Friday, October 10, 2003

And the outer darkness was filled with much wailing and gnashing of teeth...for they knew the glory of the A, but were unjustly condemned to a C..
Yeah.

My buddy Sam from Men In Hats basically summed my feelings up well when he said 'So much fury.'

You know that last english exam I had last term?

The one that I worked really, really hard on so later on I could possibly post it on OB because I liked the anti-war message inside it?

Yeah, that one.

I got a *resist urge to add expletive of sorts* C5.

A C5? The grading system for each letter is from the lowest, 1, to the highest, 5.

And I got a C5.

Which is basically a kiss of death for my ranking.

I was coming fifth or sixth out of 160 grade 11 students (which I was damn proud of, seeing as english was my best subject) I'm now most probably down past the fifteens.

Which is brilliant for everyone else who did rather well in that exam, but not for me.

So much for that.

When I first got my piece back, I was half expecting a bad mark, I always do.

But when I read my criteria sheet, I was, at first, surprised, miffed, really confused, and finally furious.

My comments? (You know, the bit that explains where you went wrong)

One sentence.

One. Sentence.

All it basically said was that my story wasn't appropriate for the poem stimulus I chose.

Let me just explain my story and the poem to you so I don't leave a gap.

The poem I chose from the list of stimuli was 'Anthem For Doomed Youth.' For those of you not in the know, it is basically a description of war, filled with metaphorical statements like the 'demented wailing shells' etc. Overall it is a description of the horrors of war and leaves a very anti war image in the mind.

I chose that one and put it in modern terms, in an Iraq-like country and focused it on a squad of US soldiers in a hostile situation.

The poem describes the rapid rattle of the guns and I used quite flowery language to describe the S47 Soviet's used by the antagonists.

The poem also has demented wailing shells or whatever, there is a scene in my piece when all hell breaks loose when the Antagonist's use their S47's grenade launcher to rain down a furious hell upon the soldiers.

I used an almost surreal, dreamlike writing style that I deemed appropriate for the poem as it pretty much matched it.

A fallen soldier with 'a rifle, hands no longer to claim its own' is in the scene. An unspoken sorrow and emotion is shown towards this dead person and a sense of loss is obvious.

It was emotive, contained no more violence than was necessary for it to be relevant, it even contained a line or two of what I thought was well implied wit.

I guess I was wrong.

And so was Flynn (who read the whole thing), as was Mark, Katy and anyone else who read the stupid thing in its first stage.

Alex Godfrey (Said king of English who's coming first) was wondering how the hell I didn't beat his A1.

The thing that really gets to me is the marking.

So many things are underlined for no apparent reason and the first 'incorrect' spelling was...well, not.

Don't get me wrong, I had some spelling mistakes, I always do, it's a fair trade though, I can write well and on the off chance I get some words wrong when I'm redrafting in a hurry.

But as far as I know, and this might be just me you know, intensely has only one 't.'

There it was, on the first page, written in black biro between the blue 'n' and 's,' a 't.'

Which left my now 'corrected' word as 'intentsley.'

I guess I must be going crazy.

I was going to say something about the mark in class when Mrs Taylor asked if anyone had any questions, but I didn't. Why? Because I was so...upset...I would have vapourised at three paces.

Monday's lesson is going to be interesting.
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