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Author Topic: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey  (Read 33283 times)

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PhoenixxFire

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #15 on: February 05, 2018, 06:08:25 pm »
+8
Hey!

Life's been pretty awesome recently  ;D

I've been doing a lot of things I love, I've got two school camps coming up (outdoor ed, fish & turtle conservation). My fish teacher, another student and I are looking at starting a SCUBA club which will be amazing - the reason I don't dive much is because it is hard to find other people to dive with. I'm also going to apply to Tas Uni's 'Introduction to temperate marine bio' course. It's a week long thing, specifically for years 11 & 12. They are offering a few scholarships for interstate people, so hopefully I will get in.

We have had a few SSDP (that's my school's new version of homeroom) sessions now - We had a community (1/3 of school) meeting on Friday so we missed it then. Today our group (and some others) had to do a mindfulness type activity. We drew a tree and (I don't remember it all exactly) on the trunk we had to write our core beliefs, on the roots things that keep us grounded (religion, culture, family, etc). On the leaves we wrote people we could ask for help/friendship/advice. The fruit were things we hope to achieve in life. Seeds were what we hope to leave behind/how we want to be remembered. Wind was things that could stop us from achieving our goals, rotten fruit/compost was bad things we wanted to be rid of. There were a couple of other things but I don't remember them all. It made me so freakin' uncomfortable. For those of you who don't know, IRL I am a very private person, and we basically got told to write down everything that was important to us, everything we we afraid would stop us and people that are important to us. If everyone I know tried to fill that in together, they might get half of them right. I spent most of the time drawing (aka tracing the example) tree and only filled in a few things (from memory i wrote music, SCUBA diving, the ocean on the roots and empathy, respect and humour on the trunk), i think they're going to make us finish it tomorrow and I so don't want to. - It's not private, we gave them to our teacher and he's going to read them.

I also had English, Math, and Enviro science today. I'm finding school exceptionally boring at the moment. I knew English and Math would be boring, but I was hoping Enviro would be more interesting. So far every lesson has been our teacher at the front of the class talking the whole time. The only activity we've done in class was for 15ish minutes today when we had to look up some divergent species.

Fish has, of course, been heaps of fun - we've got quite a few new students (more than last year) and its always cool to see their enthusiasm. Outdoor ed is also fun, the content is interesting and we actually get to do stuff.
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
2020: Just Vibing
2021: B. Paramedicine/B. Nursing @ ACU Canberra

Bri MT

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #16 on: February 05, 2018, 07:38:24 pm »
+2
snip

Is it ok if we temporarily switch lives? I was heavily obsessed with the oceans for a long time and although as of last year I have switched from the marine biology path the ocean is still something that I really connect with. Being around the ocean so much and ocean conservation are both so fantastic (plus camping is just generally great)

Hope you really enjoy these experiences - they sound amazing

(sidenote: empathy happens to be one of my three core values - so cool to see the overlap there)

Sad to hear that enviro isn't living up to what it could be - but at least on the whole it sounds like things are looking good! :)

PhoenixxFire

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #17 on: February 16, 2018, 07:05:43 pm »
+9
I'm a planet. We have 3 'communities' at my school (each with 4 houses). One community's colour is gold and their theme is Egyptian gods. Another's colour is green and their theme is greek gods. But then they had to go and give my house blue (which I wanted) and the theme of planets :-\ They're gods. And I'm planets. It was the school captains who picked the themes and colours too (based on suggestions from students - I'm told the colours were picked by majority). I was very indignant. Then I realised that the planets are named after Roman gods. So I guess we can pretend to be roman gods? Now i'm slightly less indignant (but still kinda weird having 2 the same and 1 different - they could have given us Norse gods or something).


School still feels very relaxed at the moment - doesn't really feel like year 12 yet. We haven't had any SACs yet, so I'm still relaxed from the holidays. I'm going on an outdoor ed camp on the 26th (canoeing along the Murray), it should be fun but we're not even bringing tents - just a tarp to chuck over all of our sleeping bags, so no privacy which is going to make me a bit crazy. We're also not allowed to bring our phones, I was going to bring mine anyway and just use it in my tent so I don't get it confiscated, but I guess that won't be happening.

That week is also when my class is doing our first English SAC (creative). It's going to take all three lessons so i'll have to do it when I get back. Not looking forward to it - I hate creatives.

I'm really far behind in maths, but I don't really care because it's all stuff we did in general 1/2 anyway.

Enviro is still boring, we're doing quadrats (counting/identifying plants) on Monday though so that should be a bit better, although quadrats are very boring.

Outdoor Ed is fun in class, but the work is annoying because we need to learn about a specific indigenous community and our textbook only has general information ::)

Fish is great. Today we finally started organising who is going to have which tanks/fish to care for. Most people didn't have specific tanks in the previous years, but we're changing how it is running. I've got my maingano's and mphanga's (of course) and also me and another guy have my Silver Perch - I should film me feeding them some time, they flip half out of the water, it's awesome to watch. I say 'my', the m&m's were mine last year, and the Silver's were mine early last year and 2016. They're so big now, they started off as tiny, tiny babies (fat tiny babies because I fed them too much). We (the fish leaders) are currently working on planning the setup of our fish room - it's a bit of a mess at the moment, with random tanks everywhere, but we really need to get it set up properly, and move all of the fish out of the classroom because it's starting to be used as a general science classroom due to the increase in student numbers. We have a whole room to put fish in, and a garage-ish sized room that's connected to the classroom. The plan is to put our native fish in the big room and our tropicals in the smaller room. The tropicals are all introduced species (at the moment) but we have some introduced temperate (cold water) species so I don't know where we are going to put them - We managed to get a permit for a Carp at the start of last year (and an actual Carp), she's been in the classroom and I don't know where we are going to put her yet. Her name is Krystal because we caught her from the Yarra on camp and we are very immature. Our fish teacher had a tent that had a pole in the middle to hold it up, so we teased him about being a pole dancer - another teacher ran with it and named the fish Krystal, because our teacher constantly jokes about her being his only friend (and then we tell him it's only because he feeds her.) I'll try to include some photos of some of the fish soon, because they are awesome  ;D

Is it ok if we temporarily switch lives?
The last few days of October and the first couple of weeks of November are available for a life switch :P
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
2020: Just Vibing
2021: B. Paramedicine/B. Nursing @ ACU Canberra

Bri MT

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #18 on: February 21, 2018, 07:10:23 am »
0
The last few days of October and the first couple of weeks of November are available for a life switch :P

Tempting,  but I think I'll have to pass and focus on my uni exams

PhoenixxFire

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #19 on: February 24, 2018, 08:05:19 pm »
+6
Hey!

Turns out its really hard to take photos of fish through glass.
Rambling about fishy things
Krystal the carp

She's a really cute fish - she'll follow my finger all along the tank because she thinks its food. There's a plan to release the carp herpes virus into the Murray at the end of this year/early next year. Personally I think that it could work in theory but I don't like how they've planned it. At a briefing where they were answering questions on it they said that people would be paid to pick up the rotting fish but in areas where there aren't people they would just be left to rot. It's estimated that the biomass of carp in the river is more than all other fish combined. All of these rotting fish will suck oxygen out of the water and could lead to a mass blackwater event which would kill lots of native fish. Another issue is that if someone doesn't want to wait (they're planning on slowly moving the virus upstream) and moves an infected fish to their area, then they won't be able to clean up the dead fish. The last problem I have with it is a worry about another fish (like redfin) taking over. Redfin actually kill native species whereas carp just degrade water quality to the point where they die. Something has to be done about carp, i'm just worried that this is going to backfire.

Frank the Umbee

Frank is an evil fish. He is all alone in his tank because he will kill any other fish we put in there, even female fish. In the wild, the males lure a female into their territory, the female lays her eggs, and then the male chases her back out.

Silver Perch


They're critically endangered in the wild and are mostly bred in aquaponics (like this tank). They have a very, very limited gene pool in captivity. They have grown so much, the smaller ones I got last year and they were tiny babies (smaller than goldfish).

Western sooty grunter

I don't know much about them, it's just here because it let me take a photo haha.

Catfish

I think this one was a black catfish. I took a lot of photos of our eel-tailed catfish, but it didn't really work because they kept swimming too close to the glass, and I had to have my phone against the glass so I didn't get lots of reflections.

Baby mainganos and mphangas

They're getting bigger! The mainganos (horizontal stripes) are my favourite because their colours are brighter than the mphangas.

Adult maingano


Our smaller room



The larger room




Anyway I actually typed that up last night, but then it was midnight so I wanted to go to sleep and I've been at work all day so now I can finish it.

I just got a new keyboard (I've got a surface pro 3 so the keyboard disconnects). It's strange being able to right-click again. This is a bit hard to type because the keys have space between them, but they didn't on my old keyboard so nothing is where I expect it to be.

Our WASHI's (Work and study habits index - our version of GPA's) came out today. I got 3.1 out of 4 overall, which is fine. But I'm really annoyed because my math teacher (who was also my teacher for year 9 math and my failed attempt at Unit 1 methods in year 10) gave me 'seldom works independently' which is the 2nd lowest option in that category, but then he gave me 'Never works in a group' soooooo like, what does he think I do all lesson? I've never really cared about our WASHI's, the only thing they are used for is supposedly determining whether you're allowed to work ahead of your year level, but I've never seen someone kicked out for it.

They are so subjective, it's ridiculous. There really isn't any set guidelines for what each category means, at least there wasn't last year they changed it for this year. Last year there was a category for which the top option was 'always strives to go beyond what is required'. One of my teachers didn't give me the top option because he said that I could have taught the new kids etc. (It was fish). It was fair enough, but I really hate that category anyway. There is always more I could be doing, where does it stop? Anyway so I'm kind of mad because my other subject scores where 4, 3.43, 3.43, 3.14 and I got 2.86 for SSDP which is fair enough because we don't do anything, but then I got 1.71 for math. It feels like my teacher just hates me, I'm a bit behind but that's it. Our class is way ahead of the other classes anyway because apparently we have to be the best  ::) To be fair I don't like him either. But like, what does he think I do in class??? Also he gave me often on time (the 2nd highest) when I've never been late.... (I got always on time for all my other classes). He's always so ugh like he picks on people in class and makes a big spectacle of it. Like he always points out how far behind someone else is (they're a little bit behind me) and he'll just walk behind them and be like 'You're only up to 1I.' It just makes me so uncomfortable because that's no one else's business. He hasn't done it to me, I sort of challenged his authority though which might be why he doesn't like me lol. We were supposed to do some things on our CAS and show it to him to prove we could do it. I refused to do it, arguing that I wasn't up to there yet (and i'd already done it all in general anyway so I knew I could). Anyway he mostly leaves me alone and has only commented a couple of times on me being behind.  - That's why I didn't want to ask him how to fix my CAS btw (I didn't know it was broken when I refused to do it).




I should be writing my English creative now. I worked today from 9am to 4pm, my English teacher won't normally look at work on Sundays, but she says she'll look at anything we send her tomorrow night because we have a SAC this week (next week for me because I'll be on camp.) So I need to finish that either tonight or early tomorrow, I would have rather done it this morning but I couldn't because of work. It's my creative SAC so the plan is to attempt to memorise at least the main ideas and just replicate it - Which means I can't get feedback off you guys because I don't want to risk plagiarism accusations.

Outdoor Ed and Enviro are opposites at the moment.
In Enviro our teacher just talks the entire lesson
In outdoor ed he sometimes talks a little but we mostly just get given work to do and I don't really even know how to do it - He wants us to know things that aren't in our books and I can't find much on google. Also he wants us to do work but I don't really know what he wants. It's really hard, I can't find much information and when I do, I don't even know if that's what we were supposed to find out.

We planned the setup of our big fish room this week. It should be pretty good :)


Work's been kinda hectic. I work in the Deli at Woolies if you don't know. On Tuesday I worked until 10 (when we close). Except I ended up staying until 10:20 (when the duty manager kicked me out because my mum had parked in the carpark and it closed at 10:30). We just didn't have enough time to do anything. I got paid for it though because the Duty Manager signed an adjustment.

I worked until 10 again on Wednesday, a different duty manager works on wednesdays, she works every day except Monday and Tuesday so she's the main DM. I like her but she just doesn't get some things. She kicked me out at 10:10 and she told me to just do what I can do before 10. But like I can't leave food unwrapped (I had to wrap the ham after 9, normally it is done before), I can't leave dirty dishes lying around, the food on them will never come off in the morning, I have to clean the floors, they're always a total mess and get cleaned every night, I have to clean the slicer, it's hard to clean as it is and I can't make them do it the next morning and I just don't have enough time. It is very stressful.
« Last Edit: April 24, 2018, 12:24:24 am by PhoenixxFire »
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
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2021: B. Paramedicine/B. Nursing @ ACU Canberra

PhoenixxFire

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #20 on: March 15, 2018, 07:10:19 pm »
+10
Hey, this took forever to write. I started writing it the day after i got back from camp (3rd march) but I had an English SAC and got a bit distracted haha.

This ended up really long so I'm going to dump camp in a spoiler.

Camp!!! (it was the 26th Feb - 2nd March)
So on the Sunday before camp I was out most of the day buying gear for my trip to Nepal (which is in June). So when I got home I couldn't be bothered packing. I wrote a list before I went to bed, and got up early and packed. Guess what this means? I got to school and realised I forgot my bowl and my cutlery  ::)

It was okay though, I told my teacher and he got me to raid the staff kitchen, turns out one other student forgot as well but we both 'borrowed' stuff so that was fine.

So the camp was a canoeing trip from Yarrawonga to Cobram. On Monday we got to Yarrawonga and went to have a look at the weir. Whilst I know that there is lots of Carp in the Murray river it was strange seeing at lest 10 of them in such a small area. We met with our instructors there. (my outdoor ed teacher came, as well as another staff member from school and there were 2 canoeing instructors from Rubicon).

We chatted for a bit and then we drove to the area where we were going to stay. Of course we couldn't drive to our sleeping area, so we had to carry all of our gear and the canoes a few hundred metres.

I didn't think that we were going to go canoeing on Monday, but we did! We didn't travel anywhere, we just got used to how they worked and steering. At one point we played a game where we had to follow the instructor around exactly, and he swerved around lots of obstacles. My canoe partner and I are competitive people, we were alternating for first and second most of the time, but then we went around a log and leaned a bit too far and we were the first to capsise. Of course we insisted that the instructor had asked us to demonstrate. After that we all deliberately flipped our canoes and had to practice pulling the flipped canoe over other canoes, turning it, then pushing it back into the water. Then came the hard part, getting back into the canoe. I ended up doing 4 rescues because both my friend, and our teacher managed to flip their canoe whilst they were trying to get back in.

After we finished playing in the canoes we decided to go for a swim, so we went across the river and explored NSW. Unfortunately it started to get dark so we had to come back and make dinner. Due to the lack of room in the canoes, all 14 students were sleeping on a tarp (or under if it rained, which it didn't) so we were all crowded there in our sleeping bags, in the open air. Guess what else I forgot? Mozzie repellent. Luckily other people let me use theirs so I (mostly) survived.

That was the last time we saw a real toilet. By real toilet I mean a drop toilet. Every day after that we had to dig a hole. We finally saw a proper toilet again when we got into Cobram at 11pm on Thursday night.

In the morning we jumped in our canoes and headed out. I was at the back of the canoe so I got to steer. It was great fun ;D We mucked around a fair bit. I was at the front of the group most of the time, we had to stop at one point because some of the people at the back had decided they wanted a swim. There was only like 4 boats at the front, we stopped at a sandy area, and there was a sand dune and a couple of people in the front group decided to run down it and jump in the water and a few of us stayed in the boats. Everyone else caught up and stopped right on the sand dune and they all ended up getting out too. I kinda wish I had, it looked fun, but at the time they were just going to run down and then come back but they ended up staying a while.

We did a really bad job of navigating, we ended up stopping at a beach because it had a rope swing (I say beach, i really mean a sandy area on the edge of the river). Our teachers advised us against going on the rope swing because they could not be sure it was safe but some people went anyway.

We emptied out the canoes and sorted our food into breakfast/lunch/dinner so we could get to it easier. We were sent off to have 'solo time' whilst the teachers started making dinner. It was supposed to go for half an hour, but i fell asleep for almost 2 hours (oops). By the time I woke up dinner was almost ready so we ate and then split up into our study groups (there were 3 groups, water/land management & policy; Indigenous relationships; biodiversity). I was in the Indigenous relationships group, we were the smallest group (there was 3 of us). It was really good though. One the the canoe instructors is aboriginal so we asked him lots of questions and I learnt a lot  ;D

Wednesday was much the same. It was super hot the whole week but it was actually pretty comfortable on the water, if we got warm we just splashed ourselves (and each other) to cool off. We decided to take a short cut at one point (it was a narrower area that effectively cut the corner. We turned in and the current picked up. We didn't know that there was a log across most of the river, the first boat got passed it (about a 1m gap). Every canoe after that hit it because we were too close together to stop. We all got some emergency instructions yelled at us, grab the log, lean into it, don't let your canoe flip. After we had all pulled ourselves around it we got out and went to look at it from the river bank. It turns out that there was actually two channels and the other one had a log entirely blocking it! We got told a story about a time one of our canoeing instructors was going down the river with a friend and they hit a log and his friend went under, they were both fine but it was scary. We asked about what to do if we went under. Essentially it was curl into a ball (smallest possible surface area) and hope that there was enough room under the log so that you got pushed through.

We had really strong winds on wednesday so we stopped for a bit and went for a swim, except we really just walked upstream and floated down around the bend a few times. We had a whole lot of fun attempting to push our teacher under and playing keepings off with his cap (we kind of cheated by putting it down the front of girls life jackets so he couldn't try and get it off us haha). We also played a game called Mr. President which is even more fun in water than it is on land. Basically someone puts there finger to their ear (like as if you were a secret service agent with an earpiece), when you see someone doing it you copy them, when there's only one person who hasn't done it everyone runs and tackles them and yells 'get down Mr. President'. We played it on a different camp last year and told everyone except our teacher, would definitely recommend if your teacher won't murder you for it.

We played another game throughout the week, it wasn't really a game. It's called silly salmon, basically whenever someone put their hands together and wobbled them (if that makes any sense) you had to run to the water and jump in (like flopping around in the air and landing sideways). You had to do it regardless of if you were already dry, but some people refused haha.


On Thursday we had to get to a beach called twin nobs by 2:30 to meet some people from Parks Vic who were going to talk to us. Along the way we were collecting sticks because we were planning on making a raft between two canoes. We hit a jackpot at our lunch site when we found a bunch of wooden pallets that someone else had used as a raft. We re-purposed them and tied two of them in between two canoes. I was in one of those canoes and it was a lot of fun when a boat went past, its wake couldn't tip us over, so we stood us and 'surfed'. Of course we also had people jumping off the back of the raft whilst we were canoeing :) Originally we were going to stay at twin nobs for the night and then get up early to go to Cobram. Naturally we had to be a bit more adventurous, so we decided to stay at twin nobs for dinner and then leave about 8 and paddle in the dark to Cobram. It was absolutely amazing paddling in the dark, it was a full moon that night too! I can't describe how amazing it was and I'm very happy we got to do that. Whilst at twin nobs someone managed to lose our hygiene kit (which had our toilet paper in it!) Before we knew that we had lost it one of the students was going to show our teacher where the hole was so me and another student tagged along so we could see where it was. The kid led us along and he keeps going 'oh they dug it ages away' we ended up running for a bit and then our teacher goes 'is this a joke' and the kid goes 'yeah'...turns out it was like 20m from camp but we had run like 800m lol. It was very very funny and I'm surprised he believed it or as long as he did.

We got into Cobram about 11pm...and guess what? There was no camping at that beach. We actually knew that before we left but we did it anyway haha. There were sprinklers across most of the grassy area so we had to squash ourselves in the corner nearest the car park (that was empty except our bus). We struggled to stay awake as we emptied our canoes, and then we got to use a real toilet! It flushed and everything! Despite how tired we all were, we stayed up until 1 ish talking and eating leftover snacks...and I hid in my sleeping bag and browsed AN on my phone that I totally didn't bring haha. The next morning I was up first and everyone else was a little sleepy. We packed up and I scrubbed lots of pots and my hands turned a colour I like to call Trangia Black. For those who don't know a trangia is a portable stove sort of thing. The pots go very, very black on the bottom..and it's greasy and stayed on my hands for most of the weekend despite repeated scrubbing.

Definitely an awesome camp ;D


Some of my classes weren't running last week because of year 7 camp, U3 classes whose teachers were on the camp didn't even have it on our timetable so I got to go home early a lot :)

I had my first Englush English (that typo should tell you how well it went  :'() SAC last week, the creative itself was okay, I managed to memorise it which I was happy about. Unfortunately I hadn't written my written explanation (I had 3 lessons for the SAC). I was going to write it the night after the 2nd lesson and then write it in the 3rd lesson but I had work that night so I got home late and fell asleep and then slept through my alarms in the morning. I then had to write it for the first time in class, I feel like I structured it really badly and repeated myself a bit. I finished it and I wished I could have redone it, it was very hard to try and figure out what to put in each paragraph. I never have to write another creative ever again!

I was supposed to have my first Enviro SAC this week but it's been moved to Monday which I'm very happy about. I'm on camp (at the Murray again) next week so I get to do it the last week of term...then I realised i'm on another camp Sunday/Monday of the last week of term so I'll probably do that SAC on Tuesday and then my outdoor Ed SAC is on Wednesday.

Next week I'm going to Cohuna for a fish camp. We're going to be working with Turtles Australia to record turtle nests that have been destroyed by foxes (our native freshwater turtles are likely to be critically endangered within the next 30-50 years, mainly due to foxes eating their eggs), we'll also be doing a half day of canoeing (yes again lol), there might be kayaks as well which would be awesome. We'll be going through a redgum swamp so their should be some good photos! I'll be back on Saturday and then I'm leaving early Sunday morning and going to Daylesford for a training trip for my World Challenge expedition to Nepal, which is at the end of June.
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
2020: Just Vibing
2021: B. Paramedicine/B. Nursing @ ACU Canberra

PhoenixxFire

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #21 on: March 24, 2018, 11:37:33 am »
+10
Jumping on the bandwagon....
Spoiler
I made it sound bad at the end - overall I really, really enjoyed the camp!
BABY TURTLES!!!
I intended to post this last night but it took me forever to figure out how to add images..and then it took ages to upload ::)
« Last Edit: March 24, 2018, 11:39:35 am by PhoenixxFire »
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
2020: Just Vibing
2021: B. Paramedicine/B. Nursing @ ACU Canberra

PhoenixxFire

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #22 on: March 25, 2018, 09:07:52 pm »
+5
Guess who managed to walk into a fallen tree that was laying at about head height despite having been told to watch my head.

me

To be fair my hat was down low over my eyes so I couldn’t see it and the people in front of me were short enough that they didn’t have to duck.

I wasn’t expecting a random tree fallen across our path, the rest of it was clear haha.
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
2020: Just Vibing
2021: B. Paramedicine/B. Nursing @ ACU Canberra

PhoenixxFire

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #23 on: March 26, 2018, 12:52:34 pm »
+1
We thought we had bought 6 bags of wraps.
We bought 4 bags of wraps.
We ate 3 yesterday.
We have 5 wraps to share between 12 people.
Send help.

« Last Edit: March 26, 2018, 08:04:14 pm by PhoenixxFire »
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
2020: Just Vibing
2021: B. Paramedicine/B. Nursing @ ACU Canberra

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #24 on: March 26, 2018, 01:13:51 pm »
+3
Jumping on the bandwagon....
Spoiler
I made it sound bad at the end - overall I really, really enjoyed the camp!
BABY TURTLES!!!
I intended to post this last night but it took me forever to figure out how to add images..and then it took ages to upload ::)

LOVE this video!

Seriously enjoying your updates. You've gone on more camps in the last few months than I have probably in my life hahaha.

P.S. Franklin is awesome.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2018, 01:44:40 pm by Joseph41 »

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PhoenixxFire

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #25 on: March 27, 2018, 10:51:28 am »
0
Just had out last outdoor Ed lesson before our SAC tomorrow, we know most of what is going to be on the SAC but I have no idea how to really answer the questions and just generally have no idea what i'm doing. :(

I thought it would just be a test but no it seems we’re going to have to write a report type thing, we basically have to include everything we’ve learnt this term in different sections. I’m supposed to know about a specific indigenous community, I tried to find specific information for ages and couldn’t, we’re also supposed to know about a specific environmental movement and I’ve had one lesson on it because I’ve been on camp too much. Fml.
« Last Edit: March 27, 2018, 11:25:22 am by PhoenixxFire »
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #26 on: March 28, 2018, 01:44:55 pm »
+7
I passed my English SAC!!

Ok so I knew I would pass it, but I did better than I thought I would. I got 23/30 which sounds bad but it’s okay because the highest anyone got was 25/30, the highest in my class was 24/30.

My teacher was telling us that quite a few people in our class (and the other classes) got ‘mid-range’ (13-18) so I was a bit terrified, but I did wayy better than I thought I would ;D

I think only one person at my school got 40+ in English last year, so I really have to be rank 1 to do well. Hopefully the other SACs will go okay.

My outdoor ed SAC was a mess as expected. I included quite a bit of information but I’m not sure if I actually answered the questions properly, and I repeated myself a few times  :-\

My enviro SAC yesterday went okay I think, I might get the results tomorrow or it might be online on the holidays. We have a small class (9 students doing scored I think) so they are getting cross marked with a school that has 3 enviro science students.
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
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Joseph41

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #27 on: March 28, 2018, 02:39:45 pm »
0
I passed my English SAC!!

Ok so I knew I would pass it, but I did better than I thought I would. I got 23/30 which sounds bad but it’s okay because the highest anyone got was 25/30, the highest in my class was 24/30.

My teacher was telling us that quite a few people in our class (and the other classes) got ‘mid-range’ (13-18) so I was a bit terrified, but I did wayy better than I thought I would ;D

I think only one person at my school got 40+ in English last year, so I really have to be rank 1 to do well. Hopefully the other SACs will go okay.

My outdoor ed SAC was a mess as expected. I included quite a bit of information but I’m not sure if I actually answered the questions properly, and I repeated myself a few times  :-\

My enviro SAC yesterday went okay I think, I might get the results tomorrow or it might be online on the holidays. We have a small class (9 students doing scored I think) so they are getting cross marked with a school that has 3 enviro science students.

Right on! Congrats on English - that's wicked. :)

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PhoenixxFire

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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #28 on: April 14, 2018, 03:06:23 pm »
+7
I was intending to update this when we got our results back for Enviro and Outdoor Ed but we still haven't gotten them despite being told that they would be uploaded over the holidays (we were told within the first few days for Enviro...)

Apparently our outdoor ed teacher told us that he was going to email us our homework at the start of the 2nd week  ??? which I didn't know but he hasn't anyway so that's less homework for me haha.



This is my last real holidays of high school ever. I'm away next holidays and then term 3 holidays don't really exist. It may also be the only holidays that I ever finish all of my holiday homework (dependant on me actually writing my media analysis for English...I really have to write it though because I didn't do the last one the teacher set - To be fair I was doing my SAC when she explained and wrote a plan for it)

It's really weird to think that this is the last holidays of high school. That makes me kinda nervous but i'm mostly just counting down the days until I can be done with it.

I'm back at school on Tuesday (Monday is a pupil free day) and I'm not looking forward to it. A lot of my classes feel like a waste of time to go to. Enviro I've complained a lot about before so I won't  again haha. Math the teacher doesn't really help - My textbook makes sense so I just do the questions which I could do just as easily from home, it does force me to actually do them though. Outdoor Ed I really enjoy the camps and some of the stuff we do in class but it feels like we're learning lots of unnecessary information. I feel like English is actually the most valuable class despite my hatred for it haha, I really struggle to learn English independently aside from writing essays and making quote banks.



I've actually been to school twice on the holidays. On both Fridays we've had working bee sort of thing for Fish. We did water changes and fed them, we're also finally setting up our plumbing! This is something that we've been planning on doing for almost 2 years haha. We've set up a water tank that connects to a tap in our fish room. We've then attached a hose with a bit of PVC pipe on the end. It means we just have to hook the PVC pipe onto the tank (the pipe is like 3 sides of a square) and then turn it on. There's a tap on the pipe so we don't have to turn the tap off in between (or more accurately, spill water everywhere). The hose is also wider than the previous hose we used so it will be much faster to fill the tanks. Previously we just used a garden hose attached to an outside tap about 50m away. We're also hopefully going to attach pipes to each tank which will let us drain them without transporting water in bins, although we will still have to do that when they need a gravel vac.

When we were setting up the pipes to put a tap into the fish room we thought we had it sorted so we turned it on to see if there were any leaks, water came out of the tap but we'd forgotten that there had been a plan to put a tap in one of the other animals rooms further along so a couple of people went into the dungeon (the animals area is below half of D wing, the dungeon is this slanted dirt space behind animals, under the other half of D wing) to check for leaks and found a pipe just spouting water because it wasn't connected to the rest of the pipe.

I've got a 4 day week next week and then athletics on Monday the second week which I'm not going to go to so I've got two 4 day weeks which is definitely a good thing for the start of term.

I've also got my first math SAC coming up soon and I haven't started my reference book  :-[ so i'll probably have to do that next weekend.
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Re: PhoenixxFire's VCE journey
« Reply #29 on: April 20, 2018, 04:01:38 pm »
+5
So I still haven't gotten my results back for Outdoor Ed or Enviro :(
My Enviro teacher is away sick all week so that's fair enough.
My Outdoor Ed teacher is going to tell us next week, but he says he's going to talk to us all individually about what we did wrong and stuff. Like that's a good thing but I wish he would give us our mark before then, I need to mentally prepare myself, i'm going to be so nervous about it now, like I don't really care if I did badly (I already think I did), I just want to know before hand.

My English Media Analysis SAC is in week 3, on a Wednesday afternoon from 2-4:15 because they want all the classes to do it at the same time, but it's really annoying because we normally finish school at 1:30 on Wednesdays and I normally work at 5 but I won't be able to because school is far away from work and I won't get there in time. Annoyingly we are going to see the play medea the Wednesday afternoon the week after that so I'll have a long day then too  :-\ I'm worrying about the SAC a bit, but I think I just need more practice writing them. We have a practice SAC on thursday but its only one lesson, so half the time. Its our next lesson because of our athletics day and ANZAC day which is a bit annoying. After that we only have one class on Tuesday, then a class Wednesday morning and then the SAC.

My Math SAC is going to be in Week 4, I'm not too worried about it, it's pretty straightforward, I just need to do more practice questions and not make silly mistakes. EDIT: Have just got an email back from my math teacher and he says I can use a spiral book so yay! They're so much easier to open and use than books with a proper spine.

Outdoor Ed is freaking me out the most. The content is easy enough but I just don't know how to answer the questions. There isn't any suggested answers in the book so even when I attempt the questions I have no idea if I got it right or not and I don't really want to check with my teacher for every single question :( We also have to learn about a specific environment and a specific indigenous community and absolutely nothing in the book is specific. We're supposed to know about their specific sacred sites and where they moved during different times of the year, that sort of stuff but I've tried googling and still hardly found anything. There are quite a few other people in my class who have the same problem, the only people finding it easy are the people who are repeating the subject and the people who regularly go camping with their families so they already know a lot about a specific area. I know what I need to be doing to improve in my other subjects but besides taking notes and trying to answer the questions (and not knowing if i'm answering them correctly) I don't know what to do for outdoor Ed. My teacher is always trying to make us figure things out ourselves so if I ask him he'll probably just say to do the questions or something  :'(


I've got a day walk for Outdoor Ed in week 4, which will be fun but is also annoying because I'll miss a day of school and my math SAC is over 2 lessons so I might have to reschedule part of that. We also have a trip to the Desalination plant in Week 7 and a mountain biking trip in week 10, which i'm not going on because I'm leaving for Nepal the Sunday after week 10.

The trip we were planning on going on for fish to Fitzroy Island in Queensland is going to be next year now  :'( :'( :'( so I don't get to go, although everyone's trying to get me to go anyway (which school might let me, maybe). The reason is that my fish teacher is taking 3/4 bio and he doesn't want to leave them for 2 weeks (even though my Enviro teacher has already missed 3 weeks worth of classes...) It's fair enough though, from what he's said previously they're doing pretty badly.


Pretty tiring week back, even though it shouldn't have been given it was only 4 days and I had 3 private study + 2 Enviro classes that became private study so I only had 7 VCE classes + 3 fish classes.

Almost forgot - I'm really not enjoying SSDP (our version of homeroom/tutorial). Some weeks we ave something specific we have to do (think health, fit2drive, that sort of stuff) but some weeks/days we're supposed to be working on our own project. I really think that its a bit useless and a waste of time. We can work on anything we want but the problem is if there's something interesting I want to research or do i'll just do it so I can't think of any projects to do. Some people are organising activities, some people are doing some research about footy scores or something but I can't think of anything that isn't just doing it because I have to do something, and it just feels like a waste of time. I wish they would let me do my homework then. I really just can't be bothered putting in the energy to organise something that's actually interesting, I would end up spending time on it outside of school and I just don't have that much time at the moment.

It probably doesn't help that I worked Tuesday and Wednesday night so I didn't get home until at least 11pm which meant I didn't go to sleep until midnight (or later) and then I was up at 5/5:30 because I had homework to do that I should have done on the holidays. - I actually finished all of my holiday homework! I didn't finish it all on the holidays but I did finish it all before it was due so I count that as a success ;D


Edit: Also I didn't get into the marine science thingy in Tasmania that I applied for. Not really bothered though, it would have been awesome but I expected not to get it.

EDIT2:
I'm a planet. We have 3 'communities' at my school (each with 4 houses). One community's colour is gold and their theme is Egyptian gods. Another's colour is green and their theme is greek gods. But then they had to go and give my house blue (which I wanted) and the theme of planets :-\ They're gods. And I'm planets. It was the school captains who picked the themes and colours too (based on suggestions from students - I'm told the colours were picked by majority). I was very indignant. Then I realised that the planets are named after Roman gods. So I guess we can pretend to be roman gods? Now i'm slightly less indignant (but still kinda weird having 2 the same and 1 different - they could have given us Norse gods or something).

I now know what happened. Originally one community wanted to be planets (us) and both of the others wanted to be greek gods. So one of them decided to be Egyptian instead. They realised that we would then be left out so then we were supposed to be roman gods, but one of the community leaders hurried sending out the email announcing it because they wanted it to be their name on the email, and she messed it up. It's annoying that they don't just say it was a mistake and change it.
« Last Edit: April 23, 2018, 11:34:59 pm by PhoenixxFire »
2019: B. Environment and Sustainability/B. Science @ ANU
2020: Just Vibing
2021: B. Paramedicine/B. Nursing @ ACU Canberra