Non-serious and offensive
A Sydney student nearly had his HSC English exam censored because it depicted “an asylum seeker, driven mad by imprisonment, fantasising about killing the Prime Minister, John Howard.” Apparently, it was treated as a “non-serious attempt” and wasn’t marked until his father and teacher intervened on his behalf.
I’m a bit worried that there’s such a thing as a bureaucratically-defined “non-serious attempt”. Why is that necessary? If it’s a non-serious attempt, surely it would get a very low mark anyway? And what about the time wasted debating whether or not to mark it? Actually, I’m just using this as a springboard to tell you about my TEE English exam. I made a “non-serious attempt” at one of the essays.
The question was something about genre and techniques, so I wrote about Dumb and Dumber. I devoted about two pages to the question of romantic subplots in comedy films. The thrust of my argument was that if you pay to see a comedy, that’s what you should get. If you pay to see a drama, that’s what you should get. And the one “ouch” passage that stayed with me after I left the hall was this:
Imagine if you went to Schindler’s List, and just when he was saving everyone it cut to a Nazi meeting where they were sharing Jew jokes. You wouldn’t like it, would you? So why do they insist on ruining an otherwise-decent comedy film with a sappy romantic subplot?
If I was marking it, I’d be writing “non-serious and offensive” across it, but for some reason it was marked and I finished on 96%.
Go figure.
Hmm, given that it sounded like you were being a smart-arse for the whole essay, that crack would have been fairly innocuous as it may have fitted the tone of the rest of the piece. Was it really non-serious if you were having a decent go at arguing the premise?
I suppose not. I wasn’t taking it seriously, though — they wouldn’t include my English mark in my overall TES anyway, so why bother?
That’s a pretty sad story. I thought English was a bit more than just reading and comprehension. I’m glad that the teacher stuck up for their student against the pinhead who deemed it ‘non-serious’
I’m not so sure that your proposed alteration to Schindlers List would be out of place. Having the Nazi’s tell Jew jokes may have cut a little close to the bone for some - the audience might have been reminded of their own anti-semitism and bigotry. Most people can distance themselves from acting out genocide but perhaps not the attitudes that lead up to such behaviour. It may well have made for a good scene in the film.
Actually, you might be right.
I’m surprised no has pointed out the REAL injustice of this case.
Almost NO school English can be taken seriously any more. We don’t even require HS English teachers to be more than borderline literate.
I’ve met students who have enrolled in a foreign language (oops, we’re not supposed to use that word) in the hope that this will help them help them to write better English.