of our centre. These periods lasted from a couple of hours to a couple of days. These depended on both Mr. Thomas's mood and what exactly we did to deserve the punishment.

Well, suffice to say that our messing around started today when we decided to play some Dodgeball indoors. The game didn't seem to last very long after I was hit in the face by Steiner soon after the start of it. Anyway, Lucas put the ball away soon after, and that was that.

We pretty much had a normal day today with the exception of another UBC visit. Few people attended as it was pretty much dedicated to people actually wanting to apply there. A lot of questions were answered and the guest speaker was brilliant and charismatic.

Oh and by the way....battered fish is just another fancy name for "Fish a la Milanesa". It's getting rather annoying Sodexho trying to trick us into thinking there's new food when all there is are new names for old food...