Once upon a time, I was a passionate, enthusiastic, and knowledgable student. At least I thought I was pretty damn intelligent anyway. See, where I live, it works like this - there's these things called "selective schools". Bascially, "selective high schools" are a public school, only people in the final year of primary school are required to take a test to get into these "selective schools" based on their intelligence. I got in, at the time I thought I was lucky. Now, 5 years on, in my 2nd last year at the shithole I go to,I feel like I've been cursed. I've been put in a school with people who are so much more smarter than I am, and were somehow "born with natural abilities to write essays, reports, recite maths formulas backwards and do other crazy nerd-like activites".
Today, I have finally had enough of my school, and have decided to come forward with this. I used to look down on oter public, non-selective schools, but now I just want to be there so I'd feel smarter among them! Then I think to myself, maybe even if I joined them, I'd still feel dumb...
Anyway! What drove me to be so angry and have to "speak out" about the bloody head teacher of English is basically...because it's just gone way too far this time!
Think of it this way, you guys have every reason to feel sorry for me: I go to an all girls school, I have an unrelible, unrealistic, uncaring-but-pretends-to-care years advisor who has no idea what the hell is going on (he told our grade "once I had a dream, and then it turned into a nightmare"), I have a hypocritcal deputy principal that threatens about everything school related and even school unrelated - he tells us we have to listen to the "advice" given by the teachers to drop subjects, but we should keep all our subjects as "safety nets". What the hell? Can't teachers just come up with one point & stick to it? Okay, maybe it's not so bad after all. If you have worse stories of why your school is more slack, crap, evil, discouraging, please let know asap!
Let me have my bitch about the English department of our school for this article. My grade has had like 5 year meetings these past 2 weeks (just concerning english!!), just to be told how crap we all are and how we should all being doing the standard english course. There's 2 things wrong with doing standard english: it scales badly, being 114 out of 120 for favourable scaling, and its STANDARD english, what a dent in our egos! Or what's left an of an ego anyway. Then the head teacher, (the only reason her being the head teacher of the english dept is because she's the president of some united english teachers federation - big whoop! If she was so damn wonderful why the hell is she a teacher? Plus, from what I hear, she's never in the class teaching her class either...) tells us all that people will be chosen and told to do standard english, and perhaps any extensions of english that we take as a subject. Immediately, I felt like she hit me as the target audience. I haven't been doing that well in english this year, and not many people have been either so this of course was upsetting news. See, what angers me MOST is that this haughty taughty know-it-all of a head teacher, demands that we all do wonderfully, in a selective school environment against the top 10% people in the state, with our entire high school english career being taught nothing!
Seriously, as of day one that I commenced at this selective school, there was never a day where I was taught how to write an essay, or to express myself, or to overanalyse everything! how these other people know, I have no idea. See, there's also this thing called "tutoring" that's quite a popular trend among us selective school people. Obviously it's for those sheep out there who need to be led around all their life and have everything taught to them. This "tutored" people have no brains of their own, their LIFE is schoolwork. They have no social skills because "tutoring" doesn't teach them that. But "tutoring" teaches them everything else. We have these FOBS in our school, who can't even speak the english language properly, but write brilliant essays, speeches etc. I'm not speaking out of my outrageous jealousy here, I'm happy if they get 100/100 for everything they do, but seriously, "tutoring" doesn't teach you about life, it doesn't teach you about making mistakes, or failure, or anything!!! I hope the day they get into uni, and can no longer be tutored for everything. they'll realise where their sorry little lives led them up the wrong path. It leaves us "untutored" people, like me, in an incredibly volatile situation - not only are we being marked/assessed compared to these "tutored sheep", but we, actually having a life and all, are not getting the credit we deserve for writing from our senses and not from what we learnt at "tutoring". It's really disappointing to know...you think you're going to a selective school where you'll be among people you can relate to on a deeper and more intelligent level, but you aren't You're just constantly surrounded by fake people, who know nothing about life, they're just in the school to get their worth out of it, and perhaps conveniently putting the "non-tutored" people down to make themselves feel better. I mean, I don't have a problem with people going tutoring if they need it, if you're struggling to pass a subject, then you need a tutor, no doubt about that! But if you're going tutoring just to be keeping up appearances or something, you're wasting your money, and other peoples lives? Because of these "tutored zombies", I am on the brink of dropping out on my 2nd last year at school which I have just survived this year, and brink of bloody suicide! I hope those damn bitches out there, are sorry for the damage they've caused those people in my school with natural talent and fail misearbly once they go out into the unsheltered world, where there's no tutoring to be seen anywhere!
I found have the strength, somewhere in myself, to continue on, and live through this nightmare, and drop whatever subject the damn head teacher tells me to drop and when I fail it'll be all her fault. And when I fail, I'll prove that there are other ways in life to get a job, recognition and place in society. Maybe I'll sew clothes for a living, maybe I'll become a professional fruit punch caterer, either way, I can't let the stupid english head teacher ruin me at the end of the day! I'll prove to her that I'll make more money than she ever will as the president of some dodgy english teachers association! Let this serve as an inspiration as revenge for all those teachers who hated you! =)
Enought about tutored zombies. I think I have made my point about: how my school expects all this shit from us but never taught us a thing, how our head english teacher sucks and how much I want her dead because she could have been more fucking nice about suggesting to us we're not all that smart, and how too much tutoring can turn you into a zombie and make people like me turn on you too! One more thing about God damn english head teacher...and all other teachers in our school - there are nice & better ways to get the point across to a mass audience. Our English head teacher SCREAMED at us and publicly put us down infront of other teachers. And this is all because our school bombed english last year so the english staff are taking it out on US! If there's any complaint I could make, it would be this - TEACHERS ALWAYS BLAME STUDENTS FOR MISTAKES THAT STUDENTS DID NOT MAKE. Our english teachers never questioned themselves or the useless crap they've been teaching us the past 5 years, but instead blame us for being stupid? That's nonsense!
So my fellow student friends out there, never feel stupid, and its not wrong to blame the teacher (or subject!).
I think that's enough crap from me today. I hope I have made everyone else out there feel better about themselves and not worse, because I am in a pretty damn crap position here. If I ever die, or become psychotic, you all know why. The pressure of life, expectations to become successful and getting into tertiary education. All thanks to my school. Don't think we "smart" people have it easy. It's not easy, especially for those people who do the REAL thinking. Next year (or the end of this one), is my final year, its the big letters HSC (higher school certifcate) that supposededly determine the rest of what lies ahead of me in life. For all those other poor people like me, there's life beyond HSC and I hope that this message has reached you before you thought that your life, was the HSC. Be true to yourself, give the exams all you've got and that's all you can do for yourself. It's more important to have absorbed the learning process, so you can use these skills to help you through life, you'll probably end up a better person than those "tutoring zombies" lurking around the place. There are always alternative paths to take, no matter who says what.
Thanks for listening! Please, feel free to share with me any of your schoolworkload-related traumatic events with me, because I'm always happy to listen and empathise with you and make you feel better with stories of my own pathetic-but-experience-filled life. Good luck!
P.S If you think this was a crap article, I've got news for you - I ALREADY KNOW ITS CRAP! Blame it the english staff who taught me!!! =$ |
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