The Advanced English course is a croc of shit. If the Daily Telegraph wants to get up in arms about wasted tax funding on the Cross City Tunnel then surely this throwing of money into the black hole of apparent intellectualism should raise an eyebrow.
There is not one thing in the Adv. Eng. course that will be of any use to anyone. Ever. Unless they plan on becoming an Adv. Eng. teacher.
It seems that the people that do well in English are those that can bend over backwards to lick their own buttholes and recite bullshit about omnicience and sensationalism without actually understanding these concepts. In Term 3 of Year 11 a girl in my class who both at the time and now is ranked about 2nd or 3rd out of 65, raised her hand and earnestly asked: "Miss, what's allegory?" They should have sent her to ESL there and then! This, from someone that is apparently a top 5 student is shameful. It's not her fault, but the fault of the teaching staff and the Board of Studies for not having in place a syllabus that actually teaches people the fundamentals of the English language, but rewards rewriting an essay prepared for you by the teacher about a shit film that you wouldnt normally ever watch anyway.
Then, more recently, another person who at the time was ranked at 3rd or 4th in our cohort got up and delivered a speech about Frontline for an Oral task, and pronounce "hyperbole" as "hyperbowl". I was affronted. Here we were, having the English language made a mockery of, by someone who our teachers claim is superior to us in the "Advanced English course". Clearly they are making a distinction between the English Course, and actually being able to read or write. Furthermore, this can't even be dismissed as being a simple mistake of reading through an unknown text and overlooking a small nuance in pronounciation. No!. She wrote the bloody thing herself... Which gives her two options to excuse her faux pas. Either she plagiarised it and overlooked it, OR she never knew how to pronounce it in the first place. Yes, I'm sure people will say it's an honest mistake, but really and truly! We don't go around accidentally pronouncing "picturesque" as "pictureskew" do we?! No. We just bloody know some things about our language. Some on the other hand, DON'T.
This wouldn't be all to bad, except it's these goons that are getting honours marks for their apparent ability.
I can't wait for these idiots to enter the real world and find that when they run into difficulty there wont be an over-the-hill, tarted up English teacher there to mollycoddle them and bail them out with another annotated essay that they could use. And what a shock it will be for them when they realise that prospective employers actually couldn't give a toss about their opinions on the opening sequence of Bladerunner...unless of course they're an English Head of Dep...and so it goes on...the vicious cycle of ignorance stupidity and pre-prepared essay writing.
It's a crying shame this farce has been allowed to go on as long as it has.
