Warning: This post uses the coordinating conjunction, “but”, too many times.#9Hello! It’s been a while. And a lot has happened since March.
Tonight was meant to be formal, but instead, I’m here typing away. A lot of me is glad about this. I don’t think I could’ve braved this weather in clothes not made for the season.
A whole term has gone by. What to write. Hmm…
Before I know it, I might be spilling my guts out. Year 12 is messing with my head. I have gotten a lovely bout of why-are-there-so-many-SACs-in-one-week-itis. In my first set of SACs for Term 1, I got the exact same average for every subject and also never finished a test based SAC.
Let’s break it down by subject. I have colour-coded the subjects according to what colors I think they should be.
Chemystery <33That SAC that I said went utterly crap? The mark ended up better than I thought it would be. I was surprised. My catastrophizing brain instantly said I would fail it and I was genuinely convinced that I would. I’m definitely not one of those people who do better than they think on a regular basis, so that was a nice surprise.
The way I initially took chem notes at the beginning of the year involved handwritten closed-book active recall style notes and although it might have had some benefit in processing the information a bit better, it took a long time to handwrite my notes. I’ve decided to adapt the style over digitally, which makes writing subscripts much less intuitive. We’ll get there. I’ve only had time to do the copying notes from the PPTs and the textbook as of late, but I think once I’ve caught up on the notes I haven’t done because I fell behind last term, I will start the whole system of flipped learning again for chem. That was a long sentence. Anyways, on the topic of chem – I am really enjoying it at the moment. I am surprised that that sentence came out of my mouth. I’ve always tried to see the good in my subjects, which is why I can’t say I dislike any of them.
Chem has its difficult moments but those I will clarify with my teacher, who refreshingly makes the subject really accessible. Why talk in moles when you can talk in Smarties and M&Ms?!!
I had a Chem SAC today, and I guess you could say they were making up for the last one in terms of difficulty. I found it to be, for the most part, less challenging than its predecessor. But yeah. That’s that.
Biology“Gibberellins” (line 1) is such a cool word. It sounds like it should mean chaotic, nonsensical speech or text masked through expression in a fashionable way. But it’s a plant hormone.
The bio teachers at my school love flipped learning to the point where we have to watch their version of Edrolo, a video of them teaching the lesson, and then come to class and basically do VCAA questions. It has its advantages including its adaptability to online learning, but I can see a lot of people, including myself struggling to adapt to the independent-ness of it all. It’s your choice whether you watch the videos or not and no one is forcing you – kinda like uni lectures (I will get to that in a moment). I do end up watching them, maybe not exactly before each lesson (but who even is ever completely up-to-date with lectures??
). The video teaching aside, the bio content is incredibly interesting. U3 AOS 2 >> U3 AOS 1 hahaha. The immune system is cool. Natural killer cells and cytotoxic T cells are particularly fascinating. And the ones that release a net-like structure to capture pathogens. Don’t know what they’re called. Despite that, this unit has taught me that I would prefer to take physiology to uni.
Like chem, the bio SAC I had a few days ago did a bit more justice. It had not too many large blobs of text, unlike the other SAC, or maybe I just understood the content better. My brain can’t do large blobs of text in bio SAC questions for some reason. Of course, there were quite a few interestingly difficult questions, which is typical of my school to do.
FurtherThe textbook has green on it, but maths is, undoubtedly, a blue subject.
This subject has been a mild whirlwind. It's a nice break from the content-heavy biology, and new-concept-heavy chemistry. A lot of the time, I enjoy it.
In saying that, the first SAC was split up into four parts. Did I finish any of them? No.
A nice benefit of such a SAC with some abstract questions that didn’t reflect most of the VCAA questions I’ve encountered is that the further teachers decided to scale everyone’s marks for that SAC up by five, so effectively the pass mark was lowered to 25%.
Then came the financial and recursion module. At the start, it was going well. Towards the end, I could have almost say the opposite. I felt like I knew nothing. So a bit of revision later, I felt a bit better. Did the SAC and somehow had some time to check over it. Picked up a mistake but who knows how many more there were? I am the guru of silly mistakes when it comes to mathematics. We will see how that goes.
EngLangNow, this is controversial. English is normally red, maths is blue. But last year, the textbook had yellow on it, and that became my EngLang colour. The yellow is not entirely visible though
The first SAC for this subject reflected my strengths and weaknesses. Need. To. Revise. Metalanguage. Thoroughly. But. Too. Overwhelmed. To. Do. So. I guess it is more of a simple fix than fixing up writing. I can’t say I write “goodly” at the moment for this subject. Every piece of writing I submit to my teacher makes me feel ashamed. Almost like I’m going to be judged as a person based on the quality of my writing, like my writing is me (How coincidental, the song I am listening to right now had the lyric, “The only one who’s really judging you is yourself”).
I feel like my teacher does sense this, which is why it seems like they’ve dialled down on the amount of feedback whereas some people have their work grilled, roasted and burnt when it doesn’t deserve that treatment. Overall, I do enjoy this subject for the most part. I’ve always gravitated towards English because of the almost creative freedom it allows, and then I go and choose EngLang. #noragretz.
UMEPOf course it’s blue. As soon as you enter the page to login to the UniMelb LMS, you are greeted with a mostly blue screen. Psychology itself is definitely not a blue subject. I hope you, reader, can back this assertion up.
Guess who is considerably behind on lectures? Me. Some things happened at the start of the semester which made me abandon the lectures for a while, but I am very much looking forward to getting back into them this weekend. A number of my friends who did uni extension subjects dropped out or are going to drop out of them, and sometimes I wonder if I should too based on my current progress. At the moment, I’m determined to stick it out because I think I’ll really enjoy the rest of the content and the Sem 2 content.
The assignment for this subject was an essay about retrieval practice. We had at least a month to write it, but in true me-fashion, I ended up writing it the night before it was due because of my massive fear of failure and perfectionism. Of course, that mostly backfired, as I didn’t use the potential superpower of perfectionism to my advantage. Based on the amount of time I had to write the essay in, my mark is one of those okay but not great marks. I was obviously disappointed at first, but based on my poor procrastination habit that I’ve never seemed to kick (or maybe executive functioning skills), I am happy with it now. The feedback was fair and useful for my next essay and hopefully beyond. I didn’t realise how unconcise (for the lack of a better word) it was to have brackets in the middle of a sentence. Unfortunately, I still haven’t learnt my lesson.
OtherExcitingly, holidays (a.k.a. two weeks with no teaching but still work) are coming up! I hope I can take a few days to rest and recharge and catch up on that chem stuff that I never got to. Maybe even read a book (or two). When it comes to reading though, I will sit and read a book in one sitting if it’s one that I cannot put it down. That might be the reason why I have only read the first two Narnia books this year.
My mental health has had its ups and downs, but things generally have been better since I had one of the worst breakdowns of the year and maybe even my life. It was funny because on that day, I was crying in the car whilst my dad very calmly drove me around to the car wash and then home. When I started to pay attention to what was happening in front of me, there was my EngLang teacher on the other side of the road riding their bike. Fun times. Thankfully, I was not seen. The SAC was the next day, but I did not care about SACs or school or really anything in that moment.
I also went to see a GP about a month and a bit ago and whilst there she told me that my iron levels were quite low. The iron has been helpful so far, despite the ugly side effects that I will not detail. Now I just have to go for another blood test to see how helpful it has been and work through everything else, then I’ll hopefully be on my way to the next steps in the whole “getting better” thing.
This update is becoming way too long, so maybe I’ll talk about next year-ish stuff in the next entry.
Overall, I can say: progress.
We’re getting there. Pacing ourselves for those five months until my last exam (!!). It has gone by so fast.
Year 12 has been an interesting journey so far for me. Or should I say rollercoaster?