treelovinhippie
<this space for rent>
Half-Yearlies and I'm thinking that Software will be my weakest subject >> luckily I'm doing 12 units 
The reason it will be and most likely already is my weakest subject is not necessarily because of a fault of my own.
Here's the story (in point form for your convenience):
1) Start of the year (year 12) we begin our SDD major project that we get to do whatever we want
2) Going along fine and happy working on our projects with about 1 theory period a week and the rest all prac working on our projects >> so having fun mainly doing prac
3) Our teacher (who formally taught art - I'm not even sure if he has a degree in computers or similar) pretty much runs the whole computer department, he only knows VB, so that's all we are taught in terms of languages and that's what we had to do our projects in
4) The odd bit of theory simply involved turning to what seemed a random page in the text book, going through it a bit, writing a tiny bit of notes (not even paragraphs) and writing down the text book page number
5) We had this teacher last year as well and didn't learn much, especially in the way of algorithms which made up about 50% of the yr11 yearly.... the thing is that there are only about 4/15 people that even care about how they go
6) As at the 1/2 yearlies this year, this is exactly what is in my book (note book)... methods of implementation, prototyping, RAD, end-user, networked software, binary conversions, logic gatesfloating point standard (taught to us less than a week before the exams along with feasibility, shifting/adding, and searching/sorting) >> that's it!
7) OK, since we hadn't done much theory at all, I was beginning to worry a few weeks before the exams started, so I thought I better find out exactly what we had to study or what chapters we needed to know so I could go through and learn it all myself (as we hadn't been taught much at all)
8) So I ask him what's in it.... reply: "What we've already learnt", I ask again, and again and again over several days. All other subjects had given us at least a warning as to what we had to study for, and software I had no clue as to what we 'had already learnt' cos it is nothing
9) So I asked each day and found out a little more. I only managed to find out what chapters in general we sort of had to know the day before the exams started (he didn't say exactly what we had to know) >>> which was bullshit!
10) Oh, this was what really pissed me off..... he said that we should treat this exam as a "practice for the trials" and that he'll try not to put anything in it that we haven't learnt yet..... so great, we treat it as a practice, but it counts towards our hsc and if there's anything we haven't learnt in it we just have to deal with it
So I studied like crazy, going through the whole text book, studying what I thought we had to know an leaving stuff I'd never seen before.
Anyways, the exam was alright..... there was a 10 mark algorithm question that I had no clue how to do and there were questions to do with the CPU that I have never seen before (nor had anyone else)..... such as what is a 'stack pointer'. We'd learnt briefly what the ALU, CU, registers, flags etc are, but not a stack pointer and other things.
So what do people think? Do you think it's fair? What can I do? Just learn the whole course myself?
Oh, PS, our school is 4 hours south of sydney in a town of about 7000. Though each year our school does get a fair few people get uai's of over 90 and around 3 get 99's. And it's a regular public school, so shit-all resources to the over-funded private schools I know most of the people on these forums take for granted. Oh and no swimming pool, gym, tennis courts, new textbooks (ours are on average about 10 years old), or the best technology (we have P4s, but less than 2.5GHz, no LCDs and about 256MB integrated RAM!), damn discriminate government, funding private schools more than public schools
that's my rant for the day
treelovinhippie
The reason it will be and most likely already is my weakest subject is not necessarily because of a fault of my own.
Here's the story (in point form for your convenience):
1) Start of the year (year 12) we begin our SDD major project that we get to do whatever we want
2) Going along fine and happy working on our projects with about 1 theory period a week and the rest all prac working on our projects >> so having fun mainly doing prac
3) Our teacher (who formally taught art - I'm not even sure if he has a degree in computers or similar) pretty much runs the whole computer department, he only knows VB, so that's all we are taught in terms of languages and that's what we had to do our projects in
4) The odd bit of theory simply involved turning to what seemed a random page in the text book, going through it a bit, writing a tiny bit of notes (not even paragraphs) and writing down the text book page number
5) We had this teacher last year as well and didn't learn much, especially in the way of algorithms which made up about 50% of the yr11 yearly.... the thing is that there are only about 4/15 people that even care about how they go
6) As at the 1/2 yearlies this year, this is exactly what is in my book (note book)... methods of implementation, prototyping, RAD, end-user, networked software, binary conversions, logic gatesfloating point standard (taught to us less than a week before the exams along with feasibility, shifting/adding, and searching/sorting) >> that's it!
7) OK, since we hadn't done much theory at all, I was beginning to worry a few weeks before the exams started, so I thought I better find out exactly what we had to study or what chapters we needed to know so I could go through and learn it all myself (as we hadn't been taught much at all)
8) So I ask him what's in it.... reply: "What we've already learnt", I ask again, and again and again over several days. All other subjects had given us at least a warning as to what we had to study for, and software I had no clue as to what we 'had already learnt' cos it is nothing
9) So I asked each day and found out a little more. I only managed to find out what chapters in general we sort of had to know the day before the exams started (he didn't say exactly what we had to know) >>> which was bullshit!
10) Oh, this was what really pissed me off..... he said that we should treat this exam as a "practice for the trials" and that he'll try not to put anything in it that we haven't learnt yet..... so great, we treat it as a practice, but it counts towards our hsc and if there's anything we haven't learnt in it we just have to deal with it
So I studied like crazy, going through the whole text book, studying what I thought we had to know an leaving stuff I'd never seen before.
Anyways, the exam was alright..... there was a 10 mark algorithm question that I had no clue how to do and there were questions to do with the CPU that I have never seen before (nor had anyone else)..... such as what is a 'stack pointer'. We'd learnt briefly what the ALU, CU, registers, flags etc are, but not a stack pointer and other things.
So what do people think? Do you think it's fair? What can I do? Just learn the whole course myself?
Oh, PS, our school is 4 hours south of sydney in a town of about 7000. Though each year our school does get a fair few people get uai's of over 90 and around 3 get 99's. And it's a regular public school, so shit-all resources to the over-funded private schools I know most of the people on these forums take for granted. Oh and no swimming pool, gym, tennis courts, new textbooks (ours are on average about 10 years old), or the best technology (we have P4s, but less than 2.5GHz, no LCDs and about 256MB integrated RAM!), damn discriminate government, funding private schools more than public schools
that's my rant for the day
treelovinhippie
