Sunday, 2 November 2008

The Final Cram

My head's filling up with
words, words, words
None of them mine
Rather from
Plath, Orwell, Auden and Kroll

Quotes and references,
Direct and indirect
Fill up the Living Room
inside my head

Ibsen and Kirkup
take up the couch
While past and future essays
flutter by casually

Tomorrow they'll have to leave
Only to be replaced
by formuli, molecular structures and the digestive system

Who will have just settled in
When verb conjugations
muscle their way in,
Helped by their pals; irregular verbs.
Some take avere, others take essere (these must agree)

But they will only be kicked out
by the Bolsheviks
who'll commandeer the couch
The Jacobins and Sans Culottes will stand by the fire
And Bismark, Churchill and Wilson
will hover by the coffee table

For one long dinner party
After which, my Living Room head will empty

With only scraps of quotes or statistics
and a wine stained carpet
to remember the year by.

7 comments:

Jacob said...

That's going straight to the fridge door, N.

My favourite part is 'avere and essere must agree'. I almost forgot about verb conjugations and such.

Nerd Girl said...

See, what you do without me?

John Eldridge said...

In Queensland, a student's OP (UAI) is determined by their performance in their senior subjects over the entire year (or 2 years depending on subject), generally weighted equally from term to term.

To make things even better, an OP is determined using only the data from a student's 5 best subjects, so most students (who take 6 or 7 board subjects) have their 'crap' subject - maths for wordy types and english for mathy types - ignored.

The statewide scaling comes from the QCS test, an extremely soft 2-day series of exams which presents idyllic seaside panoramas and asks you to write about the feelings they inspire :p

The QCS score of each individual is displayed on the Senior Certificate, but the fact that the result is used only to scale groups and not for direct assessment means that it really doesn't impact on an individual in any big way.

So I've always thought that Queensland has the stress-free senior schooling setup. Fuck having to do all this Epic End Exams stuff. And the HSC? No way.

What was the point of all this? :S

Best of luck anyway!

Nerd Girl said...

...

I am in a shocked silence because that system makes so much sense! (and sounds so nice, I imagine no Queenslanders have nervous breakdowns in October)

Thanks for the luck, btw. :)

Femikneesm said...

Hope you're coping with it all. Let us know when you're results are in! Excellent post, by the way.

Femikneesm said...

I can't believe I just used the wrong 'you're'. I meant 'your', of course.

Nerd Girl said...

An honest mistake after you'd just written the other one.

Thanks for all the support too, guys. One day someone will have to write an essay on that thing and then the circle will be complete.