5 posts tagged “gcse”
Written with the inspiration of the GCSE Japanese curriculum.
1. Sign up for a (supposedly) government subsidized trip to Tokyo 5 months inadvance.
2. Book time off work.
3. Realise that vast proportion of cost of trip will be funded by parents. Deduce that government footed £25 of the bill that came to over £700.
4. Thank parents and make mental note to return with many gifts.
5. Arrive in Japan and realise that 'Intensive language course' means intensive language course, Japanese style.
6. Spend 7 hours a day in a classroom listening to fellow Geordie students bastardising simple phrases and staring out window.
7. Buy imported American snacks at every opportunity to supplement bread cravings.
8. Master chopsticks.
9. Realise that rice 3 times a day is a little unnecessary.
10. Become aware that cafeteria food in any part of the world is nothing to be jealous of.
11. Gorge self on sushi.
12. Keep feet above hip level on aeroplane.
13. Avoid offending Japanese passengers by showing feet.
14. Arrive home and experience such severe jet-lag that you can no longer stay up past 11.
15. Become aware that Japanese insisted that you learnt imperial Japanese - Watakshi wa Branwen desu - Hello, most honourable respected emperor, my name is Branwen and I am not worthy of you etc etc etc. Watashi wa Branwen desu - Hello, I'm Branwen. Subtle difference.
16. Neglect Japanese studies for several months.
17. Realise oral exam is 2 weeks away and hastily learn standard GCSE phrases - I went to Germany in the summer, I watch TV and listen to the radio in my spare time, and my hobby is tennis.
18. Go into oral exam and assure teacher that at home, in your spare time, you watch TV and listen to the radio. In your summer holidays you also watch TV and listen to the radio. Last half term you watch TV and listen to the radio. If you're a youth in your town, you can always watch TV and listen to the radio. What do you do at christmas (Kurisutumasu)? Why, my whole family watches TV and listens to that radio!
19. Avoid confusing sleep (nomasu) and drink (nomimas). Avoid confusing the two when answering the question, what will you do after your exams.
20. Recall that underage drinking is so frowned upon in Japan that if you are under the age of 20 and caught holding a bottle of something tasty, you can get a fine and spend the night in a cell.
21. Attempt to memorise 200 Kanji (symbols for words - all look the same) in one night. Manage 20 in 3 hours.
22. Scratch head at bizarre attempts of Japanese to make Kanji memorable - see below.
23. Make the chart pictured below your life. Commit all 144 characters to memory. Enjoy the bottom set, Katagana, as these are used to spell out humourous Japanese interpretations of English words e.g. pop star - pop suta. Branwen - Buranuwaenu. Glass - gurasu.
24. Cross fingers and hope for the best
Oh, Religious Studies. How I dislike you. How English you are. How terribly you are taught. How much of a waste of time are you really, and how better could the two hours a week of teaching be spent?
Now, I may be biased (and wouldn't that be a surprise) but I have a grudge against Religious Studies. Does it not, dear reader, conjure up images of fierce and exotic debate between Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, learning about exotic places and strange but wonderful customs? Probably not, if you're English, but it did to me when I moved to England and was told it was mandatory (unless you didn't want to take it, of course. Because that's how it works.) I was naive enough to look forward to a two year course of studying world religions with someone educated (this is when I was still under the impression that Oxford was home to only the pinnacle of academics and there were posh people all over the shop. Laugh not, my dear reader, as most visitors to Oxford are amazed to discover that there is a council estate and whole sections of the city (anywhere out of bounds of Oxford University) that is not posh. Cowley Road, posh, ha.) and well-travelled. Well, that was my first let down. My school has only two teachers, to my knowledge, with doctorates, and neither of them have dedicated themselves to teaching unwilling and surly students about Islam and Christianity. Because those are the only religions you will learn about if you are on the short course (where the other option is taking the full course which is an extra three lessons a week to cover the extra one religion) and you are actively encouraged not to 'bother' to learn about any other religions because 'they're not important.' Well, dear teachers of religion, if religions aren't important, then why, prey, are we here?
The next let down about Religious Studies is that we didn't even read the Qu'ran or the Bible. In fact, I can only produce about 3 or four quotes from each, at a stretch, and only because I crammed them into my head the night before my exam. One of the reasons I was so very excited about Religious Studies was because I am entirely ignorant about all matters of religion. I can count on one hand the number of times I have (resentfully) been present at some form of Church service and do not wish to repeat the experience. Yes, I know absolutely nothing about any religion ever. So I was very much looking forward to reading religious texts and learning why it is that people are religious, even what it means to seemingly depend on someone else to make decisions for you (good old God, eh) and pat you on the head and forgive you if you've buggered something up.
Yet I still remain agnostic. I wasn't exactly looking to learn about religion to become a convert, but it would have been super to have been able to make an educated decision about which religion I would choose to take up should I wish to devote my life to following a mysterious invisible person who seems to live mostly in the sky.
My biggest qualm with Religious Studies, however, is that under the four subject areas we study (general vocabulary (What is Hajj/Who was Jesus etc) belief and suffering (Descibe the importance of akirah/Why might God cause suffering?) life issues (Racism is bad. Explore/I'm Roman Catholic, can I have an abortion?) and planet earth (What does a Muslim person do to make the world better/Why do Christians save dogs) - all of these questions I am always tempted to answer 'Why do they indeed?') we are told, regardless of actual opinion or religious tendencies, what to say.
Religious Studies exams come in the form of a question on each subject area containing two questions and a quote. Upon reaching the quote you must state whether you agree or disagree with it and explain why, citing religious arguments in your answer. For example, this year's question on abortion read 'Women should have the right to choose whether or not they can have an abortion.' Do you agree or disagree? This is where my qualm is: we are all taught to answer this question by saying 'I both agree and disagree with this question for many reasons,' then go on to state these many reasons, quoting the Qu'ran ('Slay not your children') and the Bible ('Thou shalt not kill') to get your damned A. Now admittedly, I wrote this in my exam paper too, because I want my damn A, but my hand pressed so hard into my answer paper as I wrote it that it made a small hole. Personally, I think abortions are super, bring on the abortions, all over the shop etc. but I am told not to write this because 'I won't do well.' As a student who wants to achieve this 'doing well' thing we all seem to want, I am actively encouraged to put aside my own morals and beliefs (for someone who has remarkably few, I find this particularly insulting) in an exam about morals and beliefs and answer the regulation GCSE answer to prove I am an intelligent person. It's a qualm alright.
Religious Studies is one of those subjects they teach you when you're at teenager - apart from at some hippy schools where you learn 'citizenship' instead. I do
not know what 'citizenship' is and neither do I wish to learn, it sounds ridiculous and like some sort of police exam but boring - so they can slip in things like prejudice and abortion without being overly patronising (so they say) and giving us information about such things. This is handy because, at a multi-ethnic school you sadly get quite a bit of racism (most of it from the students but a surprising amount comes from teachers too) and equally sadly, quite a few abortions. But telling us what to think,
telling us how to answer a question masquerading interest in your own opinion so we can get full marks on a half-GCSE (no, I don't know what a half GCSE means either) course that no one particularly cares about as they know what a sham it is.
Finally, since I have sat my exam and will never need to discuss it go to a lesson in it again, my last problem was that I didn’t get along with the teacher. Now, I am not a person to be rude to teachers, ever. Even when I have a problem with something (and I usually do) I address it in a polite way or get my mum to ring up and shout. I managed to get off on the wrong foot with her when I first arrived at the school because in practise exam papers, I ignored the regulation form of answering and the fact that we were to only write about Islam and Christianity, writing instead long winded and inventive answers concerning mostly Buddhism. Teacher did not like this and failed my paper. Bran did not like this and asked teacher why. A heated and infuriating argument later, I was told I would have gotten maximum C for this paper because it did not contain any religious quotes to back up my arguments. She didn't give me a C to begin with because, I discovered later, she did not know anything about Buddhism and therefore could not be sure any of my information was correct. Considering that my entire knowledge of the religion comes from reading Alec Le Seuer’s 'Running a Hotel on The Roof of the World - 5 years in Tibet' I was not impressed. Most of it was made up anyway – in fact, if I remember correctly, I recall the bulk of my essay was comparing the Buddhism belief in committing good deeds to the Tesco points card system. Utter bullshit but it entertained me as I wrote it. Teacher goes on to publicly humiliate me by discussing my exam flaws throughout the next year of lessons, something which I found quite unfair and demeaning.
She teamed this with my frequent disregard for wearing the hideous school jumper and instead one of my own and accused me of
being pretentious and thinking I was too good for the school. She suggested I would be better off at a private school and threatened to send many a letter home. As far as I know, they never arrived, and what they would have said I would have read with glee:
'Bran has been causing trouble in lessons and we would like to exclude her from this school. We suggest a private establishment with fees for at least £20,000 a year to solve her incessant jumper wearing and small knowledge of religions outside the syllabus.'
The Religious Studies GCSE seems to be seriously flawed, yet they've been teaching it for decades. Is it only recently they've decided to tell us what to think and say about religion, or is it just standard to be unsure on all issues concerning it? Can we 'both agree and disagree' with anything these days, provided we quote the Qu'ran and Bible? Being a keen debater, I find this sort of wishy washy nonsense intolerable and boring. If I were one of the poor souls marking exams this summer, I'd much rather read a paper saying why you were/weren't strongly apposed to abortion/prejudice/being nice to dogs than the same unsure-but-I've-quoted-two-different-sources-so-give-me-my-A-please paper three hundred times.
Well I have the solution. Let me write the examination paper. Hell, let me write the syllabus. You can't need any real authority to do this, surely, and the pay is
very good. If, at university, we are required to think for ourselves and not copy down what our teachers tell us is the right answer, as we are told so frequently, wouldn't it be a good idea to start preparing people now? I liked my Buddhism is a Tesco points card system - it probably could have been vastly improved (or perhaps disproved) with a bit of research but I'd accept myself into university with it. (Cue the righteous sounding superman-theme-tune type music please) So perhaps this is my new ambition: to change the standards of GCSEs so students can write what they think, not what they're told, to allow teenagers across the country to talk about what they believe, not what they're told to believe, to allow everyone to learn to speak freely in our modern democracy, and most importantly, to abolish GCSE Religious Studies
(short course) and replace it with something more useful like science. I'm going to be a doctor you know.
Woe is me. Woe is, in fact, all of us. Everyone is gloomy. Even as I wrote that the cat bit my foot. She too is gloomy.
January is a terrible month. Nothing to look forward to, it's just cold, gloomy, and wet. This year it's been windy and our garden fence has blown down. I had a wonderful Marx Brothers' mirror moment with the neighbour this weekend, when we were both outside on the patio having a cup of tea and slowly turned our heads to realise that, since a massive chunk of fence is now missing, we could see each other. He nodded at me, looked disapprovingly at my mismatched socks, and went inside. It was the first recognition I have received from him since moving in in September. Hmph.
It's strange to find that after having spent five gruelling winters in Lithuania, where temperatures can drop to -30 and the snow freezes in gray, dirty lumps on the side of the pavement, SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) never affected me as much as it does in England. I suppose this is because England is wet and soggy. And there's nothing worse than having to lug yourself up the hill to school in the morning, in the cold and wet, to spend 6 hours dragging yourself through lessons that are becoming increasingly uninspiring as the GCSE curriculum draws to a close and exam pressure is mounting up. Then you slump home with wet shoes and socks (what would Mary Poppins say?) to find the house a mess, the oven broken, the heating off, and there's no tea. Suddenly it's the end of the world and all you want to do is go to bed at 4 in the afternoon.
Twenty minutes later you sulk your way back downstairs, bed having bored you and you've lost your place in your book.
You then spend the rest of the evening slumped in front of the computer or TV, trying to think of something worthwhile to do with your time, then avoiding it. I have successfully put off an increasingly necessary trip into the city centre (a 10 minute bus ride) away for two weeks now. I choose to blame the month. Even our amusing Edward Monkton calendar doesn't want to cheer me up. January features the Potato of Doom.
January days even seem to last twice as long. Good gig season doesn't begin till February, neither does my birthday. January punishes me by making each second twice as long, so no matter how many times I check the date, it's never February. Sigh.
Even one of my favourite cold day pasttimes, sitting in bed listening to comedy on Radio 4 or jazz, while knitting and sipping tea (very hard to do at the same time, don't try it) doesn't cheer me up. Jazz is good for gloom, but when gloom is already present it's just cruel. Going out seems pointless, as it's too cold. Staying in is boring. There's no middle ground, and everyone else is just as depressed. As I mentioned at the start of the article, even the animals get it. Poor Nibbles the cat is fed up of it being too cold to go out; all her favourite plants to chew on are frozen or dead and her rival mogs are shut up inside in front of the fire.
Short of emigrating to Australia for the cold season, there is no cure for SAD. So I beg of you, before things get really bad and I start writing on this thing more than twice a day, send help. And chocolate.
As friends and avid readers of this wondrous blog may know, Suz and I have just finished with two weeks of mock exams. This means either cramming or relaxing the night before, then being shunted into a large, cold hall by means of a calling out of numbers system, not dissimilar to those used by airlines who still assign seat numbers.
Once seated in seemingly endless rows of identical maroon jumpers, we write our little hands off, scribbling out all we know, between finger-stretching breaks and craning round the room to check nervously if everyone else is still writing furiously, looking much cleverer than you. Then we are dismissed, only to be sent home to cram/relax for the next one. If you’re lucky (or unlucky, in my case) you might finish the odd exam a few minutes early, and have time to look around the hall, at the rows and rows of students and think about how you’re just a number…
What I mean by this is that every GCSE student is identified by a four digit number. And as our tests are sent off to be read by examiners up and down the country, or by computers, nothing matters but that number. While organisationally beneficial, it’s rather demeaning, don’t you think? If you’re not a number in the sense of identification then you’re a number as a statistic – GCSE trends printed in the media. If the nation has done well, then the tests are too easy – your innocent little test mark is turned into a shameful signature of the country’s future university-bound generation. If the nation’s marks are poor, then we’re all thick. Being reduced to a number is not flattering.
Also making us (or at least me) feel very small and insignificant (despite the fact that we’re constantly being told that our GCSE results will determine our future university placements, salaries, even partners) is being presented with the grade boundaries with phrases expected to be used for model answers for each exam. At this I regret to say I threw a small fit of indignance, guffawing at the insult of being expected to perform my English exam using a series of practised phrases and terms, when surely the point of English is to study literature and learn to express individuality through writing? How are we supposed to flourish and become individuals at a time when change and opinion is rife within us when we're expected to learn the answer for an original writing piece? What has education, nay, the world come to if we cannot express ourselves without first consulting a revision guide? Is this reasonable, I ask you? Is this education?!
On
a calmer (but no less worrysome) note, being a GCSE student is often a
confusing thing. One minute we're being told that we should work our
little knuckles to the grindstone, or we'll never succeed in life -
whatever that is, and the next it's a 'Just get those five crucial A to
Cs and you'll be fine, kids!' We're also comforted by teenage-help
agencies telling us that the second we turn 16, government issued child
support will end, we'll be a burden to our parents and we'd damn well
better think about getting a job. Oh, it's a confusing time for us all.
I’ve just done 20 sides of A4 on revision notes, which is how I learn best, and while I fully intend to recycle these papers, I cannot help but despair at what a waste it is. A thousand revision guides are printed and then discarded after use, millions of exam papers themselves, thrown away after each student has completed them. Would it not be more practical for exams to take place on a special program on a computer? In this high tech and modern world, not to mention one that needs to change its outlook to waste and recycling.
On a brighter note, my obsession with saving everything is a huge benefit to some things, such as doing the supermarket shopping online – I have cut the total average price by about £20, wahey! Turning off lights, switching off my computer at night rather than putting it on standby, and doing all my washing at 30 degrees rather than 40, and closing windows when the heating is on are all good, eco-friendly things. But since economising has now become a way of life, I am now economising by instead of erasing a whole string of text when I changed my mind on what to type, I now “save” several letters, to avoid writing them again, thus saving my fingers vital typing energy. Additionally, I will re-use the same tea mug up to eight times a day, rinsing it sparsely, of course, between uses, in the thought that ‘there’s no need to use all our mugs when I can just recycle the same one over and over again!’ Economising has indeed become a mindset.
I grit my teeth as I write this, as my mother has just pointed out I’ve left my bedroom light on. The woman doesn’t understand that I was just about to turn it off. Obviously.
I was also thinking about how one can economise ones’ brain cells. Being a teenager, I know the lyrics to a thousand songs, I can spout celebrity gossip I hear on the radio, and can name most of my friends’ subject timetables. If only, I thought, as I tried to cram eight weeks’ worth of chemistry lessons into my head one afternoon, if only there was a way of removing such unnecessary information from my long term memory and instead replacing it with chemistry. Not permanently, obviously, as I need to know who will be available for texting when I am bored in my design technology lessons (L, who has art), the words to every Paolo Nutini song, and how many times Pete Dougherty has been arrested. But it would be useful to periodically empty out my brain and fill it full of marginally more useful things – if only for a few hours at a time. I long for the days when information can be implanted in one’s brain by means of a USB memory bar, and can be deleted or stored as necessary. Until then, the old pen and paper method will have to do…
