Keeping It Real in VCE

by Paddy Day

There has been a common refrain amongst us year 12s of 2020 that we are the cursed year. It has also been said over and over again that we are living in surreal times and noone could have predicted our last year of school would be so drastically different from years gone by.

I’m not going to argue with that, it certainly did come as a shock. If a bush mystic had appeared out of the Otways at the end of the summer holidays and told me that we would spend approximately half of Year 12 at home, I probably would have told them to go back into the mossy cave from whence they came.

Yet they would’ve been correct and I would have made a profound error in judgement. That is to say, I was not open to the unpredictability of nature.

The fact that the second lockdown coincided with wild and chilly weather lashing the coast is, in my view, of great importance. The virus that has struck communities around the world is now talked about in a very similar fashion to the weather. How many cases today? How many mils of rain did we get last night? What’s the swell doing on the weekend? Have infections risen in the last week? These questions

are commonplace, entrenched in our daily conversation. They show that the coronavirus undulates like the weather.

To be honest, as a VCE student, despite the complications, the virus really has just been like an extended period of bad weather and I have faith that the sun will come out before too long.

When we first went into remote schooling, I asked my Chinese teacherduring a Zoom call how he was going with the lockdown and online learning. He almost brushed the question aside, saying that we should just keep doing what we are doing. I have heard similar sentiments expressed over the last term or two by friends, fellow students and teachers, saying that the virus is out of our control and that we should just focus on the task at hand.

Many people get sucked in to conspiracy theories surrounding the machinations of VCAA (Victorian Curriculum and Assesment Authority), the changes to the ATAR calculations and whether we will even have exams. But if the virus has taught us anything, it’s that substance takes precedence over superficiality and that those who are passionate, talented and hardworking will be rewarded in the long run.

At home, the temptation to sit back on the couch and watch the footy or Netflix or dink around on your phone for hours on end is, for some, quite hard to manage. Remote learning has in many ways sorted the wheat from the chaff, those who are disciplined and committed from those who are slack and indulgent. No matter what happens from here on in, year 12 has not been what we expected, but that doesn’t mean it’s now null and void.

We haven’t had the final year of celebration we all hoped for, social distancing has prevented us from making the most of our final year together as a cohort, but we will still have all been through it together.

Personally, I am appreciating the excitement of it all and the realisation that we are living in history. This year, while studying the Russian and French revolutions in VCE, I have come to realise that, in the scope of things, we are pretty well off in this part of the world.

Paddy Day, ‘keeping it real’ as he studies for his VCE from home in Aireys Inlet, during the second COVID stage 3 lockdown.

situations or be disadvantaged in one way or another, but the fact that most of us have access to a VCE curriculum is a privilege and miracle in itself.

Whenever I have felt down about the virus or wondered in a Latin class ‘tantaene animis caelestibus irae?’ (can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?) I just think about those impoverished Russian and French peasants who had no such access to education and who were oppressed by the draconian regimes that presided over them. But we are living in 21st Century democratic Australia. Coronavirus or no coronavirus, it is better than 18th Century feudalism or early 20th Century authoritarianism.

While we wouldn’t want to rest on our laurels politically, particularly on matters of ecology and justice, I still feel that we are blessed to have the opportunity to follow our passions and cultivate our intellects.

The coronavirus is a life force, an organic being that morphs and changes like our own desires and whims.

We are not fighting a war against a biological entity. We are not taking up arms against a living thing. We are learning from it, letting life be our teacher and accepting that we humans are but humble disciples of a bigger thing.

If the world is our classroom, then Mother Earth is our teacher and we are the students. VCE is not just about metrical scores and statistical figures, although they are important as well.

It is about applying what you learn, drawing parallels, interpreting, and marvelling at the world around you. There is certainly a lot to be thinking about right here, right now.

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