Back from the HSC

Hello again!

I have been absent for a long time, due to the HSC. But I'm finished now, and hopefully will be studying a Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications) next year. I'll find out on January 16.

Having just done it, I've been thinking a lot about the HSC lately, and its place in education. I loved my school subjects, but I wonder whether I have actually learnt that much this year. So many fascinating things that I heard in the classroom had to be pushed out of my brain to make room for completely memorising a few pages of summary notes in preparation for the exams. Much of what we learnt over the last twelve months was condensed into 40-minute essays. A term’s worth of learning about a Shakespearean classic was turned into six neat paragraphs, and these paragraphs are used to help decide whether or not we gain entry to the courses we want to do at university.

I have always loved learning, and it saddens me that the HSC makes some people hate learning so much. Of course, I understand that there is a need for some form of examination to make sure students actually deserve university placements, but I fear that this is at the expense of enjoyment of the fact that we can learn.

In Australia, we get to go to school for all of our childhoods, if we want. Now that it's compulsory until 17, most kids spend thirteen years at school, and public education makes it accessible even to the less fortunate. However, just a few hours away in countries such as Fiji, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, very few children have this privilege. My family sponsored some school students in Vanuatu to help them with their education - without this, they would have left school at fourteen, and never had any other formal education.

I don't write this to sing the praises of my family but to express just how blessed we are in Australia. Which is why the emotional effects of the HSC sometimes worry me. Exams leave students so anxious and upset that they find it incredibly easy to completely forget how lucky they are to be educated, and to learn so much.

I know it's hard - I've done it! But for future HSC students, I encourage you to try your best to remember how lucky you are, even if you are so stressed you can't sleep. You'll feel better about education, and you will value your time at school for more than the marks it gives you.

Why this girly-girl loves heist movies

I am a really girly girl. I hate blood (as in can't even watch movies with fake blood without hiding and/or screaming), am a member of a beauty website, watch beauty gurus on YouTube, spend up to an hour doing my hair to get ready for parties, wear dresses all the time and have four different conditioners in my shower.

And yet, I love heist movies. (Bloodless ones.) I watched one a few weeks ago with my boyfriend and his family, Man on a Ledge, and loved it. I can't help it.

It's not the shooting that I love, or even the action scenes, really, but the idea of planning something to such detail, to distracting authorities, and to getting away with something so extraordinary. Man on a Ledge had a really complicated plot and heaps of little details that only got revealed at the end, leaving me sitting on the lounge with my teeth clenched and this silly little smile on my face. The same reaction when I watched Catch that Kid with Kristen Stewart when I was 12.

Producers make their movies for people like me, for people who want to be swept away by an extraordinary scheme. Hints of comedy are thrown in to please the masses and a lack of gore means that this is a widely accessible genre for a wide audience, from young teens to the elderly.

I think what gets me most is that heist films appeal to the imagination. Everyone wants to be as strong and smart and sexy as the robbers, getting back at the criminalised elite and winning one for the underdog. Every girl (secretly) has had at least a tiny desire to squeeze into a catsuit do some extraordinary action scene wearing 4-inch heels and with not a hair out of place. It grows from the spy-play that so many children enjoy (I made secret computers in the middle of my notebooks by drawing screens and keyboards and my Password Journal was one of my favourite possessions) but also from a desire to be a little more impressive that the average. Why this expresses itself in a desire to commit major felonies, I don't know. Real life crime is much less glamorous. 

The problem with gendered language

In Extension English, I study the elective 'Language and Gender'. Basically, it talks about how men and women are supposed to use certain types of language, because of their gender. We also talk about the difference between sex and gender, but let's not go there right now...

According to the 'Language and Gender theorists' that we study, and the way that we look at things, any language that does not comply to the expectations of the theorists is a subversion. I'm still deciding whether I think this is the best way to look at things. Actually no, I know I don't think this is the best way. I think there is one main problem with applying theories to something like gendered language.

If we state that something is 'typically male' or 'typically female', we automatically apply stereotypes. Stereotypes limit. So women apparently lack a sense of humour, according to Robin Lackoff... what about female comedians? What about all the hilarious girls I know who make me laugh everyday? Heck, sometimes I try and be funny on my blog... does that mean I've been really unfunny just because I'm a girl? And men apparently use more commands, according to Deborah Tannen. So does that mean women can't be commanding?

The most interesting theory states that language is a system that sustains the male as the norm - so basically, women can never get ahead because language upholds male power.

In the past, I definitely can see how this was relevant. But now that we've replaced chairman with chairperson, mankind with humankind etc., I don't really see how this can possibly be relevant, unless we accept the stereotypes that the L+G theorists create and which we surprisingly all seem to hold despite never having heard of Tannen or Lackoff or Keith and Shuttleworth...

The main point of my post today is that we are being taught this in Year 12, just before going out into the "real world". So this is one of those things that will probably stick with us after we leave school, given how much we are studying this course and memorising all the theories to use in our essays. When we first started this course, I was pretty affronted that every HSC student's best friend, the beloved Board of Studies, wished us to learn about what were basically, in their most basic forms, stereotypes. Sophisticated ones, sure, but stereotypes nonetheless.

Now I'm starting to think that perhaps the BoS might have manipulated us just a tiny bit... because none of us believe these theories. Maybe that was the intention all along? Maybe the BoS wants us to think about the truth in stereotypes and learn not to believe this theorists?

You sneaky Board of Studies...

Ten years from now

What did the zero say to the eight?

“Nice belt.”

NO! STOP LAUGHING! I want to tell you something really alarming.

Ten years from now, when we’re all 25 or 26, and maybe considering kids (or already parents!) laughter may not even exist anymore! Instead of you sitting there in your seat, laughing at my awful joke, the kids and teenagers of ten years from now will just be saying ‘lol’.

I’m quite serious. Already, people have started to use this internet-founded expression of amusement in real life, along with other expressions such as ‘rofl’.

There’s just something about hearing people laugh that makes us laugh! Lots of the time, we may not even understand something someone has said, but other people laugh, so we laugh. It’s contagious.

Ten years from now, it’s quite likely that laughter won’t even exist! Kids won’t laugh at the jokes their trying-to-be-funny peers tell them. They’ll just say ‘lol’. They won’t roll on the floor laughing! They’ll just say ‘rofl’. It sounds sort of boring, doesn’t it! ‘Lol’ and ‘rofl’ aren’t contagious at all, are they?

But the text-speak revolution doesn’t end with laughter. What about that great expression, ‘ily’?

‘ily’, I-L-Y, stands for I love you. One of the most meaningful things you can say to a person! People wait their whole lives to hear those three words, and they’ve been reduced to a simple acronym that you can say without even meaning it! In the future, when proposing, will guys get down on one knee and say, ‘ily, will you marry me?’ I seriously hope not! That would be an AWFUL proposal!

And can you imagine wedding speeches? “When I first spotted Sarah, I knew that she was the one for me. Sarah, I’m so glad we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together… ILY!”

Yuck. What a way to spoil the moment! How can something so beautiful, so meaningful, possibly retain any meaning at all when it has been turned into nothing more than 3 letters?

And finally, what about that actually STUPID expression, ‘biffle!’ Um, what? Best friends for life? BFFL? Biffle?

Once again, internet-speak has changed something meaningful, telling someone they mean so much to you that you want to be friends with them for your entire life, into something inane and utterly meaningless only said (currently) by tween girls whose only obsessions are One Direction* and boys in general. You even SOUND stupid when you say it. Biffle. That doesn’t sound like a word at all! It sounds like a brand of pillows or tissues or something!

We really need to do something about this! Let’s not let internet shorthand destroy laughter, love and friendship! I want my kids to grow up in a world where they laugh, hear the words ‘I love you’ and have a best friend for life, not a ‘biffle’.

Ten years from now, I hope that we still know how to speak in a way that actually means something. I want to be able to tell a joke and have people laugh, even though they’re probably laughing at me, not at the joke!

*No offence, girls. I'm just joking. DON'T HURT ME.

18 does not an adult make

My friends have started turning 18. I have another two months to go until I reach that age, but all of a sudden, according to the law, I have adult friends. It's quite weird to look at people I've known since year 7 and think 'that person is legally an adult!'

18 means many things. It means that you can drink, buy alcohol and cigarettes. You can get married, if you want, without parental permission. You can get a credit card, own property, buy plane tickets in your own name, you can even change your name!

But does this make you an adult? According to the law, yes, but I (being close to this age myself) have been thinking about this quite a lot lately, and I've decided that there are a few other factors that should be added to the definition of adult, apart from reaching the magic number.

1. The ability to say no. Kids say yes to everything appealing, even if it's not good for them. They'll lie to their parents about being sick so they can go to a friend's house after school and end up throwing up all over their backyard (it only happened once. A long time ago.). They'll eat and eat and eat junk food just because it's there, not stopping even when they're full. If you can say 'No', you are getting closer to being an adult.
2. Ability to get a job. You don't have to have a job, because some people are at school/studying/living off a massive inheritance, but you do have to have the ability to get one. So good personal hygiene, the ability to look someone in the eye and the ability to express yourself at least reasonably well should be there before you're classified an adult.
3. A general understanding of who gets told what. Yes, I'm talking about tact, secrets, oversharing and other wonderful things like that. Don't keep telling the same friend about your secrets if she just keeps telling others. Don't tell your mate that his acne is looking really bad lately. And DON'T tell me all about the surgery you just had when you know I'm squeamish. Mistakes are fine - but you can't be an adult until you have at least a small understanding of when to keep your mouth shut.

If you can do all these things when you turn 18 then congratulations - in my eyes, you are an adult. Of course, if you turn 18 and you can't do these things then in the eyes of the law you're still an adult, but I am pretty sure you're going to want to develop these things pretty quickly!

One of the boys

I am a teenage girl. I imagine that all sorts of stereotypes have just jumped to your mind: makeup, One Direction, hopeless crushes, 3-hour long phone conversations... And apart from One Direction, yep, I am kind of like that. Also the hopeless crush morphed into a boyfriend about two and a half years ago.

So being such a girl, I have more male friends than female. I have a few very close female friends, but then the rest are all boys. I'm not really sure why it happened, but I find myself getting on really well with boys. I don't have any brothers, and I get on really well with girls too, but I know I would never cope in a girls-only school. Sleepovers with girls are fine, but I'm going on schoolies with a mixed group, mostly because we girls didn't know what we'd do for a week or so by ourselves!

Recently, my male friend called me a 'bro'. I took this as a massive compliment, as I hope it was intended. I'm delighted by the fact that I find it easy to relate to boys, because in the 'real world', I'm going to have to talk to all sorts of people, male and female.

I think that boys can teach girls a lot. My girl friends and I joke about 'typical boy behaviour', but then we turn around and realise that it is this behaviour that girls could benefit from. Caring a bit less and taking friendships lightly are things that boys are particularly good at. Girls, who tend to get caught up in the smallest details of who said what about who, could learn a lot from the way boys let things slide off them.

One thing that scares me about leaving school is leaving these boys behind. Or should I say men now? They've been such a big part of my life and I don't want to lose them now.

Sorry for being soppy, gentlemen. Remember I am a girl!

Technology >:(

Wrote a big long post the other day, which I was writing on Word because I don't trust websites to properly save text. Had almost finished when the computer did an automatic restart to install updates or somethinglikethat.............. ANYWAY it was a starter version of Word, so didn't save like Word normally does. Nothing to restore.

Which is why you did not get to read a post I slaved away on for nearly an hour the other night. I will rewrite it eventually but this week has been hectic.

Just a hint - it's about male/female friendships. FRIENDSHIPS.

Torture in the form of a camera

On Monday, I experienced my last ever school photos. Yet another last for this year, following on from last Swimming Carnival, last Cross Country Carnival, last first day of the year, Music Camp, last first day in winter uniform, last ever day wearing white socks to school... No more hanging around waiting for the previous group to finish. No more rushing out of class, hoping not to miss out on something that will be in the next exam (Yes I am a massive nerd). No more being seated in the front row because you're teeny-tiny and happen to go to school with the world's tallest teenage boys. No more worrying that the top row is going to fall off the flimsy scaffold-thing and crush all those below them into a mush of blazers, braids and shoe polish.

And most of all, no more horribly embarrassing posed photos that you have to wait months to see and are hardly ever happy with.

I'm one of those people who has NEVER been happy with a school photo. Well, not since Year 4 when I somehow managed to pull off a decent smile. That particular photo is still the one in my mother's wallet. And then, the hormones kicked in, the mosquito-bite scar arrived (a putrid scab for Year 5 school photos!) and Mum stopped doing my hair. Not one good photo in high school. So this year, I was absolutely determined to finish Year 12 with one decent portrait photo of myself in school uniform.

In Year 10 one shoulder was higher than the other, so I practiced standing nice and straight. In Year 11, my hair was disastrous, so I washed it the night before, tried to scrunch it with product to get nice waves to add texture and intricacy to my ponytail (or something like that), talking to myself in the mirror like a beauty guru on YouTube... And The Rudolph-style nose I've been sporting every year since Year 7 thanks to a tendency to flush when embarrassed/hot/cold/angry/happy/sad/tired/hungry/asleep? Covered with a layer of foundation.

Of course, we sat down for the photos. I hadn't practiced sitting straight! And my hair? Well the product did work, but as I sleep on my side, instead of the waves I'd been aiming for, I got one VERY flat side of hair and one just normally untameable. It took longer than normal to do my everyday ponytail, and no time for clever braids or face-framing curls. I even think I forgot a ribbon! My red nose was successfully covered the morning of photos, as planned for, but, as if I was being punished for my vanity, a couple of nasty pimples popped up overnight on my chin. Concealer was hastily applied, and then put in my pocket for touch-ups (it was a stick concealer), where it promptly melted. Only within the tube, luckily not on my school skirt, but it was pretty much useless throughout the day. Yeah yeah I know, #firstworldproblems. But I had my heart set on not looking gross! When people look back at their passport-photo sized image of me in 20 years, I wanted them to remember me and my personality, not the leering lady with the nutty hair and the wacky skin.

So my perfect school photo? Well I still don't know. Maybe it will be fine! Maybe I'll look like a witch! Or maybe I should just stop caring and think about how much fun it was to laugh along with my grade at the photographer's lame jokes, and try and get away with flipping over the dangly crests on our prefect badges, and just look back at all the old dorky, silly and embarrassing school photos and reminisce about how amazing these last six years have been?

The art of not killing all your school friends

Anyone who has been to high school is going to know what I’m talking about here, particularly those who are doing or have already done the HSC.

For those who haven’t, I’ll just quickly explain something. In Year 12, your rankings in every subject matter a lot, as they moderate your marks in the final HSC exams. If you come first in a subject, your mark is set, but for everyone else, this system can be pretty terrifying, as you have no idea what effect everyone else’s marks will have on you. The higher your ranking in each task, the better. This leads to something quite odd, something which I like to call ‘The Love-Hate HSC Complex’.

By the time you reach Year 12, you’ve been at school with the same people for six years, maybe more if you went to the same primary school. Deep friendships have developed over years of shared classes, moaning about homework and lining up at the canteen. So in your head, this year is getting quite emotional, as you imagine next year, when, no matter what you do, you’re not going to see these people every day anymore. You start to appreciate everyone in a really, quite freakishly positive way. You forget all the times they’ve wronged you, that party they didn’t invite you to, the way they won’t let you copy their maths homework, that one time they hit you in the face with a cricket bat during PE (Accidentally! Of course!)…

While all these over-the-top emotions are rushing around inside your head, BAM! It’s time to get your marks back for an assessment. Suddenly, your passionate love for your classmates is buried under your passionate desire to RANK FIRST and WIN AT THE HSC. The whole grade is called into one classroom, and you’re sharing a seat with your best friend. You know, the perfect one with the perfect hair and the perfect work ethic? Yep, that one. The teachers are going to give you a big lecture about the assessment before they hand back the marks. This is the first problem. No one listens. They are too concerned with their ranking. Finally the teachers finish, and the assessments are handed out. You hold your breath as your essay/speech/exam is placed face down on the desk, then you turn it over.

18 out of 20. YES!

A great mark, of course. Yet, a niggling doubt still rests at the back of your mind. You crane your neck to try and spot other people’s marks without being too obvious, and catch a glimpse of the red number written on the Perfect Best Friend’s assessment.

19.

What?

The hatred takes over. For a few, blinding moments, you forget all that they are to you. You forget those flowers they gave you when you were sick/sad/happy, or the way they’ll answer their phone to talk to you even when it’s past midnight on a school night. All you feel is PURE, UNADULTERATED HATRED.

It’s natural of course. Everyone is feeling it right now, except the kid with 19. And you know that they must deserve the mark, and that you have no reason to hate them, but there it is. You want to wriggle off your chair and go booby-trap their locker.

Suddenly, they turn to you. Smile. “How’d you go?”

It sounds like an innocent enough question, but everyone knows that behind that open-ended inquiry is the burning desire to ensure they are the best. They want to know your mark. And because they’ve probably already spied, you answer. “18”.

They grin. “That’s great!”

You could interpret their response as them being nice, and truly affirming your result, but you’re still a bit blind, so you instantly think that they’re only glad because you didn’t beat them.

And so it continues.

I frequently see and experience this. You can get a great mark, and still not be happy, because your ranking is not good. It’s unfortunate that the year when everyone finally seems to love each other is also the year in which we have to compete with such stakes. But in my time, I’ve figured out a few ways not to kill my friends (and make sure they don’t kill me!) when the Hate aspect of the ‘Love-Hate HSC Complex’ sets in…*

1.       Remember, if you can, that they are still your friend.

2.       Think about your different goals. Take university entry as an example. Unless your friend wants to do the exact same course as you, you’re only competing to do the best you can, not to get in to the course, so you can’t hate them for threatening your chances.

3.       Remember you’re not the only person who wants to do well. Try and feel some happiness for the people who did well as they try and achieve their dreams.

4.       Don’t take it out on anyone. Wait till you get home and then rant to your soft toys.

5.       Try not to cry or say that you did awfully (at least in front of everyone – again, wait for the soft toys). Sure, everyone has different standards, but even if you think coming tenth is a bad rank, imagine how the person who came fortieth is going to feel hearing you moan about how badly you did. If you come dead last, moan all you like.

*Anyone who knows me may think I’m being hypocritical writing this because of my tendency to lost it a bit over bad marks. To them I say... do what I say, not what I do. But I do try to follow my own advice!

Omitted history

I am currently doing the HSC, and studying Modern History. As part of this course, everyone has to do a personality study. At my school, we're doing the wonderful horrible Leni Riefenstahl.

Before this year, I'd never heard of Leni. Turns out she's a really important person. She worked as a film director for the Nazi Party in the lead-up to World War Two, directing a very propaganda-y film called Triumph of the Will that glorifies all things Nazi, followed by a documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

After the war, Leni was arrested and trialled on the grounds of being a Nazi, but was eventually acquitted. But she never worked as a director again. Ever since the end of the war, until her death in 2003 at the remarkable age of 101, she protested her innocence, stating that she only did what she did because she was passionate about film and her career, and had no real idea about the Nazi policies including the concentration camps. Considering her close relationship with Hitler, I'm not convinced, and neither are most of the historians studying her life.

But it begs some interesting questions - when investigating a person, can you take what they say about their life as truth? Are autobiographies reliable sources? (Is the HSC making me overthink things???)

For an assignment that I'm finishing off at the moment, our teacher pointed us to 'The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl', a three-hour epic documentary of her extraordinary life. The best part about it is that the old footage and recounts are spliced with candid interviews with Leni herself. When I heard this, I though 'bingo! I'm going to hear it exactly as it was!'. Alas, no. She lies, sometimes right out. If anything, the documentary has made me even more confused about what really happened, and what her real motives were.

But it has brought me one major epiphany: perhaps we find the truth about history in what isn't said. Maybe all we'll ever know about Leni is that she didn't want to tell the truth about why she worked for Hitler, and maybe that's enough - if she won't tell the truth, she's obviously got something to hide.

A home for nerds

I am a confirmed nerd. The very name of my blog asserts that fact. And everyone knows that nerds LOVE the internet. They can connect with other nerds, create nerdy things and just be themselves. So out of all the websites, which is the best one for nerds?

Of course, I used nerds in the absolute COOLEST sense. I have simply observed many nerds finding homes on the internet, and have joined them.*
Well, in my opinion, the winner is Youtube. Tumblr might have nerdy elements, but it's so full of hipsters and quotes about romance to be truly nerdy. Facebook has everyone, plus all your non-nerdy friends can see when you do embarrasingly nerdy things. Twitter is too full of oversharing B-list celebrities. What does that leave? Well, MySpace... no I kid. No one cares about MySpace anymore.

Youtube! Youtube is the home of nerds. Before you protest, here are my reasons.

1. Tutorials. Yeah, beautiful people watch hair and makeup tutorials, sure, but they are NERDY people who can be bothered sitting through ten minutes to LEARN. Also, the hair and makeup is far outweighed by the 'How to be awesome', 'How to integrate an inverse trigonometric function' and 'How to solve a Rubik's cube'.
2. TV Shows. If you care that much about a TV show to want to either a) catch up on it online or b) get it sooner than everyone else in Australia, you are being an Internet nerd.
3. Things like this. This is Pride and Prejudice done in a video blog from the perspective of Lizzie Bennet. Absolutely brilliant, hilarious, and featuring the witty, incredulous line from Mr Darcy 'These people are enjoying popular music unironically!' Fantastic!

I could go on about the nerdy value of Youtube for many more points but my subscription box is calling.

*Nerdfighters! If you don't know what this means, shame on you. Now google it.

The Eli(s)abethan Era

Welcome to my blog!

I'm a teenager who wants to be a writer (novelist and journalist) and who needs another outlet for all the crazy stuff inside her brain. I'll try and write here every few days, be it little updates on my life or more feature-y style stuff.

Hopefully you can find something here that interests you. For more information, check out the 'About Me' tab. If you want to email me, you can email thatissostrange (at) gmail (dot) com (until I get a new email address specifically for this blog)

Subscribe if you want to hear more from me!

Liz xx