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Author Topic: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)  (Read 19184 times)

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SlowandSteady

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My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« on: July 27, 2019, 11:24:43 pm »
+19
(I was going to make one of these in Year 10, but to hell with it.)

After reading numerous VCE and HSC journals, I wanted to make one of these so that I have something to look back on at the end of my schooling. Right now, I'm imagining myself having just completed Year 12, reading through this journal and subsequently spitting out whatever beverage I happen to be sipping on as I realise and have a good laff over how insignificant my tiny little problems were.

About me:
  • I'm in Year 8.
  • I'm into piano.
  • I'm mad for The Beatles.
  • I procrastinate by looking at education-related resources (QCE Syllabuses, Australian Curriculum, ATARNotes, etc.).
  • My handwriting is poor.
  • I cried a little when the above list was all I could come up with.
Skooling:
Been cruising through Year 8 now for a semester and a bit, and I think I'm going pretty well. The subjects I'm doing right now are:
Advanced English - I think that English is one of my strengths, but I have the tendency to second-guess just about everything that I write, which sometimes translates to not writing anything down at all until I'm sure that it's the best I can make it. This, as you could have guessed, is quite time-consuming and even led to me not finishing an English exam (although the essay was of good quality :P). We're currently doing a unit on persuasive writing around the teenage brain and its development. They had us watch a television series (which was pretty cool) to demonstrate how much teens suck at doing things themselves.
Advanced Maths - When I got into the Advanced Maths class half-way through Year 7, I was really lacking confidence with the subject as a whole, but recent good results have led me to believe that I can do better and that it's possible for me to succeed in this area. Currently doing a unit on statistics (Excel spreadsheets & all that).
Advanced Science - I never really used to pay much care to science, but now the content is getting more interesting and enjoyable. This will especially be true later on for science in the later years (*cough* Neuroscience *cough*). Doing the physics unit for this year, which centers around energy.
Advanced Humanities - Focusing on Geography; more specifically, the theory of plate tectonics.
(We get two electives chosen for us)
Spanish - I was confused as to why I had to do Spanish, because I had already opted to do Digital Innovations instead of a language for the last two years, but I'm finding it pretty fun. Quite a bit of the content I covered in Year 5 and 6, so I'm not finding it difficult. Getting the opportunity to enter the griffith uni languages competition (once I ask the teacher). She came around with a sign-up sheet for it, but I didn't take one (neither did anyone else). Regretted that shortly after as I realised that it could be pretty fun and it didn't involve speaking in front of a crowd.
Visual Arts - There are about 5 arts subjects: Media, Music (damn I wanted this), Dance, Drama and Visual Arts. I'm horrid at drawing. When I was finding out what one I was doing, it was pretty much a game of Russian Roulette. I lost :'(. Then I realised that the assessment wasn't drawing, but creating and tracing a collage, which I could handle. I'm so grateful for that. Here's a picture of the collage so far:

Planz (WARNING: Subject to extreme change):
Year 9: Choose digital innovations and digital tech as my two electives and have a wild time.
Year 10: Choose digital technology, philosophy and reason (prep for senior philosophy. Has a unit on conspiracy theories so who wouldn't do it), and science extension as electives. Maybe complete Physics 1/2 or ask if I can accelerate a DigTech subject (It's not on the application form).
Year 11/12: Literature, Methods, Physics, Philosophy & Reason and Digital Solutions.
Afterwards (if I make it there lol): Computer Science / Software Engineering at either unimelb or monash.

Hopefully I'll be able to update this thing every week (for the next four years) to let people know what's hip and happening.
« Last Edit: July 27, 2019, 11:28:33 pm by SlowandSteady »
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AngelWings

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #1 on: July 28, 2019, 11:46:52 am »
+6
Woo! First QCE journal on AN! Hope you enjoy making history with us and hope you’ll be able to post regularly here. :)

Anyway, what makes you want to study down in Victoria after high school versus in Queensland? (I’m genuinely curious.)
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SlowandSteady

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #2 on: July 28, 2019, 01:35:24 pm »
+4
Anyway, what makes you want to study down in Victoria after high school versus in Queensland? (I’m genuinely curious.)
Well I lived in the suburbs of Melbourne just outside the city for a few years when I was little, I've been visiting there just about every christmas holidays and all of my extended family is over there. I really like the idea of independence (moving from QLD) while not being cut off to family and places I'm familiar with. Once I started doing some procrastinating on science research on different universities in the melbourne area, I found that monash and unimelb were highly ranked in the computer science field. The Melbourne Model also sounds intriguing in the sense that I'm not confined to one area of study.
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Joseph41

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #3 on: July 29, 2019, 05:27:59 pm »
+4
Awesome work in starting our first QCE Journey Journal! :) I reckon starting it now is an awesome idea. Do you have favourite VCE/HSC Journey Journals from the ones you've read through?

Cool subjects. You said your electives are chosen for you - do you have other ones coming up?

P.S. That collage looks awesome. Also: "I procrastinate by looking at education-related resources" - big feels. 😂

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caffinatedloz

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #4 on: July 29, 2019, 08:51:03 pm »
+3
I love the "About Me" section! Do you get up to much outside of school? Are you interested in sport and music? What is your second least favourite food? Would love to get to know more about you as a person.

Can't wait to read some more updates! I commend you for starting so early!

SlowandSteady

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #5 on: July 29, 2019, 11:01:03 pm »
+5
Awesome work in starting our first QCE Journey Journal! :) I reckon starting it now is an awesome idea. Do you have favourite VCE/HSC Journey Journals from the ones you've read through?

Cool subjects. You said your electives are chosen for you - do you have other ones coming up?

P.S. That collage looks awesome. Also: "I procrastinate by looking at education-related resources" - big feels. 😂
Haha, thanks. Out of the ones I've read so far, my favourites would have to be colline's and Erupeta's VCE Journals, and r1ckworthy's and angewina_naguen's HSC journals. Regarding electives, we've already done two last semester, Digital Innovations, which I elected to do in place of a LOTE (hence the reason I'm confused about why I'm doing Spanish this sem), and HPE (not really an elective, but more a semester long course). For the arts, though, I'm pretty sure that it's one term per unit, so I'd be doing visual this term and one of dance, media, music and drama next term (fingers crossed for music). The collage really is a piece of work, but I fear that I'll find a way to muck even tracing up.

I love the "About Me" section! Do you get up to much outside of school? Are you interested in sport and music? What is your second least favourite food? Would love to get to know more about you as a person.

Can't wait to read some more updates! I commend you for starting so early!
Asking the hard questions. I get up to regrettably little outside of school; I'm not even sure if you could count piano lessons, because my teacher lives next door. I tried a season of cricket and enjoyed it even though I was quite bad, so I'll pick that up again this season. Second least favourite food would  probably be fried dim-sims (I tried to make them once and burnt them terribly, so I wasn't too keen thereafter).
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caffinatedloz

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #6 on: July 30, 2019, 06:10:29 am »
+2
Asking the hard questions. I get up to regrettably little outside of school; I'm not even sure if you could count piano lessons, because my teacher lives next door.

Wow! That's super convenient! What kind of pieces do you like to play? It is preparation for piano exams or a concert, or is it more for fun?

I tried a season of cricket and enjoyed it even though I was quite bad, so I'll pick that up again this season.

Never really tried cricket. I guess I always found it boring to watch. (Do you enjoy watching other people play?) Do you prefer batting or fielding? I would certainly struggle to catch or hit a ball as small as a cricket ball lol. Give me a long-distance run or swim any day!

SlowandSteady

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #7 on: July 30, 2019, 09:26:03 pm »
+5
Wow! That's super convenient! What kind of pieces do you like to play? It is preparation for piano exams or a concert, or is it more for fun?

Never really tried cricket. I guess I always found it boring to watch. (Do you enjoy watching other people play?) Do you prefer batting or fielding? I would certainly struggle to catch or hit a ball as small as a cricket ball lol. Give me a long-distance run or swim any day!
Only started lessons a few weeks ago with one lesson per week, so it'll be a while before I'll be able to play anything more advanced than the renowned classic, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (with correct phrasing and dynamics, mind you 8)). Always loved messing around on the keyboard and have been wanting lessons for ages, so having a piano teacher next-door was a pleasant surprise. Trying to get into the school band next year but I'm unsure if the position will be filled already.

Chose cricket last year for sport on a whim, then one of the year 10s said I should sign up at the club, so I did. I can't bat for my life (high score of a whopping 11), but I'm an average bowler. Not super into watching sport, but the T20 and Big Bash series are alright; there's less time, making it more fast-paced.
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Joseph41

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #8 on: July 31, 2019, 09:59:42 am »
+1
Looooove cricket. I'm sure the batting prowess will come. ;)

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SlowandSteady

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #9 on: August 03, 2019, 09:17:25 pm »
+6
Well, it's time for the first update of my QCE Journal (although it feels awkward calling it that).

I'm not sure whether someone decided to do karaoke down the street, or play music, but either way it's giving off the ambiance of a haunted house. Just going to give a run-down of what happened in my subjects this week:

English: Most of the class was just independent research on the development of the teen brain, then finding how it links to the show we watched. Doing this in order to refute that 'the teens are not the stupid, reactionary risk takers depicted in the show'. Next week we'll be focusing on how to structure our arguments.

Maths: I think I'm going pretty well on the assignment so far and have gotten to the second and final part of it: developing a report based on the data provided and the graphs I've constructed from it. The lack of specificity (or at least that's how I perceive it) in the structure outline for the report is tripping me up a bit; I'm paranoid that I'll either leave something out or include unnecessary information, so I'll approach the teacher on Monday for clarification.

Science: Got handed the task sheet for our assessment task. It involves selecting a factor which influences how high a ball bounces, the choices being drop height, type of ball, type of surface that the ball hits, temperature and air pressure. The easiest one to justify would be drop height because it's directly linked to GPE, but I think I might choose type of surface and research how different surfaces transfer and transform energy in different ways.

Geography: Yesterday I learned that the exam for this unit was on the coming Friday, so I've pretty much been making improvements to the set of flashcards I've developed with as much detail as possible. The content hasn't been hard to grasp, but I really need to remember to include the little details. Currently working on contour maps to make cross-section graphs (visual representations of the slope of a landscape). Got to make one of Hogwarts.

Visual Arts: Ok, so the funniest thing happened while I was about a quarter way through tracing my piece. I reserved a light box (you place your paper over it for easier tracing) by placing my collage on it to go get some pencils. Once I came back, to my horror, my piece had been violated (moved off the light box) by some girl who wanted to use it. She didn't have her artwork there, but was just resting her arm on the equiptment so I couldn't place mine back down. She then proceeded to grab my collage with her arm outstretched over her head. I could have reached it, but I feared that I would scrunch it. After a few seconds, she dropped it and it floated gracefully through the air and into the nearest rubbish bin. I pulled it out to find a large smear of brown paint all over my poor little lemur's face. I ended up starting over and, to my surprise, my piece ended up looking way better than the first one. That blessing in disguise has given me hope that I won't completely fail this subject.

Spanish: So I signed up for the languages competition, and I think I might have been the only person in my year level who did. The Spanish teacher is pretty busy, so I've had to sift through the online resources she's given me to find content relevant to the speech. I'm ashamed to admit that the class has a sticker reward system (It's a nice little throwback to Year 3, though). The deal is that 10 stickers earns you one hot chocolate; my taste buds still haven't recovered from being completely seared off.

Got two awards on Thursday for getting 5 A's and top effort & behaviour, so that was nice. I will admit that I got a tiny bit bummed about HPE, but after seeing some really intelligent people in the exact same situation, it gave me some reassurance.
That's all for now. Peace.
« Last Edit: August 03, 2019, 09:35:24 pm by SlowandSteady »
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Joseph41

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #10 on: August 05, 2019, 11:59:13 am »
+3
Feel free to call it your Year 8 Journal, or High School Journal, or whatever you like! :)

Great update. Good idea chatting to your Maths teacher about the assessment. No harm in asking or looking for a bit more clarity. Sucks about the Visual Arts collage but I'm glad it worked out better in the end haha. Maybe that was her plan all along. ;)

What's the go with the languages competition? What does it involve?

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SlowandSteady

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #11 on: August 05, 2019, 03:40:00 pm »
+5
What's the go with the languages competition? What does it involve?
So, pretty much, I get handed a template for a speech in Spanish, fill in the spaces with names, ages, descriptors and so forth to match me, and present it in front of two judges at Griffith Uni. Really had no reason for doing it, but I decided that I wanted to do stuff so I won't look back and wish I was more involved with school. Today I just joined this STEM competition, which sounded fun; every week there's a challenge related to a STEM discipline and you  compete against other schools. I needed a team of three, but all of my friends except one weren't very enthused. He said he might know some people wanting to do it, so fingers-crossed.
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Joseph41

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #12 on: August 05, 2019, 03:54:53 pm »
+1
So, pretty much, I get handed a template for a speech in Spanish, fill in the spaces with names, ages, descriptors and so forth to match me, and present it in front of two judges at Griffith Uni. Really had no reason for doing it, but I decided that I wanted to do stuff so I won't look back and wish I was more involved with school. Today I just joined this STEM competition, which sounded fun; every week there's a challenge related to a STEM discipline and you  compete against other schools. I needed a team of three, but all of my friends except one weren't very enthused. He said he might know some people wanting to do it, so fingers-crossed.

Love that attitude!

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SlowandSteady

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #13 on: August 10, 2019, 10:37:33 pm »
+6
Guess who's back?

I've been having a nice week; it hasn't been too hectic :)
Here's what's been going down:

English: Working on argument structure and persuasive techniques (ethos, pathos, logos and all that). I feel that this assignment will be fun to write. Each person in the class had to pick an overarching metaphor for their piece to relate to teenagers; mine compared their lives to an amusement park (ups and downs, adrenaline, safety).

Maths: Got up super early on Friday to finish off my assignment, but still ended up staying back 20 minutes after school to finish it and hand it in. The deal was that you could either hand it in on Friday, where you would get our marks back on Monday, or hand it in on the due date (about a week later) and wait for the teacher to return from her holiday (week 10) to get your results. If I didn't get it in then the wait would have been agonising. Knowing that I handed it in earlier than needed was a huge weight off my shoulders as well. Now I can focus more time on...

Science: The draft for our rationale is due on Monday. We use this huge checklist to self mark our work, then the teacher, using the same checklist, marks it herself and hands it back to us. There really isn't heaps to say about Science right now other than that I need to get consistent with setting goals and actually committing to them. I wanted to finish my rationale today, but didn't come close :'(

Geography: Had a practise exam which caught me a bit off guard. We marked it afterwards and the only thing I was really struggling with was knowing which landforms were where on the world map and forgetting small details, or rather, not knowing how to embed them into my answers (the difference between a magma plume and a hotspot isn't clear to me). The exam is on the coming Thursday, the first Geo lesson of the week.

Visual Arts: After a touching reunion with my favourite pen, which had been lost for 4 lessons in the art room, I got to colouring my artwork. I tried to do a gradient (dark => gradually lighter) for the sky, but sort of failed. I did it a bit better when my friend (he's awesome at art) went through some stuff on a blank sheet of paper for me. Coloured the eyes of the lemur, which turned out to be a blend of yellow, orange and red. The teacher said they were "dazzling", but this dude is so deadpan I really didn't know whether he meant it. He's an awesome teacher, nonetheless.

Spanish: I've been good (or should I say 'bien' 😂) with the content in class. Main focus has been trying to get my pronunciation right for my speech. I fear that I'll sound really awkward if I mispronounce a word or use what the judges might see as a weird accent, but oh well.

My friend managed to round up a third member for the STEM thing. When I found out, I gave her the old "welcome aboard" and continued working frantically on English, where I zoned out when presented with this weekly writing task thing. Not the best at thinking on my feet.
« Last Edit: August 10, 2019, 10:42:07 pm by SlowandSteady »
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Joseph41

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Re: My Journey to the QCE Journey (and beyond)
« Reply #14 on: August 12, 2019, 05:04:38 pm »
+2
I'm so glad you could reunite with your favourite pen - can defs relate haha. 😂

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