OK, so now we've finished it. What did you think of Adv. Eng.?
To me it seemed incredibly flawed, and mostly useless. The only useful part of it was studying the effect that context has on a text. The rest is meaningless babble, and to go well you have to regurgitate exactly the same interpretation of the text as everybody else and write in a way that will "please" the HSC markers.
The "analysis" that we are asked to perform is useless and shallow, because of those crappy little gimmicks they want us to abide by. "Journeys", "In the Wild" that kind of stuff. Wouldn't it be far more rewarding for us to study a few really great texts in detail (not through some narrow scope like "journeys"), instead of learning to crap on and on about tiny aspects of almost 10 different texts and being expected to analyse all of them to an acceptable degree in two hours? Take "A Brave New World" for example... Excellent text. It's impossible to even scratch the surface of its depth and meaning in 20 minutes of writing about it (assuming the other 20 was on Blade Runner), you could spend a whole 3 hour exam just on Brave New World and still have plenty you didn't mention. Why are we forced to be shallow? Why must we omit true meaning from our writing?
Should those capable of meaningful analysis be forced to dumb down their responses so that the rest of the state can catch up? There should at least be some sort of alternative to this compulsory course other than english extension, which is merely an addition to it.
Does anyone agree? Disagree?
(Just as a bit of background, my assessment results for english were erratic, spanning from 12% to 100%. I've received all kinds of feedback, from "Do not write poems" and "Your entire response was extremely flawed" right to the other end of the spectrum (I wont say the exact comments). My rank is 65/104.)
To me it seemed incredibly flawed, and mostly useless. The only useful part of it was studying the effect that context has on a text. The rest is meaningless babble, and to go well you have to regurgitate exactly the same interpretation of the text as everybody else and write in a way that will "please" the HSC markers.
The "analysis" that we are asked to perform is useless and shallow, because of those crappy little gimmicks they want us to abide by. "Journeys", "In the Wild" that kind of stuff. Wouldn't it be far more rewarding for us to study a few really great texts in detail (not through some narrow scope like "journeys"), instead of learning to crap on and on about tiny aspects of almost 10 different texts and being expected to analyse all of them to an acceptable degree in two hours? Take "A Brave New World" for example... Excellent text. It's impossible to even scratch the surface of its depth and meaning in 20 minutes of writing about it (assuming the other 20 was on Blade Runner), you could spend a whole 3 hour exam just on Brave New World and still have plenty you didn't mention. Why are we forced to be shallow? Why must we omit true meaning from our writing?
Should those capable of meaningful analysis be forced to dumb down their responses so that the rest of the state can catch up? There should at least be some sort of alternative to this compulsory course other than english extension, which is merely an addition to it.
Does anyone agree? Disagree?
(Just as a bit of background, my assessment results for english were erratic, spanning from 12% to 100%. I've received all kinds of feedback, from "Do not write poems" and "Your entire response was extremely flawed" right to the other end of the spectrum (I wont say the exact comments). My rank is 65/104.)