VATE English Language Revision Lecture: Review

[tan(k)]

Today I attended the VATE English Language revision sessions. Having looked around on the forum before going to the sessions and not finding any recent reviews or descriptions I thought I would let people know what I thought of it.

I went to the Section C (essay) first with Rebecca Swain. I personally thought this was the most informative and helpful part of the day. She went through all of the 'big ideas' covered in English Language and gave some really interesting and relevant examples. In terms of writing the actual essay, I did get a few new ideas that I'm actually quite excited to try. Her exam tips, however, were very general and nothing new.

Section A (short answer) was presented by Luke Francis, who is an assessor for VCAA. He was very entertaining and engaging. Content wise, I didn't really learn anything but I guess they can basically ask anything in this section of the exam so covering all of the content in that amount of time would be impossible. I did get some really great study tips though and overall this session was quite fun.

Section B (analytical) was the most boring session of the day. The presenter, Josephine Smith, gave us two sample analytical commentaries and then read them to us. Her exam tips were not bad but nothing stood out.

Overall, I'm glad I went, if only for the essay ideas. And it was definitely value for money (only $45). I felt like we had to rush to get through everything during the two first sessions because each only went for an hour and 15 minutes.
I'd love to hear what other people thought. Or if you've been to a different lecture, what did you think?

[walkec]

I was there today, but for Literature.
I went to Dark Roots (run by Ross Walker), then Exam A, then Adrienne Rich poetry run by the Lit teacher from Mac.Rob

I though the first 2 sessions were the best. Ross was really good in that he asked us if there were any short stories from the text we were still struggling with, so I jumped at the opportunity to discuss the two that I am least comfortable with. We then got 10 minutes to annotate passages that he had selected and discussed our ideas.

Session 2 was good, on the whole. A lot of the exam strategy stuff my teacher had already covered, but it was good to reinforce this. The presenter also gave us a few suggestions as to how to go about planning and annotating and suggested that we spend the bulk of reading time on the text we are least comfortable with. The suggestion of also structuring a paragraph/s on a specific literary device was something that I hadn't considered.

Session 3 was by far the worst. The lecturer was difficult to understand and I found her to be quite condescending. I asked her a question to clarify how much we should refer outside of the passages and her response made me feel like a complete idiot. I felt as though she was far too rushed in her approach and too general. Sure, having an understanding of Rich's life is important but it's not the same as analysing poetry. I also didn't like how she structured her talk around the motif of silence - there is so much in Rich's poetry that could have been covered.

But yeah, $45 was good value. On the whole, I'm glad I went.

[Robert123]

Ha, I was in all the same lectures as you for english language. I agree with your review strongly for all 3 lectures although I thought i just found the last boring due to being brain dead by that time of the day.
It was so crowded there, I heard there was around a total of 1000 students there so I'm glad I did the lectures in the different order compare to the majority