At the end of the day, what remains? by

2025-07-30 04:00:56 UTC

The most significant memory of assessment I had was as a student in my final years of secondary schooling. I studied the International Baccalaureate diploma, which was assessed at the end of year 12 with external assessments, internal course work, and 2 relatively unconventional hurdle tasks which contributed towards your final grade – theory of knowledge, and the extended essay. The extended essay was by far the most freeing in the sense that it could be completed in any discipline and past students and my peers tended to centre the topic around their interests or academic strengths. However, I found this the most challenging aspect of the IB portfolio because I had gotten so used to rigid assignments with fleshed out expectations and success indicators that this task was daunting in its limitlessness. This caused me to reflect upon my previous schooling and active outlook on education and what the purpose of it really was. The disproportionate emphasis on outcome had been so normalised and trained into me from the schooling system that this independent, self-directed research paper almost seemed like a trap – a misstep waiting to happen.

2025-07-30 04:02:02 UTC

I feel like when I was in year 12 and on my way to conceiving and understanding the "Whose Reality" segment of the Unit3/4 area of study I was preparing to conceive of and trying to understand it. I felt excited by what I would be able to try and conceive, but also nervous about what the content was supposed to be concerning. When I went bank to placement and saw what kind of SAC's began to take the place of Whose Reality in the Protest pieces I felt similarly confused - and I wondered, if it is confusing to me now, how and when will the concept of VCE English becoming conceivable for me to learn to be able to teach effectively

Paper mache Jerry Seinfeld bird

2025-07-30 04:02:43 UTC

Our English classes in high school typically had 4 assessments a semester; a take home essay, an in-class essay, and oral presentation, and a creative response. No, actually it may have been one in-class essay and the take home was actually a creative writing task. Anyway, it’s the creative response that I think of most. At the time, I felt that these were a waste of time. I think I was prejudiced by notions of what I felt a rigorous English classroom experience ought to be. For one of these creatives I remember making a paper mache bird with the face of Jerry Seinfeld – this was meant to be some representation linking To Kill A Mockingbird to the last episode of Seinfeld in which the friend quartet are made to answer for their social ‘crimes’. Another I made was a diorama of the Apollo 11 landing, complete with Lego figurines and torches, made to convince viewers that the moon landings were, of course, faked. This, I believe, was during a unit about persuasive texts. The creative, often silly and chaotic nature of the creative responses, which I derided at the time, are the ones that stick with me now and inform my capacity to argue, and indeed to intellectualise or pseudo-intellectualise. My experiences as an English teacher so far have centred around persuasive writing, not on creative responses or expressing thoughts and concepts in modes other than written or spoken ones. Creating a paper mache bird, or a diagram of the moon landing in English class does not fit neatly into the VCE study plan. Actually, it doesn’t fit at all. But moreso than any unrememberable essay I wrote as a teenager, those tasks come to mind frequently and make me consider the best ways to lead students towards capturing their own ‘collections’ of reality.

Musing

2025-07-30 04:02:57 UTC

Learning is the goal, assessment is the proof of learning. This is often twisted, turned around, and flipped where assessment is seen as the goal, with learning being derived from its pursuit.

The curriculum offers the required parts, but ultimately its the teachers who determine how this is assessed. While the curriculum can't be changed (at least 'in the moment') assessment is far more flexible in approach. We determine the form, and depending on students needs we can alter that form, to change it from an impassable wall which prohibits performance, to an open gate which encourages it.

I've witnessed this where English assessment was differentiated on an individual basis to provide better access to EAL and ASD students. Where it was presented in smaller components, or with additional components (such as a written piece accompanied by an oral discussion).

2025-07-30 04:03:06 UTC

When I was a student, I went through all kinds of English exams. Although my test results were usually quite good, I didn’t actually have a strong grasp of English. My English writing was still very formulaic, and I still don’t know how to write beautiful essays like a real writer. For me, assessment has never been very important. In fact, I sometimes dislike it because it can hurt my confidence in language learning. If the assessment is just a small quiz during the learning process, I think it serves as a useful standard to check how much I have learned. But when assessment becomes a tool for selecting people for jobs or further study, it can make English learning feel twisted and stressful. As a teacher, I think we should try our best to help students not fear or dislike assessment. Instead, we should give them more encouragement, rather than always pointing out their weaknesses. If students have difficulties, teachers can adjust their teaching strategies to help them improve.

A frustration

2025-07-30 04:05:33 UTC

There was a time I received a good mark for an essay about which I could not recall a single conscious or coherent thought I’d had in the writing of it. The essay was on Catcher in the Rye, I gas bagged something or other about Holden Caulfield crossing the street while repeating the name of his dead brother. I decided that success in English could be attained by what might be described as mostly blind ‘bullshitting’.

This delayed my recognition of the inestimable value given by expressive, determined acts of meaning.

The kind of English studies I experienced

quietly, but studiously ripped deliberate, expressional language from its possible living relationship to my thought and environment. I did not recognise I could create an own-context through interaction, a taking within, of already instantiated forms of life, discoverable in rich, inherited bodies of expression.

Unwittingly, English became a thoughtless exercise of inhuman, machinic reproduction.