I have to be very honest here. I become exceptionally wary everytime someone asks me for advice on History Extension and whether it is a subject worth picking up. It's been happening quite frequently recently (mostly because Year 12 is just around the corner) and well, to a lot of people I don't really know what to say.
As you all know I am extremely biased against History Extension. If you haven't picked up on that by now you must be as dense as one of Hagrid's rock cakes. So giving advice to people is really really hard - especially when I already have my own built-in bias towards a subject. To be fair though, it's not that the subject is bad or that the teacher isn't great. It's because it's just such a mentally taxing subject that requires so many hours and hours of input and consolidation.
For example, we get booklets handed out in class which we are supposed to take home and do some "extra reading" on. This is just an excerpt of something we got at the beginning of the year:
"The past, appropriated by historians, is never the past itself, but a past evidenced by its remaining and accessible traces and transformed into historiography through a series of theoretically and methodologically disparate procedures (ideological positionings, tropes, emploments, argumentative modes), such historiography - as articulated in both upper and lower cases - then being subject to a series of uses which are logically infinite but which, in practice, correspond to the range of power bases that exist at any given juncture and spectrum. Understood in this way, as a rhetorical, metaphorical, textual practice governed by distinctive but never homogeneous procedures through which the maintenance/transformation....... etc, etc."
(Source: Rethinking History - Keith Jenkins)
If you understood all that on the first reading then CONGRATULATIONS. YOU MUST BE SOME SORT OF GENIUS OR SOMETHING. It took me at least 4 readings just to understand that paragraph - and then I had to go grab a dictionary and look up every second word to gain a deeper understanding. And you know what was worse? I seemed to have been dumped into a class full of people who had way better literacy skills than me and actually seemed to UNDERSTAND what they were reading. Don't try to prove me wrong. I am entirely justified in having yucky feelings towards said subject.
I am probably not the best person to come to for advice on subject choices anyway. Which reminds me. I was feeling mightily depressed after school today because of maths and the realization that I would have TWELVE periods per week on that subject alone. And then I had a "hallelujah" moment at tutoring where I realised that I could just drop 4 u maths and even do 9 units this year if I wanted to. Cause get this, 9 + 3 = 12!!! So technically, my 9 units next year, plus my 3 units this year would still leave me with 2 extra units.
But then I realised that that logic was based on the assumption that I would do well in this year's HSC exams. So I sunk into spiral-of-despair-v2.
Not that I'm dropping 4u maths. It's just nice knowing that there's a "trampoline" to catch me if I decided that I didn't like what I was doing now.
Okay enough about maths and history and school and all that yucky stuff. Let's have a DW gif spam!!!! YAY!! (haven't done them in a while!)
And I have finished Series 5 :) I watched the last episode yesterday (even though I promised myself I wouldn't watch any until the exams were over) but come on, it was only one episode.
And more sexy Matt Smith dance moves.... because one can never have enough sexy Matt Smith dance moves.
P.S. My mum, who works at a high school as an interpreter, just came into the room and asked me what an "import" was cause she had to translate for some parents tomorrow. Apparently their kid got sent to the principal for calling some guy an "import" and "fob". LOLZ FOREVER. Now my mum can't stop laughing at the definition.
