Almost one year ago, I wrote a post called Reflections on 2008, summarising the year which had just gone by. According to that post, I did much the same thing at the ends of 2006 and 2007, but I don’t remember writing those posts (does this mean I’m getting old??), so all I have to go by is 2008.

And I guess it would be wrong to pretend that I’m the only one who writes these end-of-year wrap-ups. Seemingly most bloggers do, so I’m hardly unique. However, no other blogger has had the year I have had, so at the very least, the content of the wrap-up has to be unique.

So, this was the year I graduated from secondary school. I finished my VCE with an ENTER of 97.85.

The awesome thing about VCE as opposed to the junior years of secondary school is that finally, I can switch the balance of subjects I take to have more subjects I like than subjects I don’t. In year nine, for instance, sure I liked SOSE, and Science, and PE in semester two1, but that still left two-thirds of my subjects that I didn’t care for at all. Last year I only took one subject I disliked — Maths — and this year, uh, none. I got to do subjects I did like…

…with the possible exception that I disliked unit 3 Geography. My teacher that semester had an unusual style of teaching that turned me off the whole subject. You can read that post for details, but in short, he was obsessed with SLIDESHOWS. And he would make one about every topic in the Murray-Darling Basin, and force us to watch in silence, and explain the same information multiple times over, and be very strict about when we could and could not take notes, and he got really possessive about his slideshows and took personal offence when people didn’t like them. He spent parent-teacher interviews BITCHING (there is no other word for it) to my Dad about how selfish it was for me not to like his slideshows.

He was so annoying that I gave up on Geography. Then it turned out to be my best subject, with the highest study score. I hope that wherever he is2, he doesn’t think my 46 is thanks to his “excellent” teaching, because IT IS MANIFESTLY NOT.

The teacher who should actually take credit for that is my unit 4 teacher, because he was awesome. Unit 4 Geography was a blast — he brought in coffee every Monday morning and some Thursday afternoons (for our Geography doubles); I spent pretty much every class not working and chatting to people… it was awesome. And don’t get me wrong, he did prepare us well for exams. We did a lot of practice tasks — practice quarter-exams, practice exams, and so on. For year 11 Geography he made up his own curriculum (but that was okay because his made-up curriculum was much more interesting than the real one… and more bludgey!) but for year 12 he stuck to the real thing and was pretty good at it.

The other subject that I disliked in unit 3 and liked better in unit 4 (although not to the same extent) was Revolutions. As we all sadly know (because I mentioned it), I was not able to study Revolutions at my school this year due to only four people choosing the class. This meant I had to study through correspondence at the DECV, although I very nearly didn’t as my school was too incompetent to send off the forms on time and I was almost stuck in Legal Studies. When I realised my teacher was an intensely overcritical unhelpful woman, I wished I’d stayed in Legal Studies3. I finished unit 3 feeling like I knew jack-shit about the French Revolution and not understanding how I apparently did well.

Again, my salvation was a new unit 4 teacher. Admittedly, I could only barely read this new teacher’s handwriting, but from what I could decipher — and from what I saw at the unit 4 seminar — he was awesome. When I did the first week’s work of unit 4, I was still so pissed off at my unit 3 teacher that I wrote the snarkiest, most anti-authoritarian answers I could manage while still answering the question. I was pleasantly surprised when I received the corrected work to see that the snarkier I got, the larger my teacher’s ticks and the more complimentary his comments.

This persisted for the whole unit. Once I wrote what I thought was a balanced answer explaining the double-speak of the “people’s democratic dictatorship”, and got a lengthy rant in response beginning, “For some reason you seem hesitant to state that this was not a real democracy,” and continuing to describe Mao Zedong’s tyranny until he ran out of room on the page. And at the actual seminar he left no opportunity unused to mock authoritarianism, either. Man, he was great. He restored my optimism about Revolutions for sure.

I did take some other classes, too. English was unexpectedly fun. I hadn’t really liked English since year 8 because the teacher I had for years 9-11 was annoying, but this year I got a new teacher. She was hilarious, and seemingly incapable of not revealing what was on her mind at any given second. In a good way, I mean. My Psych class was also fun, since I had good classmates and a good teacher there also.

For Philosophy I had my year 9-11 English teacher, but as it turns out she’s a better Philosophy teacher than an English one. I liked Philosophy best when I got to criticise idiot philosophers, and liked it least when certain people (mostly the teacher) got overly aggressive defending their views.

Man, this year’s reflection is getting so much longer than last year’s! This is annoying.

Anyway, I had to look up what my new year’s resolutions were last year to assess whether I’d achieved them4. Luckily I wrote them in last year’s post. My resolutions apparently were:

I want to do well at school, for instance. It’s my final year, and I need a good ENTER to get into the tertiary course want.

DONE. And to a larger extent than I’d originally thought. Hell yes, 97.85!

I’d also like to finish that NaNoWriMo novel that I haven’t actually touched since November ended.

Um no, it didn’t happen. I did start rewriting it in April, spent most of July and early August writing my 90,000+ word epic, and ultimately decided (this month) to rewrite it yet again because the pacing is all wrong. Too long and boring near the beginning, and generally weird towards the end. Blah.

I should probably start blogging about that novel again, since I’m sure I’d have plenty to discuss about it. When I want to talk about it, I tend to update my Twitter instead.

Blog-wise, I’d really like to write more consistently well, and more frequently.

Okay, as I think we can see from the sidebar, epic fail. In the last four months of 2008 I averaged 11.5 posts a month. I wrote 10 in January, and my average then dropped to 3.25 between February and May. The only two months were I did write more than that 11.5 average were August (with 18) and then this month (36 with this post — oh, NaBloPoMo madness!). So, ummm, yeah.

As for “more consistently well”, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to judge. Perhaps I’m writing “more consistently well” by virtue of the fact that fewer of my entries are asides. Or perhaps I’m writing worse because so many of my entries are links these days, rather than carefully-structured entries. I don’t know. Oh, and in the first half of the year, I’m sure I wrote a few crappy entries along the lines of, “hey, it’s been a couple of weeks, and I don’t have any more ideas for posts, but I thought I’d let you know I’m alive…”.

So, I don’t think I achieved this resolution.

More resolutions!

Yep, I gave this section its own subheading so it wouldn’t look like I was still commenting on my failure to achieve that last one. Here are my resolutions for things I want to achieve in 2010.

  1. Get a job. I think it’s time I started earning some money for myself.
  2. Finish that novel that I started in 2007, already! Furthermore, I want to achieve this by the mid-year point, because then I can use the special offer from NaNoWriMo this year to receive a free proof copy. Technically I think it’s supposed to be used for my sloppy NaNoWriMo first draft. But, well, that seems like a waste…
  3. Think of a name for that novel I started in 2007. It’s had a number of working titles but nothing that really grabbed me. It’s currently called “Whatever I Decide To Name It”. Yep, that’s clearly the title of a future best-seller.
  4. Post, on average, 30 posts each month. This is like my own personal NaBloPoMo. One thing that irritated me about this event was the need to post EVERY SINGLE DAY — compensating by posting two posts another day was not an option. So I will alter the rules just for myself, to remove the need for useless asides.

I can’t really think of anything else I want to achieve in 2010, so I won’t write any more.

Anyway, there you have it — my annual “reflection”. Best wishes for everyone in 2010, and Happy New Year!

  1. Seeing as my teacher let me participate in the great and time-honoured sport of walking, while listening to my iPod…
  2. Apparently he moved back to his home state, New South Wales…
  3. My school’s Legal Studies teacher is also a bit unhelpful, but at least he’s nice… and Legal could have been my “I don’t care about this subject” subject just like Geography turned out to be!
  4. I think the point of a resolution is that you’re supposed to keep it in mind throughout the year and work towards it, not just write some stuff you want to do and then later check whether you achieved them when you weren’t even trying. But that’s not how I do resolutions, and seriously, just how many people do do resolutions that way?