Failure

This week I’ve been infuriated by certain teachers’ failure to keep track of their students’ assignments, then blaming me for not doing my assignment and being about to fail me unless I can somehow get my assignment to them (again) by the end of the day. When they’re on the complete other side of the city.

I’m not used to failing subjects and I was furious when I found out I was about to fail this one. Everyone else was astonished, except the senior school coordinator, who was simply furious with me for not doing my assignment (even though I had). I got to break the news to one of my History classmates: “Congratulations! You’re the only one not failing Revolutions right now.”

Top Ten Reasons Not to Study Revolutions at DECV

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.

Good citizenship: part two

This post is a continuation of the story I started yesterday. This story, in case you’ve forgotten, is about my History teacher’s dedication to the cause of “good citizenship”, and his efforts to “indoctrinate” everyone to ensure they would agree.

As I mentioned last time, I was opposed to the slideshow, the main tool of “indoctrination”.