Natural talent and gift is just excessive exposure very early on.
Takes someone who is called a "math genius" in high school for example, everyone will just assume he/she is naturally talented at maths, no-one will think to ask he/she how much maths they did in primary school. In actuality they did maybe three times, even more, the amount of maths that everyone else did. And at primary school level this isn't very much, maybe 20-30 minutes a day? But after years it adds up - the time spent accumulates to a total that cannot be reached with a single year (Y12) of effort.
It's too limited to just look at work done in Y12. Even if this supposed genius is lazy throughout his/her high-schooling years, his/her years of work during primary school still puts him ahead of the majority half a decade later in Y11/12.
Lol exactly my point of view on the natural talent debate. *Hi 5*
However I would like to add that I have allowed my view to have enough leeway for people like Terence Tao who are definitely naturally talented. But otherwise spot on imo
On the topic of English, ilovemathsmeth and others have obviously put in a lot of hard work but achieved below their expectations of themselves. It is natural to be disappointed. In most subjects pure hard work seems to do the trick, but in English it is more often knowing what to do and then putting in the hard work. You need to have a teacher or tutor or somebody who will tell you exactly what to do in a language analysis, how you have to break the article down, make links between parts etc. etc. and then you have to work on it. For context and text response you similarly need effective instruction early on.
For language analysis it helps if you enjoy picking out how the author is trying to position you (giving you a sense of superiority
). For context and text response it helps if you enjoy the text, it helps if you actually appreciate what the author is doing. Charles Dickens and Shakespeare were geniuses! You are reading their work, so take some joy out of seeing how they are manipulating every sentence and line. At some points text response was a bit like language analysis only with a whole book. In context you can exercise your imagination a bit. It's a bit idealistic to say English is all fun. It gets boring, it gets tedious and you have to put in a lot of hours. But if you take a little bit of joy in it you can go a long way.
Other things: be brave enough to try out fresh spur-of-the-moment ideas in the exam as these make you stand out, get yourself into a good mindset for concise yet meaningful writing and keep on practicing, plan thoroughly and...yeah can't think of anything else right now.
And of course it helps if you enjoyed writing prior to year 12.
And I think it's a huge mistake that we're all judged on a number instead of our real accomplishments.
At this time of our lives what be our *real accomplishments* apart from that statistic?
Our involvement in a range of activities, contributions to the community, actual competitions that test real thinking.. things like that?
Not VCE, by any means.
But what makes you think we
are simply
judged on our ENTER as opposed to contributions to the community and other competitions. Sure ENTER cutoffs exist for university entrance, but that's about it. Beyond university and heading into employment academic results become less valuable than genuine experience that demonstrates particular qualities. For med aspirants, in fact, this already becomes important.
EZ Edit: Fixed up double post for you. =)
Home
Help
Search
Login
