Because of a certain little thing called the Welsh Baccalaureate. Those fortunate enough to have never heard of this horrific qualification will now have to pity the pain a huge amount of Welsh Students suffer. It is basically 'Key Skills' rubbish. But worse. And longer. And fussier. This qualification basically consists of roughly 11 things we need to do.
- ICT
- Number skills
- Working with others
- Improving self performance
- Solving problems
- Communication
- Individual Investigation
- 30 hours volunteering
- Work Experience
- Pro-Wales-Anti-Everyone-Else Propaganda lessons
- A diary and 'fun' activities!
If having a teacher not read it is bad, a teacher actually reading it is even worse. I have been rejected a huge amount of my ICT work because I didn't spell a Welsh word correctly or didn't write it quite the way he wanted it. Bearing in mind, this wasn't even my real tutor. My *real* tutor decided to skip 80% of the lessons because he was doing a much more important job in producing the school's musical (which surprisingly, was actually pretty good of what I heard from it). So, I had to complete ICT the day it was due in, like 70% of the year.
7 I haven't even looked at yet, and need to complete this in the next few weeks, and 9 was so difficult to come by. Work Experience searching within the medical sector is near impossible because of insurance policies. I ended up doing Work Experience in a charity shop I already volunteer for. Hmmpf. Either way, this is a necessary procedure, otherwise you fail the Bacc. Which is pretty sucky.
The 30-hours volunteering wouldn't have been an issue if we decided where to volunteer, but had no choice. The Year 12 students were forced to a local 'activity camp' in the valleys where we were underappreciated babysitters for Year 7 students and fed potato skins for a weekend. Fortunately, as I grew up in the mountains and don't have a family with the greatest of culinary skills, this wasn't too great an issue, and found some things fun, even though Year 7 children snubbed me, accused me of attempting to drown them (!-- this did *not* happen, the kid who did this has an older brother in my year and is known to cause mischief) and I also fell in a lake. My friend, Hannah, couldn't adapt very well, and went home ill and leaving me with no one else in my room, so moved over to a room where most of the girls stayed. (And there we had some laughs regarding lads and comic books, but that is another story...)
Finally, I must outline the huge Welsh propaganda and useless PowerPoints the Bacc consists of. As much as I admire the passion of our Welsh department, the lessons were highly biased and had a huge attitude of 'WALES AGAINST ENGLAND AND THE WORLD, HEN WLAD WILL CARRY ON, WE'RE BETTER THAN YOU' and then whined about no-one who moved from England to Wales learn the language. Slightly hypocritical. The PowerPoints are mainly common sense on how not to get yourself arrested and the whole 'Don't do drugs' slogans.
One fun thing I hope I can achieve out of this horrific course is a pass, which, stupidly enough, for this very simple and easy course, is worth an A in A-Level. Yep. This may count towards me getting into university if I do terribly in Physics, bearing in mind I get an A in Chemistry and Biology.
A quote I may add from a student in the year above.
"How do you pass the Bacc? Just finish the blinking thing, there is no possible way of failing other than failing to do it."
As well as Bacc, this post-exam relief means I can do several things, such as learn German, learn theory for driving, start my personal statement, practice the UKCAT and make helluva lot of money working all summer. Should be fun.
Until I post again pretty darn soon,
Amy
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