Jayeless

1. It’s distance education. You are already at a disadvantage because you don’t have a teacher to explain anything to you in person — you have to work things out yourself.
2. Your school may forget to send the enrolment forms, leading you to become stuck in Legal Studies until your coordinator gets so sick of your nagging that she withdraws you from the class. But really, do you want to have to nag?
3. You have to send in your assessment task for area of study 2 before you’ve finished studying it.
4. There’s a 50% chance you’ll get the teacher who doesn’t know anything about the French Revolution and spends her time going, “So, there were only a few representatives of the Third Estate in the Parlements…”
5. DECV students don’t get access to vcehistory.info. One of the old Revolutions teachers took offence to the “royal pornography” on the site. This was influential in that it undermined the authority, and this teacher didn’t doubt that; he just thought it was inappropriate for students to see such things. He complained to the webmaster, who pretty much said, “OK, your students don’t have to see it then.”
6. They ask stupid questions. Lots of stupid questions. If you have an aversion to writing stupid answers to stupid questions, well… this isn’t a great course for you.
7. They make you add a citation for pretty much every damn sentence you write. Including comprehension questions. Actually, especially comprehension questions. At least with analytical ones, you don’t have to cite the analytical sentences.
8. They tell you which half of the exam you must write on which revolution. That is, you must write the historiography-including half on France, and the essay-including half on China. If the Chinese essay topics suck, TOO BAD. You won’t know any Chinese Revolution historians, so you’ll have to suck it up!
9. Their set textbook — the one you’re required to buy — is OUT OF PRINT.
10. You don’t even get to escape the spectre of “good citizenship”, because you still have to study this moron named Rousseau who sent all five of his kids to the orphanage and explained, “The orphanage will raise them to be good citizens.” I can’t blame DECV for that. What I CAN blame them for is all the questions they made me answer on him! I hope my teacher appreciates my snarky answers.

Again, I’ve left an unacceptably large gap between blog entries — eleven days. That’s an even larger gap than the seven days I called unacceptably large last time. The problem is something I like to call “blog entry ADD” (or at least, for the purposes of this entry we will say I like to call it that). It’s not that I have nothing to write about. It’s that I can’t concentrate long enough to finish an entry on the one topic.

This is what I’ve been doing for most of the last eleven days. I get this new, shiny idea for a blog entry, open the “Add New Post” page, and start typing. If I finish the first paragraph, I hit trouble on the second; I have no idea where to go from my introduction, or how to structure the entry such that I hit every point I want to make concisely and obviously and cleanly. And then I give up.

The next day, I might open the entry and tell myself to finish it, but I don’t have any more ideas than I had the previous day. I leave the tab open, but go and do stuff in other tabs. Undoubtedly, one of these other activities will inspire a brand new shiny idea, so I’ll come back and start writing about that one. And so the cycle continues.

If I forced myself to sit down every day and finish an entry, I’d have enough for at least a week. And by the end of that week, of course, I’d probably have enough ideas for another week! That said, it’s not going to happen. If I did sit down and force myself, it’d still take hours to finish the entry. Those hours are hours I need to do other things, like attend school, or sleep, or do homework, or eat, or chill out and do fun things like read or watch DVDs or talk to people.

The end result is, no blog entries.

Am I alone in suffering from “blog entry ADD”, or do others suffer from it as well? Does anyone know what the cure is?

I’ve left a longer period of time between entries than I usually like to leave. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, we had a huge heatwave last week. The media called it “unprecedented”. We had three consecutive days above 43°C (approx. 110°F), and I couldn’t think in that weather, let alone write! Then I had to prepare for school, and then I actually had to go to school. It’s because I went to school that I can deliver this pressing news.

This exclusive news is, someone in my school is working hard to screw me over this year. I have a couple of reasons to think this.

The first is, I am somehow in two homerooms. Every morning, I am required to be in two completely different rooms, simultaneously. Since I’m bound by the laws of physics, I can’t actually pull this one off. Therefore, no matter which room I go to, I will always be marked as absent from the other one. Every single day! All year!

The second goes as follows. I am trying to study History this year. I studied it last year at school, but since four people is only enough for a class when the class is Chemistry, I have to study it through correspondence this year. Or rather, I’m trying to. Last year, my vice-principal put me in Further Maths rather than recognising History as a subject. This year, I found that I’d been taken off the Maths list… and promptly put into Legal Studies.

I asked the “senior school coordinator” why I’m suddenly in Legal Studies when I shouldn’t be, and she replied, “I chose that subject for you on purpose! I knew you were going to nag me about it.” What? Is that the methodology coordinators should use to pick their students’ subjects? And is it a good enough reason to deny students the right to choose their own subject?

She explained that in actuality, I was only in Legal Studies until she confirmed I was in History. This turned out to be just the problem. I’m actually not in History — and nor, in fact, is anyone at my school enrolled in any of the correspondence courses they signed up for. My super-organised school forgot to send the forms off, and then promptly lost them. This means that I am in Legal Studies for the foreseeable future.

Only two days into the school year, my school has screwed me over twice. If not for that, the start of my school year would have been pretty good.