#vcaa

how we feeling

for me I am not feeling a thing for some reason i think all the anxiety has flipped polarity so that it all cancels out for now

we’ll see in the morning

ANYWAY I’m sure u will do well in revs hope the best

Well it’s the morning now and I’m legit shitting myself

I don’t know what my VCAA student number is so I can’t see it online, I have to wait for the letter or for a teacher at my school to email it to me

Im hoping for above 30 but I will take 25+

At this point I’m just mega nervous waiting

I hope you did well also!! Good luck to the class of 2023!!!

Yo so the bigwigs at VCAA (the guys who write the curriculum for all education in Victoria, Australia) have been coming out with new study designs for almost all VCE classes that’ll be implemented at different points over the next 3 years. The VCE is considered relatively prestigious-ish in the sense there’s a fair few people in other countries who send their kids to Victoria to do it (Australia’s biggest export is education after all) so it’s a big deal when major changes happen to how important courses run. Context = understood.

So I’m a maths (…and science) teacher now and the major changes to the three maths streams since I graduated in 2012 can be summed up like this:

Spesh (the highest tier of maths, scales up the most out of any course except stuff like Latin) - Kinematics are less of a thing but they added in Proofs and hypothesis tests(?!) instead

Methods (still high scaling, but more like uni engineering maths instead of theoretical crazy hard stuff) - Stats removed, some more “calculus but if you can’t do calculus to that particular thing” included instead

Further Maths (General maths, scales down(?!) and is the “ya got a mortgage here’s a maths problem” class that a commerce degree at uni usually means by saying you need at least one maths background to get in) - the stats from methods is here now and they call it General Maths to stop the confusion with it and methods

and there’s also now a fourth tier of maths called foundation

I’m assuming foundation is the barebones “pay your bills with x income And do your taxes” class your relatives keep saying they should’ve been taught how to do in school

So that’s all the changes across a decade of education. When they announced “big changes are coming to the way things will work across VCE maths” I think I’m safe to say most of us took it as the usual reordering and in/out for content as described above. Since I’m a good boy (read “I wanted to put on a good front to make sure I got my contract extension” - I’m permanent now dw) I attended the online seminars (lmao webex) that they presented as information sessions on the changes.

First one was Spesh. No biggie, exactly what you’d expect, some stuff’s swapped again, hang on Pseudocode is in..? But that’s just any code that could do any maths?! And they’re mentioning that it’s in methods too??? The chat at this point’s asking a lot of questions, mostly “how can we know what’s examinable so we can actually teach this??” But thankfully they have an example that should satisfy you:

This is not even a half step above “hello world” and it’s in the hardest maths course? How hard does this get? What do they consider legit? Is there an example exam question that they have as a reference? How will they be able to write textbooks on this if that’s all they have?

No answer. Oh well methods is the next day maybe that will elaborate on it.

Methods opens with the same spiel on things, negligible changes imo on actual content… and he acknowledges some confusion from yesterday on Pseudocode! Has he got an answer? What’s the example this time…

Oh. And it’s definitely examinable and we might elaborate on that later but for now that’s all we got.

That was all 2022. Recently (2023) they did the same thing for “revisions” which was for FurtherGeneral Maths’ course (all of these are being phased in kinda since changing a year 12 course when year 11s are running on the old one makes no sense). Guess what showed up in the General Maths study design!

It’s ya boi 21st century life skills!

I’ll be honest, I was a little suss on this from the Meth/Spesh presentations but I think this confirms what I was thinking: this is some boomers pulling the “kids need to learn how to computer” card isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, kids do need to learn to computer, but lol as if they’ve got this as their only example to show off across all three variety of maths!

But wait, there’s more!

They’ve got a page about it now! Yay! There’s some more examples - harder ones now - but there’s still no actual information on how this topic can be presented on the actual end of year exams. What do i teach them? What constitutes legit Pseudocode vs nonsense pretend code? Is this basic computer science 101 or are the kids going to be presented with a max level spesh question through the lenses of a guy saying “yeah but make it code”

rethink your initial aim to get into higher academia & make your family proud, do tafe instead

do a gap year bc atar is redundant after a bit

volunteer, if you accept peanuts as payment

offer your skills at your local library, do existential bookreadings for kids

wail

say bye to your friends who are getting accepting into their courses

ponder socialist utopias

get lost in anarchist papers

become a tap dancing clown

brace yourself to write a book about your inspiring rebound

work at maccas

get into graffiti

become an underground legend

make trash sculptures

actually go to headspace to get support in work/study

start a blog

write your manifesto

become a countercultural icon

busk (if you have skills like that)

capitalise off your mediocrity (mass appeal)

print a stupid amount of resumes to handout

dont resort to drugs and things

consider a career in comedy

actually take a cert in a marketable skill thats in demand

sell at a market

make stickers

join a cult

become a gutter punk

start an onlyfans

become a menace to society

read stories about successful people who 'didn't need uni' to get to where they are now

bitch about nepotism

pray to god you get a job with a liveable wage

launch an instagram for something weird, because you have nothing to lose

watch every single college acceptance video on youtube, yt knows its a fantasy you'll never see

get into cooking mean shit

decide to publish songs recorded in your basement onto spotify

dedicate hours to read religious texts, to find a path

start a youtube channel

publish a found-footage film

start writing poetry, but only free-form lyrics

read textbooks to replace higher education

regularly gather around fires

get jacked, give advice you're unqualified to

accept your fate

consume an absurd amount of self-help material

wonder where and when it all went wrong

get dragged further to the depths of nihilism

binge [insert anything]

make responsible financial choices

sell AI art as NFTs

consider crypto

contemplate your life

get into drag

do bartending

laydown

practice a bunch of foreign languages

be one of those mascot guys

train-hopping/hitchhiking

become a filmnerd

complete a barista course

clean your room

join a discord

become a DJ

produce techno

become a performance artist (search: Petr Pavlensky)

live in a sharehouse

defect, escape the clutch of the atar

make shitposts about your 'situation'

go to indonesia, become the modern Gauguin

wander alone into a forest

live off the grid

join the circus

watch youtube videos to teach yourself shit you didnt learn in VCE

busk as a mime

meditate

watch Netflix's entire catalogue in a week

consider a career in graphic design

set up a ponzi scheme like that movie

reminisce how good it was as a kid

get into seriously exploitative work to eat crumbs

ruminate whether or not you're mentally challenged

live off youth checks

visit real estate properties as a spectator, not a buyer

cultivate an enthusiasm for vintage cars, something out of reach entirely

literally become Bernard Black

regret the fact you didnt do any subjects that taught you how to handle money

get tatted

try to think of a list of jobs unlikely to become automated in the next 5 years

come to a conclusion that nothing can replace real human service

wait tables

lend an ear to the homeless

time manage like a mf, to make up for how time was thrown around

catastrophises

compare yourself to your graduating peers

compare yourself to country students

compare yourself to the sweats

consider a life of crime: jail provides a food , water and roof over your head

steal lemons

VCAA @ me: 

*has barely revised

*notes only 3/4 finished

*done no practise exams

Me: it'll be right

i would consistently annotate my folio and go in depth about what i liked and why i liked it, i would get marked down because i wasnt using the language they needed to know that i knew what i was talking about 

you can be as descriptive as all hell, but unless you use the language that they are looking for, they cant mark you to the level you should be

art elements, art principles, (going into drama here) expressive skills, dramatic elements, etc. these are all lists of words they can actually grade you on! these words are what theyre looking for!

it seems crazy to try and memorise them  i know. get into the habit of having the lists next to you in class or when annotating so you can implement these words. eventually, when you get through your folio or you start mock exams, youll find you can remember them so much easier. some will even be second nature