#ilona's catholic school ramblings

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

y’know if there’s one thing i didn’t particularly like in high school english classes it was the speech-writing/public speaking/rhetoric units. like obviously i did go fairly well in the speech assignments, usually getting like 25/30 or whatever (and also in year 6 when we did a unit speech writing my teacher wanted mt to compete in the regional/diocesan public speaking comp which i actually turned down bc it felt too big to do or whatever it was)...... even when i’d fuck around and misplace my palm cards in front of the class, much to my teacher’s utter disapproval and annoyance.

but what i hated the most about these topics was that they were taught straight out of a textbook, where we just wrote notes from the whiteboard or from the unit booklets we got about speech writing and body language/stage presence during public speaking..... with no development activities in between; where the teacher could’ve set an exercise about doing expressive body language etc while presenting your speech to the class.... like don’t get me wrong, i know teachers are super pressed for time in their class schedules..... but this fucked me up quite a bit.

because without the above exercises i developed this weird idea that speeches in my english classes were meant to be like unfeeling/detached and overly formal, and not like a performance i’d do in a drama class.... so when some of the kids from the top class in my half of the year got demoted into my year 10 english class.... and some of them were being hella expressive and engaging with their voice and body language.....i was super confused (and jealous). like i didn’t know we could do that???? i just thought we had to stand in front of the class for 5-6mins yapping about adversity in literature and be all awkwardly formal about it????

whereas, when i had to do my shakespeare monologue or an actual speech in my drama classes in year 10 (and maybe year 9 for a speech i can’t remember tbh), i was totally fine with presenting the speech (or the monologue obvs) with some good amount of emotional connection and involvement with the audience; that drama forced you to do,whereas english was just like “write this stuff down directly from the board/your speech writing booklets that i scanned from an Excel textbook (a textbook brand in australia) and try to write an expressive speech with precise instructions to formulate it!” while my drama teacher would encourage us to “write whatever the hell you want, and see if it makes me (or the class, in terms of a monologue) laugh or cry! experiment! do it! and obvs practice guys!!!” 

just idek how i misconstrued that speeches in my english classes were meant to be weirdly stilted, formal and non-expressive... even though there was always a whole section in english speech writing topics about “DON’T BE MONOTONE! MONOTONE IS BAD! HAVE GOOD VOCAL DIFFERENTIATION AND EXPRESSION!!!!” whereas i was totally fine in drama with doing everything from terrible accents (mostly texan/sotuhern american and general american, canadian and british) to breaking the fourth wall, usually to ask for my phone for my lines lmao or whatever dumb shit lmao.

like did anyone else ever feel the same way with speech writing etc topics in their english classes??? or was it just me being really weird and confused about it??? lmao. because i’m sure that most people would agree that stage presence/public speaking etc can’t solely be learned straight from a textbook or writing down exact formulaic instructions; and then expect students to present their tightly written correctly written to a formula speech to the class in a very expressive and almost seasoned ~public speaking professional~ style in front of a class.... when there were no activities to practice such things.

and like yes. i get that “practice your speech in front of your parents/other family member/s or in front of a mirror” was always the homework and advice with speech topics, but that didn’t really help??? like there should’ve been small group activities where you practiced a part of your speech in front of a couple of your classmates and they could critique it and your presentation of it to give pointers??? although then again, maybe they don’t want kids doing that idek anyway.

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

y’know i always found it weird throughout school how i was literally the only girl in my year without my ears pierced....mostly because a lot of girls got them done super young, like when they were a toddler or whatever. 

then some of the girls i know who’ve had kids got their kid’s ears pierced literally when they were like 8 months old or something, bc they have girls. like.... what the fuck is this??? let kids choose when to have their ears pierced instead of getting them done when they’re not even old enough to choose to do that???

i only say this bc i didnt get mine pierced lierally until i was 15/16, in 2011, for my year 10 formal/junior prom. the day i finally got my ears pierced, i had a pounding headache for literally like 3 days straight after it and my ears obvs ached for a while too. but it was my choice, mostly. I got them pierced bc i felt like I had to get it done for the formal as well.

i also found it hard to remember to sterilise them all the time... so much so, that when i finished high school in 2013.... i had to take my earrings out because they were going green in my ears, so then my ears were slightly infected from that (not badly!). i haven’t worn earrings since then, bc the holes have closed up. i also found it irritating how many of the cheapo earrings i was buying (lmao) would fall out of my ears and i’d lose them.

but anyway. why would you get a toddler’s ears pierced??? or do they not feel the pain as acutely as i did or something, and that’s why people do it??? or is it another stupid gender thing, where if you pierce a baby girl’s ears then you can tell them apart from boys or their brother/s (if they have a brother/brothers)???

like im just saying maybe people should think about whether it’s really necessary to get their child’s ears pierced super young, solely bc they got it done when they were young. let your kid/s have a say in the matter, instead of getting it done when they can barely string a sentence like “let me choose” or “let me get it done when i WANT to”, together.

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

honestly my little “im so edgy and original XD 👩🏻‍🎤” ass in catholic school was true chaotic evil for her poor drama teacher. bc by year 11 and year 12, (if she’d been able to stay at that school and do drama), she would’ve been begging him to let her do a parody music video of christina aguilera’s 2002 hit song “dirrty” titled “holy”..... for her major drama project in the hsc (ie. end of high school exams etc in my state of australia)...... which would’ve most definitely either gotten him cautioned or fired from the school.... and her more than likely suspended/expelled lmao. like she was such a fucking asshole lmao.

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

by far the worst edgiest/angsty thing i did i my emo phase at catholic school was when i wrote a story about zombies in australia (bc 15/16 old me was annoyed about australia being left out of the whole zombie apocalypse media genre for some dumb ass reason).... where both of the protagonist’s parents die and stuff like that.....

and then i turned that awful story into my english class teacher as my final creative piece of the year.... bc i thought i wrote was some fucking deep ass metaphor at the end of that story about being depressed is being like a zombie....  

but i think it’s safe to say that that particular story was probably burnt by the english faculty and my teacher was just like “uh, what the FUCK?” when she read it. bc i never ended up getting it back from my teacher 😅.

and this post is also why i can’t be a high school english teacher. bc this scenario was just yikes.