Don't be real, be postmodern......

[anotherusedpage]

I think I must have missed the point of last week's class on Structuralism. I thought I understood it at the time, but this week we moved onto Poststructuralism and Deconstructuralism and I realised I didn't have a fucking clue what any of it meant. And all the terminology's in French, which doesn't help. Neither does the tutor. He's not really a tutor, he's a postgrad student interested in an academic career, and we're his guinea-pig class...
Oh well. Next week is Marxism and Feminism. I can DO Marxism and Feminism.
Only four hundred pages of Dickens left to go this week. And a couple of hundred words of Anglo Saxon.
I'd forgotton what a bastard work actually was.
Still. I only have to survive another two days of hard work and then I'm going to go see Matrix Revolutions...

Comments

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Public schools aren't just any old private schools, they're the poncy-est poshest most expensive form of private schools - the one's you've heard of like Eton and Harrow and Rugby. The seriously shit expensive ones. It comes from the days when the upper classes could either educate their children at home or at a 'public' school - we're talking hundreds of years before state funded education come into place.

As well as this, some places, especially in inner cities also have some form of grammar school, which is state funded but you have to do an exam to get in. It used to be that the exam was compulsory and called the eleven plus. Then they decided that system was unfair (long looong before my time), and they changed all the names around so crappy Secondary Moderns became all inclusive Comprehensives. Grammar schools became 'Grant Maintained' ie the government was still paying for them but trying not to admit it. I think they've changed the name of it again since then, actually, as well.... Not all grant maintained are grammar schools, some of them are faith schools (ie C of E, Catholic, Jewish etc etc etc), but the majority are.

I am ... ahem ... lucky enough to have sampled the delights of all three types of british school - I did three years at a state comp, which was a real shit hole, then two years at a private school which was wonderful until the money ran out, and then two years at a grammar, which was great but a little stressful cos it was HUGELY grade orientated. (I've never been to public school, though. You have to be quite seriously shit rich for that).

GCSEs are the exams you take at sixteen, just before you finish compulsory education. Most people do eight or nine GCSEs, you have to take some science, some English, maths, a modern forreign language, and a technology, and then you make up the other subjects by doubling English and Science (or even tripling science) and with humanities and creative subjects. The compulsory subjects are only compulsory at state schools, at public and private schools you don't have to follow government guidelines so much.

After GCSE all the people who really, REALLY don't want to continue in education drop out and get McJobs and the rest of us go on to do AS levels at the age of 17 and full A levels at the age of 18. Most people would do four AS and drop down to three A levels. Nothing is compulsory at this level. They've only just changed to this system, it used to be just three A levels on a two year course, but people complained that the curriculum wasn't broad enough, so they fucked around with it to give people the opportunity to study more broadly. The idea was you'd take an AS in a contrasting subject to your full A levels. But of course it don't work like that - I did Music, Theatre Studies, English and History, which is no broader than it would've been anyway. So they're thinking of changing it AGAIN to something closer to the IB.

So. That's Jessie's Brief Intro to the British Education system. Just don't get me started on LEAs, PRUs, SATS and the national curriculum....

And I thought the second HP film was better than the first. I dunno if I'd've bothered to read the books if I'd just had the first film to go on. I read the first book when it first came our, before it was famous. Somone had bought a copy for my brother, but he wasn't interested, so I nicked it off him.... now the whole family's hooked.

It's seven-something in the morning here and I haven't had my cup of tea yet

You're remarkably coherent for seven in the morning. More than I would be.
It's quarter to eleven at night here, and I still have three hundred or so pages of reading to get through before I can turn in..... (turn into what, I'm not quite sure. A quivering wreck perhaps)
We love Dickens really.

[lucy-lupin.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your explanation. It confused me more than anything else, but that's because of my sleep-deprived brain and the school system itself, no fault of yours. But I don't think there can ever be such a thing as a brief introduction to any education, as you're about to see with mine :D

In New Zealand there are School Cs (certificates), which sound similar to GCSEs. You take them when you're in Year 11 (NZ schools have 13 years, one more than Australia and the US) and continue on for two more years to take University Bursaries if you plan on continuing your education. The marks on your bursaries determine what courses you get into at university and different universities have different mininum acceptance marks. My poor best friend in my first year had to leave her boyfriend behind because she had marks that were high enough to get into her course at our university, but not his.

But the closest I've got to School Cs was working as a reader-writer at an all-boys private school near where I used to live in Hamilton ;p. I actually attended an American private school in Singapore. In the American system you complete a certain amount of courses in each subject (it varies from school to school) plus a bunch of electives, and this will give you a core high school diploma. If you plan on going to university though, you need to do more than that. There are two standardised tests you take in your two last years of high school, SATs I and II. SAT Is are verbal and maths tests, while in SAT IIs you pick three subjects to be tested on. Most students do one maths, one english, and then one other subject.

Then there are APs (Advanced Placement courses). APs are basically university level subjects you take while you are still in high school. In May (one month before the high school academic year is finished), there is a standardised exam on each AP subject. If you get a 3 or above (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the highest), you can get university credit for those courses. I knew a guy who had enough AP credits to go to his junior year in college. The New Zealand universities didn't give me any credit for my APs because they don't recognise them. Bastards :)

In most American schools only the best students get to take them, but my school was really competitive so we were pushed to do them. In my year in particular (which was an exceptionally gifted year), if you didn't take any people thought you were dumb. AP Psychology was the bludger course everyone who didn't want to take APs but needed something for their academic record took. I took that plus AP English and Modern European History.

Well, I haven't talked about the Australian education system yet but my head is spinning enough, as yours probably is by now. I'd better sign off before I drive us both insane :)