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Finish the endo final exam just now. It was tough in a sense that we had to memorize about 16 pages of notes WORD BY WORD. It was certainly a daunted task for me, because I didn’t start memorizing the notes till two days ago!!! Well, guess what…I memorized all of them word by word eventually. The exam started at 2pm and last for 3 hours, and I didn’t finish writing the exam until 20min to 5pm. I swear I wrote as fast as I could…non-stop!!! Still by the time I finished it, I only had 20min left. My hand got sored afterwards.

I remember the last time I memorized everything is way back in junior high school in Taiwan. Academics in Taiwan is very different from western education system. I had to memorize word by word of every single textbook from grade 7 to grade 9 in classes of Mandarin, History, Geography, and Citizenship & Morality. That would be a total of 24 textbooks (one book per semester, two semesters per year, for 3 years) with every single word memorized. The memorization went to the extent that I would know the locations of certain paragraphs and/or picture on a page and where that page is approximately located in a textbook and in which textbook. This is particularly so for History and Citizenship & Morality textbooks, and perhaps Mandarin textbooks too. I still remember I have dreams occasionally (even now!) where I suddenly cannot remember what the next paragraph is, I know how the paragaphs look like but can’t recall the exact words. You can tell….that period of my life affected me very deeply. There were also other courses that didn’t require word-by-word memorization such as English, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Health Education, Biology, General Sciences, etc. However, memorization in these subjects were still quite extensive, though not word by word. So, why did I have to memorize in these subjects? Because there was a provincial exam after grade 9 before admissions to senior high school. That exam scores would serve as the basis to decide which schools a student could attend. Certainly, everyone wanted to go to a good senior high school, so the competition was fierce. And thus the reason why I had to memorize so much stuff from grade 7 to 9. That was then. Now I’m old and probably won’t be able to remember that much. Good to know that I could still memorize 16 pages of text in 2 days.

And…guess what, the endodontics instructor Dr. Donald Yu didn’t provide us any pizza during the exam!!! Of course, no pizza, because if there were, everyone wouldn’t be able to finish the exam till 10pm. No kidding!

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