Not So Objective

English teaches us about subjectivity and objectivity. How much of English is subjective? 110%. English is supposed to be an expression of our thoughts and ideas, is it not? I understand that particular responses like essays have a certain structure that needs to be followed but is the depth of analysis of one teacher the same as another? If I handed Ms Tishler and my English tutor the same essay, would I get the same critique? Would they scrutinise the same details? Would the same elements of my essay be picked at like a dead carcass? No bloody way. Different people look more specifically for certain structural or critical components and bypass others.

Teachers tell us that poetry and creative writing are way to express ourselves, with relevance to the topic being studied of course. Yet, when people hand in their poems, they receive Bs, Cs and lower. A poem is an expression of oneself, are the means of expressive techniques are not good enough? What if the teacher interpreted it wrongly? I understand that some people struggle in communicating their message in an effective manner but I don't know. I guess there is a higher standard for the A range, but who is to say what is an A?! My story is "poorly written"? What if I was doing that on purpose because of my character like friggen Suzanne Collins (or maybe she's just a bad writer)? It's so open and ambiguous. You never know if something you've produced is ever good enough. And who's to say if it is good enough? Do I sound philosophical? Or just stupid? Yeah. Stupid.

At the end of the day, it comes down to what kind of person is marking your HSC paper. If it's an English enthusiast that lives for the language, then congratulations, your work will be judged really harshly. If it's a middle-aged woman who is marking the HSC for the first time, the chances are that she will mark very easily and people that deserve band 5s will get into the band 6 range. If your marker is an old woman and your paper is in the last few hundred of the thousands then congratulations. She probably won't even be reading it properly. At least in maths, there is a wrong and right. There is an order of logic and a solid standard across the board. OR MAYBE THE STRESS OF THE ENGLISH ASSESSMENT IS JUST DOING MY HEAD IN AND I'M GOING CRAZY. Who am I kidding, I was always crazy.

Vietnasleaze

You think you're amazing because you stay up every night reading Wikipedia pages so that the next day, you can interject a random conversation with an obnoxious comment that is completely irrelevant to the topic being discussed? Moreover, you were not even originally a part of the conversation. If I wanted to talk to an asshole, I would have talked to my own. Ew... Anyway. Just because you are somewhat tall, it doesn't give you a status of superiority over the rest of us. It's quite humorous how you think you're so much smarter than everybody else when in actual fact, your low and poor assessment results are an obvious translation of your highly inflated sense of intelligence. Also, why in freak's hell are you hanging out with all these Year 7 and 8 kids? I'm not saying there's anything wrong with them (but then I would be lying for the most part) but does it make you feel accepted, like you finally belong with a bunch of 12 year olds that might as well be your younger siblings? If that's what you need to sleep at night, I respect that (not really). And what is with your walk? You think you're cool because you walk with your arms waving around like you're one of those things outside car dealerships? If you're gonna strut, you could at least strut correctly. My gawd. The fact that you cried when someone called you 'Jenny' makes me cry. Grow a pair and learn to take a joke buddy! And don't patronise me with your "metalanguage" (if you even know what that is) BECAUSE BITCH I GOT TO GRADE 8 IN PIANO TOO ALL RIGHT? Don't call my friend illiterate when he is in the top advanced class and does extension English when you're in some low ass class. ALL RIGHT? Also, you're never gonna get school captain. Just sayin'

Still not over this bull shit.

The Power of Power

Jim Jones was a charismatic man who held loyalty and sacrifice close to his heart. He created The Peoples Temple as a church to help the elderly, homeless, addicts, foster children and those of the like. He believed that a capitalist America caused an unhealthy balance in the world (rich people are too rich, a.k.a communist) and established The Peoples Temple to alleviate as much unfairness from the world as possible. The Peoples Temple seemed like an amazing feat from the outside but on the inside, it was transforming into a cult centralised around Jones himself. As the number of his followers increased, he became infatuated with power and forced everyone to call him "Father" or "Dad" and soon believed himself to be Christ and later proclaimed himself God.

He convinced his followers to move into the remote jungles of Guyana where his "temple" became a place of politics rather than religion. His control became extreme, the living conditions horrible and the people forced to work long hours. The rumours of these conditions reached home and the public rallied for the government to investigate Jones. The government body took a trip into the jungles of Guyana where Jones, heavily induced by drugs which caused paranoia, saw as his demise. He launched an attack against the government and influenced all of his followers to commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced grape juice. He died from a shot to the head, but people aren't sure if it was his own doing or a murder. But this travesty was the largest massacre in American history (not due to natural disasters) until the events of September 11 unraveled.

It really puts power into perspective, huh?

Onions make me cry

You will never know how I feel. How I've been feeling for the past few weeks. I feel like I have to put on a facade of  happiness at school just to show you up. I'm repeatedly forced to adopt a "mask" and my identity is in a constant state of flux. Obviously you in conjunction with Ms Tishler have gotten the better of me.

Perspective

A foggy Dubai taken from the top of the Burj Dubai 829.84m from the ground. It really puts things into retrospect. Individually, it may seem that humans are irrelevant and insignificant bodies of life but collectively, humans are able to build magnificent structures such as the Burj Dubai and even create man made islands. What the actual hell?!

Year 11

This post is long overdue but because I refuse to do any homework tonight due to the fact that I am completely buggered to hell, I shall blog about how the "business end" of our high school life has been for me these first few weeks.

Wow. I did not expect Year 11 to take me off guard the way it did (or has?), I don't even know how to speak English anymore. I received an insurmountable amount of lectures from my teachers and parents ever since I finished SC about how Year 11 would be super hard work, but little did I know that these lectures (for once) contained a large percentage of truth. Day one and we were exposed to the notion of identity, expressive realism and traditional criticism (still don't know what the freak Catherine Belsey was on about but that's another matter) and all this other crap. We were given homework from the get go. And it wasn't even a mere few questions from the textbook. It was "do this whole exercise from what you remember from Year 10 and if you don't remember, too bad, I'll pick on you the next day to answer the question in front of the whole class and if you can't, I'll give you detention." I don't know about everybody else but I remember jack from Year 10 after almost 8 weeks of frolicking around in freedom, NOT thinking about maths. Sorry, Ms Chand. Allocating whole exercises to be completed for the next day is a bit extreme. But that's how every single day of my life has been this school year :( And that's just maths.

Music, SAC, Earth and Env. Science are less intense but still lots of work nonetheless. People think that subjects such as these do not require "hard work" but every single subject in the HSC is equal in worth. I may not be balancing covalent compounds or some shit because I'm practically incapable of doing maths outside of maths class but that doesn't mean that my HSC will be a breeze. I just don't like the connotations that they bring to the table, that is all. But I don't really care.

Everyone's staying up into the wee hours of the night to do homework (not to skype and msn and facebook stalk like the old junior days, sadly) and coming to school, completely drained of life and energy. And it's only the end of week four. Maybe it's just my inability to cope with stress and pressure, but I don't see these years as being very enjoyable. My migraines and all the physical shit I had last year are already beginning to resurface if I don't change something. I think it's time for all of us to grow up and realise that our future is completely and entirely dependent upon our decisions of the now. You will not pass anything if you don't study and work really hard for it. I'm already fretting for the upcoming trigonometry TOPIC test. I never studied for topic tests last year, they were the last thing (if ever) on my mind at all.

The gulf between junior and senior school is incomprehensible, but my friends tend to tell me that I make everything into a melodrama.