my cohort was unlucky because we had to change english adv/extension teachers three times throughout year 12, so we changed our list of prescribed texts twice. the teacher we finished the year with is very experienced with teaching hsc english, she taught at a top 10 school before coming to ours + marked the hsc many times whereas our teachers before were competent but less experienced. this is important for my point because our last teacher told us her strategy with picking prescribed texts strategically to our advantage.
our first teacher initially picked common mod: merchant of venice, mod a: keats/bright star, mod b: an artist of the floating world. while she was at our school she only taught us merchant of venice; by the time term 1 came around we had a different teacher who changed our mod b text and taught us ts eliot instead of artist of the floating world. then our last teacher came in term 2 and changed our mod a texts to the stranger/the meursault investigation.
our last teacher explained to us that she wouldve not chosen merchant of venice not because it’s difficult or popular but because she thinks it’s not a text that high schoolers should be studying lol, but for ts eliot she says she really wishes our second teacher didnt choose to teach it because it’s the most popular one and therefore harder to get higher marks in due to there being so many good responses both from past years and from other kids that study it at top ranking schools. which would hold us to a much higher standard than if we studied a less competitive text. for this reason she chose for us to study a much less popular one (stranger/mersault investigation) purely because less students study it and we have a better chance at offering less overused insights in our essays. she said if she could have taught less popular common mod and mod b texts then she absolutely would have, but the circumstances were just not in our cohort’s favour.
unfortunately on top of our school being pretty weak academically, us having to change teachers 3 times did not bring us good hsc results despite the mod a “strategy.” i was ranked first in english internally and just barely got a band 5, most kids in my class got band 3s. even so, you could say there is an advantage to doing less popular texts over the popular ones, though the popular ones are popular for a reason. plus, it is way harder to find good resources for stranger/meursault investigation compared to tempest/hagseed. so there are benefits and drawbacks to both. but our teacher’s conclusion is that the less popular texts give us a better chance to do well in.
questioning their experience