why english, and why standard?
I guess this post will be about how much english drags me down, and a bit of introduction of myself. As an Introduction, I'm Yose, a 17 years old student from Concord High School, Australia, who just happened to be very bored and out of my mind when I decided I'll start to write my own Blog.
In Australia, most people knows that to get to a good university and get a good course in it, first thing needed is a good UAI. That stands for University Admission Index (I'm explaining this people who aren't familiar). University admission index is basically a mark that is based on your performance on high school, and the Higher School Certificate test.
In high school, students gets to choose what subject they want, and the selection range is rather vast. Different subjects have different "scaling", or "boost-up" marks, depending on their difficulty. This means, if a student takes a hard subject, he is more likely to end up with a higher mark than a student who chose an easy subject. Higher mark means higher HSC test mark, which means higher UAI, which means easier entry to university, which means better life, yada yada yada..
You'd expect every student take the hardest available subjects to increase their marks. Top-university-course hunters typically chooses chemistry, extension 2 maths (the highest), physics, english extension etc, while people who are more "relaxed" chooses easier subjects.
Sounds like a wonderful system? There's a catch: You have to do at least standard english, or any other higher english. Sure, people may first think that english is easy, and would be a pretty fun course, but I'd have to say otherwise.
Last year, teachers handed us students a paper, which asks what subject you wanted to choose. I still remember that I'd be committing a sin to myself if I chose english standard. Fair enough, I chose english advanced course as one of my subjects, along with chemistry, physics, and extension 2 maths. Well that makes me a top-uni-course hunter, but maybe with the exception that I hate english, and I've been in the "rather bottom" class before this happened.
To my surprise, I was in a standard class. I wondered why, and went around asking teachers, but I never got a decent explanation. This may not seem like a serious situation, because all you need to do is fill out a form to move to an advanced class.
Maybe one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made during my "school career", was the fact that I never really asked for a form to move to the english Advanced class. At that time the friends over at english standard were telling me to stay, and it seems to be a pretty nice class anyways. Except that I had this feeling that the current teacher hates me, and I just happened to hate her as well.
The reason? Maybe because I have always been bad in such a way that she always seems to give lengthy lectures all the time to me. That is another reason that prevented me from moving to an advanced class, I feel really lazy talking to my english teacher, that at the time happened to be the head teacher of the english department as well. But because her husband died, she had to leave the school for some times.
So there I was, stuck in a english classroom, not knowing of the peril to come. People were telling me how english advanced students only get to do a *bit* more work than english standard students, but the scaling scheme for HSC is very different. Those kinds of words are really depressing, to tell the truth.
One day, I went across a renegade internet forum for students, that has a specific focus on the HSC and it's subjects. I found this forum wonderful, it really provided me with a lot of information. Here is the place I discovered many information about the HSC, marking schemes and materials to study.
I paid a visit to the english standard forum, and was rather annoyed at the discussion topics fellow student forumers posted. "Is english standard crappy?", "english standard scales you low", "I shouldn't have dropped from advanced" etc. Naturally, when a person is doing english standard sees this thing, that person is bound to see what the discussion is all about. And so did I.
Inside were found lengthy discussions on scaling schemes of english standard, how it scales you down, and how much points by it could drop your UAI to. If I call the title horror, then the contents would be most fittingly described as "apocalyptic".
Inside the discussion, many other forum members posted their reactions about how in english standard it is almost impossible to get to band 6 (that's 90% subject mark for you), and how you have to work extremely hard to get them. Of course, there are people saying that nothing is impossible, but as I go along the discussion, it seems that it's only wishful thinking. I kept going on the discussion hoping that something good about english standard will be said, about how it doesn't really scale you down, or how it's not that bad compared to english advanced. But that wishful thinking turned into a feeling of despair, and maybe I have to accept the fact that I won't really get high HSC mark for english.
But in that discussion, a noticable post came up, and says that if you do an essay a week, you can really get those marks going. I don't know why, but this may sound very full of hope, but I was really thinking about it. Maybe if I could write one essay a week the 90s HSC mark for english would come. Maybe if I put more effort into english I could get away from the english scaling dillemma and pull off a decent mark.
That's a reason I wrote this essay. One of my first essays to be published in the internet. Maybe my worst, but it has my perspective on english courses. The essay I hope will change everything about english, and my views on it.
Well, the situation is not that bad now anyways. The old teacher left, and I got a new english teacher which just happens to look much more tolerant and more willing to give help. The english class is pretty small, only 15 people, and it seemed that the class has changed to a much better class after the old teacher left. Is it really the old teacher being unable to control the class, or me associating the class atmosphere and teacher's hostility?
Anyhow, I think resentment on past mistake is useless, and it's more constructive to repair past mistakes and preventing them. Off to the next essay.. next week!
