To pass English in Queensland you have to pass both the oral and written aspects of the English course. The course is the problem though. The course doesn’t really reflect your ability to read and write, it deals with a whole lot of other things such as memory, creativeness, emotion and subjective interpretation – which count absolutely NOTHING towards being literate.

I failed an oral task where I had to act out a scene from a Shakespeare play and if I fail the next task where I have to analyse poetry and discuss what it says to me, then I fail English and am apparently illiterate – YET I CAN WRITE THIS BLOG POST IN CLEAR ENGLISH!

The tasks this year for English have included a motivational speech on leadership, an essay about Shakespeare’s play, acting out a scene from a Shakespeare play, writing an literary film review from a movie, writing an analytical essay from a 20th century novel, writing a short story from a line of poetry & finally recording a podcast about poetry and what it says to you. Not a single one of those tasks can differentiate between a literate and non literate person, they differentiate between people who are good at reading meanings out of books, movies and plays that do not need to be analysed unless you wish to become someone involved in literature in your further studies.

I always perform poorly in short stories because I am not a creative person. I have immense difficulty coming up with ideas and I generally deal in facts, figures and technicalities and not in emotion, creativeness and fiction. That task disadvantages me greatly, because these are things that cannot be taught, you either have them or you don’t and with the way my brain works, I have more difficulty than most people with these types of thinking and therefore only scraped a C for this task. The same thing with the Shakespeare oral, where you have to act out a scene from a play. I have poor acting skills, have difficulty remember large amounts of text that I cannot understand or process easily and because of this I failed this task.

The final task I have to complete is analysing modern poetry and then creating a podcast looking at what it is trying to say to today’s youth audience and it’s relevance. I’m supposed to read the poem and feel the meaning from it and see what it is trying to say to me, even without actually understanding actually what it means. When I read the poetry, it doesn’t actually mean anything to me, it is just a bunch of words thrown together on a page – yet if i was to put that into my podcast, I would fail. If I fail this English assessment – then I fail English and therefore I am illiterate according to the QSA – YET AGAIN, I’M WRITING THIS BLOG POST IN ENGLISH JUST FINE.

The English system in Queensland is a joke and needs radical reforms and quickly. The current English curriculum favours those who are creative and not those who can simply spell and punctuate correctly and use correct grammar. Shakespeare, analysing films, plays, novels and poetry are not skills that you need to be able to function in day to day life and are definitely not skills you need to be considered literate, although according to the QSA they are. There are stacks and stacks of people out there who have passed English, yet they cannot string sentences together properly, cannot spell and certainly cannot punctuate. It’s because there is so much time wasted on this other rubbish that the actual basics of literacy are forgotten. English needs to be structured into a system like Mathematics, where there is a general course (Maths A) for those who wish to be numerate and able to use maths to overcome everyday situations such as currency, basic measurement and statistics, and then more advanced courses (Maths B & C) for those who require extra levels of Maths for their further studies or for those who simply have the interest.

Why is it not required that all schools offer an English course which deals with issues such as filling in forms correctly, reading timetables and schedules, basic comprehension, putting proper sentences together, spelling and punctuating correctly? This course can be offered to anyone who just wishes to be classified as literate and then you can simply offer all the extra emotional interpretation skills and performances to those who wish to study it in English B and Drama.

To all of you across Queensland who have some hard slogs coming up for the next term in English to simply pass – I wish you all the best. To all those coming up through the English system in future years, I hope that reforms come sooner rather than later so this nonsense is stopped.

I cannot see why this matters. As long as you use the jargon and terminology specific to the subject you’re writing about, then why do you need to use fancier words than necessary. Here’s an example: I was writing about the apartheid era in South Africa and wrote this (not a complete sentence), “…realised that they didn’t have enough people to work…”. I was told to write this instead, “…realised that they didn’t have an adequately sized workforce…”. To me, they both mean the same thing, one just uses fancier words than the other. So why can’t I use the one I choose and get the same mark?

To me, the point of communication is to get your message across from one person to the other in a way that you can both understand that message. Both of those sentences achieve that goal, my sentence even gets across to more people than the so called “improved” sentence. Why do we have multiple words that mean exactly the same thing, that doesn’t improve communication, that handicaps it because everyone has to know all the different words that mean that one thing.

The other problem I have is that, in traditional English (the UK one that we use in Australia) we still have silent letters in words. WHY on earth would you want to have letters in a word which are silent and therefore are useless? e.g is Colour: the US removed the u because it was not needed, same with programme: they removed the extra me because it was not needed. Nobody has moved yet to remove the g from gnome so that it’s just nome. Spelling would improve if we spelt words exactly the way they sounded.

Anyway – there’s my rant about the English language. I have plenty to rant about, so hopefully I can find some time to write about it here!