Module B Hate Thread (1 Viewer)

ben_aussie1

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I may have shot myself in the foot with this one, but i said that the excerpt thay gave for Hamlet was completely unrelated to my personal interpretation and said 'to no extent' did it resonate with my response to the play as a whole. Hamlet is mainly about themes like revenge, morality, madness, etc. and Fortinbras said NOTHING to do with any of it!!
 
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Thankfully for Gwen Harwood, it was a poem that i knew well. Unfortunately, I did that section last and only ended up writing 4 pages for it.

Though, i know ALOT of people who screwed that section up solely because that wasn't the poem they focused on, because our teachers recommended us use the less used poems such as 'Sharpness of Death' and 'Triste Triste'. So yea, I'm lucky, but still didn't do as well as I could have.
 

sophielee169

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this hsc was retarted i did yeats and when i came out of the exam every kid, even the top ranked kids were complaining because we and the teachers didnt think they would nominate and if they did then we assumed that they wouldn't chose the hardest poem, being among school children, but we were wrong and some classes didnt even study the poem just read over it so they were serverely screwed.

god my hsc hasnt been lucky, with the exception of the belonging story, i mean the crucible question just shafted me as well
same thing happened to us.. we had a sub for 6 weeks who didnt think it was even necessary to read this poem through in class..
 

sophielee169

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I may have shot myself in the foot with this one, but i said that the excerpt thay gave for Hamlet was completely unrelated to my personal interpretation and said 'to no extent' did it resonate with my response to the play as a whole. Hamlet is mainly about themes like revenge, morality, madness, etc. and Fortinbras said NOTHING to do with any of it!!
well english is all about your own interpretation of the text.. atleast yours will stand out!
 

Glorious

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I may have shot myself in the foot with this one, but i said that the excerpt thay gave for Hamlet was completely unrelated to my personal interpretation and said 'to no extent' did it resonate with my response to the play as a whole. Hamlet is mainly about themes like revenge, morality, madness, etc. and Fortinbras said NOTHING to do with any of it!!
Yikes... You may have actually. The questions are written for you to agree with them, but obviously in this case, to some extent. However, for you to hang your essay solely on going against the question is sort of pushing it....so... Im not sure.
 

steph_g

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Guesstimation of marks -
walked in with three speeches prepared, none of them suu kyi. read the question, flipped out, gave it about 25 minutes which consisted of me making convoluted statements about the speech, attempting to 'judge' and incorporate a personal voice. essentially wrote half of an essay, comparing a LIMITED analysis of suu kyi against a more thorough analysis of bandler.
thoughts?
 

wyssm

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im so pissed about speeches, i didnt know much about suu kyi's speech so i culdnt write a full paragraph on it. all i did was bullshit a really limited connection between her closing statements and my 3 speeches at the start and end of every paragraph. need to know what the maximum mark i can get? >.<
 

steph_g

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im so pissed about speeches, i didnt know much about suu kyi's speech so i culdnt write a full paragraph on it. all i did was bullshit a really limited connection between her closing statements and my 3 speeches at the start and end of every paragraph. need to know what the maximum mark i can get? >.<
did the question say respond with one, or at least one, speech?
 

Phoenix 12

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did the question say respond with one, or at least one, speech?
It said at least one. Do you think that an in depth analysis of one speech is better than a superficial analysis of two speeches?
 

steph_g

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It said at least one. Do you think that an in depth analysis of one speech is better than a superficial analysis of two speeches?
That's what I did - mostly because the other speeches I knew were Keating and Sadat, and I thought I could make more of a judgment using Bandler by drawing on Suu Kyi's call for women and knowledge etc etc
 

largarithmic

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Sorry for digging up an old post to quote but this user did try refute some earlier claims I made, so I may as well start from the claim that speeches are harder than hamlet

thats a fair argument and im not trying to say that hamlet in any case is easy, otherwise i doubt they would have set it for the advanced course, though for the question, i do think a text that consists of one entirety of one text is much easier to approach thana bunch of speeches or essays.. and how you said about it having 2 main themes that contradict, i guess if you only talked about one and backed up your evidence and it soundly answered the question, then it would work, wouldnt it? because a marker looks at what you present them, not other pieces of the text that you dont talk about.. and if that answers the question then thats all you need :)
I'll start by saying I think the speeches are inappropriate for modb in the first place given what modb is supposed to be, but although I don't do them I am convinced that even if you choose to study all seven they are considerably easier than Hamlet and the other texts in the module.

The thing is because you know that the various speeches are disparate I assume no marker expects you to come to some sort of overwhelming conclusion about what they all mean specifically, but something broader about teaching idealism or humanism or something that basically can come in any form and is pretty adaptable and within that you just analyse each speech. Essentially what you have to do is read all seven, come up with the techniques and general appreciation of how they work, and come to some conclusion about how they may or may not fit together as a whole. Given no marker will expect this to be highly specific it mustnt be that hard.

By contrast Hamlet is seriously a ridiculously messy play, the sort of thing people write PhD thesises centred around. In my opinion it's sorta designed as that; in terms of its genre, its style, whatever it is a hotchpotch of so many different things. It has a ridiculous number of very significant scenes (each of which probably is harder to analyse than any one of the speeches), which don't create a unitary text but rather a play thats divided and confused (perhaps intentionally on Shakespeare's part). To make it worse, the ending is probably one of the weirdest and most confusing parts of the whole play. And not only do students have to come up with some sort of meaningful reading supposedly of the whole text, and a reading much more in depth than what I'd assume you'd have to do for the speeches, but they have to prepare to answer a ridiculously huge range of questions for which their readings just might not fit. HSC two years ago was about the "importance of loyalty" - for a lot of people, you'd be really struggling to twist the definition of loyalty there to fit your reading of the play. Essentially memorising a Hamlet essay just doesn't make the cut if you want to secure a good mark, you have to learn much much more material than you could ever use in one single essay. And if you ask me that's what mod b is designed for.

Maybe I'm a cynical bastard but I don't have that much sympathy for people complaining they only learnt two or three speeches or poems and the one on the paper specified didn't match what they're studied. Becuase what you're supposed to do in this module is 'critically study' (whatever that means) the text you are given, here it is a collection of speeches, so youre meant to look at the collection of speeches. Not a sub-collection of the collection. Teachers and coaching colleges instructing students only to learn two of them are sorta cheating the system and teaching to the test, that's something that is bad and undermines the aim of teaching students literature. The board of studies realises this and thus keeps it within its right to throw odd questions; for example when they changed AOS to ask for only one related by surprise in 2009: the course tells you to learn two relateds, but this doesnt mean learn one paragraph for each of your relateds which you can then parrot in the test (or even worse as part of an entire parroted essay). If you have just prepared for what you assumed the exam would be, well that means you haven't properly prepared for the course; and the examination is an examination of the course not some dreamt up vision of what every HSC exam is likely to look like by people who run coaching colleges.
 
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kirstyanne-xx

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With the speeches unit, I prepared for Keating and Bandler but remembered 2 quotes and some techniques for Suu Kyi. This allowed me to structure the essay Suu Kyi through personal context, Bandler through personal context, Suu Kyi through social context (where I used quotes from the given excerpt and analysed it) and Bandler through social context.

It was possible to take aspects of the provided extract and form analysis on that...even though the question was a bit too generalised.
 

Wiz Apprec Soc

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With the speeches unit, I prepared for Keating and Bandler but remembered 2 quotes and some techniques for Suu Kyi. This allowed me to structure the essay Suu Kyi through personal context, Bandler through personal context, Suu Kyi through social context (where I used quotes from the given excerpt and analysed it) and Bandler through social context.

It was possible to take aspects of the provided extract and form analysis on that...even though the question was a bit too generalised.
Isn't this a "Hamlet Hate Thread"? Just saying... because no one really cares
 

kirstyanne-xx

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Isn't this a "Hamlet Hate Thread"? Just saying... because no one really cares
HAHA this is why I dislike this is website, so many critical people.

"Isn't this a "Hamlet Hate Thread"? Just saying... because no one really cares"
Haha thanks for that :) I'll make sure to not put my opinion on a forum about all about Module 2 - which evidently was the most challenging module in the second paper thus alot of people would have an opinion about it, including myself. This website is meant to be helpful and for discussion, "just saying".
 
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Phoenix 12

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That's what I did - mostly because the other speeches I knew were Keating and Sadat, and I thought I could make more of a judgment using Bandler by drawing on Suu Kyi's call for women and knowledge etc etc
ahh I did keating but i drew a connection between their affirmation of universal identity as well as nominalising the favourable qualities of women in kyi, and the soldier in keating. hopeully thats ok LOL i also said that they both resonate beyond their original context...
 

herbs1

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You didn't have to use it, but yeah you could highlight Hamlet's inaction using the quotes if you wanted. I had a point about inaction as well as corruption in Denmark.
I talked about how the final scenes exemplify the struggle of individuals against a repressive society. I talked about how Hamlet's struggle between classical and christian methods of acting showed how social constructions like religion prevent individual desire and actualisation, then linked it to the end/gravedigger scene. I talked about how women were repressed by similar social constructions, again linking it to ophelia's death in the gravedigger scene, while also talking about the strength of family in supporting individuality, linking it to fortinbras' good connection with his uncle/father, and laertes (sp) connection with his.

It was a fairly open ended question tbh.
 

13abie

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I think Bandler worked superbly with this particular question (drawing on cultural, historical, religious context)
but 90% of my cohort did Sadat
 

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