I don't see why we're sposed to analyse texts from the feminist, marxist etc perspective (not that it matters now). This has been an issue of debate in politics since someone accused the cirriculum of being Left-wing. If this doesn't make people realise that when you talk to someone you don't weed out every little piece of verbal meaning imaginable along with their posture and the rest of the misen'scene then nothing will.
I always suspected the English course was a crock, just a way to make the gov't look like it's upping the average IQ of the common man (or woman) or making typical conversations more interesting, but I have yet to discover a profession besides professional critic that requires the level of mutilation of texts that we have just learnt.
It's not just me who thinks that studying texts in all these ways that authors never intended destroyed the experience of reading/viewing the text, is it?
When I told my Enlgish teacher that I didn't have to finish the HCS to get where I wanted to go, she simply asked me: "then why are you here?". This is when it finally clicked that not only is the point of school void of learning for the sake of learning, but it's new point is to present students as a marketable product of the business that are schools. What happened to mankind's thirst for knowledge?
At my school we are always compared to a famous student in the length of our responses, and this English-loving girl could write a lined A4 page in 2 minutes, and it takes most of us 10. She got the highest UAI my school's history, a 99.8, and has been the benchmark to which our teachers compare us ever since.
I ask you, is this helpful? She was obviously one in a million, but is tragically only remembered because she was good at schoolwork.
For those of you doing Modern History and Weimar Germany, this stuff is gold! It tells us how things ended up the way they did, why they did, who stuffed up where and also gives a good idea of how Iraq will wrap up. Facts, people! Board-approved facts!
I know I won't be the only one feeling a bit put out if i never have to use my hard-learnt English skills again after all this hoo-ha.
