English Department Report 

As the Semester 1 Exams draw to a close, we have seen many successes from a variety of students. 

Our 7-10 classes are also reaching the crux of their text studies, and creating responses to a variety of prompts. Make sure you take the time to check in and ask about how these responses are going, as many students are producing high quality drafts. 

Our senior students have also been completing the oral presentations, and have been very successful in this endeavor.  

Over the next term, we are moving into new units, and our students will be moving through a wide variety of very exciting topics! 

• Year 7's: Students will be writing persuasive letters and completing a persuasive speech. 

• Year 8's: Students will be completing a blog post persuading a chosen audience of a topic, and focusing on local issues for a speech. 

• Year 9's: Will be creating persuasive pieces around a central framework. 

• Year 10's:  Will be completing an analytical response on the film Bran Nue Dae, directed by Rachel Perkins. 

• Year 11 English: Will be completing an analytical response to the film Rear Window directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 

• Year 11 English Language: Will be studying the origins of the English Language, and discussing changes in the language over time. 

• Year 11 VCE:VM: Will be continuing their excursion planning. 

Below is one writing example from our Year 11 English Exam. 

Gabriel Mackinnon, Year 11 

You could insert a golden coin into the slot machine if you wanted. You could wake it up from the idle slumber it had been in and watch as each of its screens light up, as the exciting but generic music starts playing, and its dark yellow shell would start rattling from the energy, breathing. It would illuminate the dark surrounds with its starry screens, bringing to light the tattered checkered carpet it sits upon covered in sparse bills and coins, muddied from a thousand footprints rendered invisible by the complicated floor pattern, stained by the spillages of empty cups. It would reveal the silhouettes of the other machines and who didn't make it - screens smashed inward, cranks inverted; roulette wheels dislodged from their attachments. Trypophobic dart boards with no games left to play, dead. The slot machine lives on. The slot machine breathes. 

You could push past the swamp of dust and let the slot machine face you, and you could let your coin fall into the receptacle, making, no promise not to return as a larger sum, but no promise not to either. You could cover your ears as the machine roars in delight, ecstatically flashing its lights and convulsing all its moving parts, preparing for you to lose yourself and play its game. You could look away from the screen for a final time to analyse the skeleton of the previous player, discarded on the ground beside it. The body is completely unidentifiable after all this time but you recognise them as once a sailor, called in by the siren's song, it's electronic bassy melody that captured him and kept him in its trance until his brain had fully withered away. You could look back at the screen, now emulating the rolling of wheels, could understand why. 

You could try to track the symbols on the first of three wheels. The incredible light of the screen burns your eyes enough to make them largely indistinct but you identify the identify the staples –  a pair of two cherries, hanging from the branch; a green clover with an amount of leaves you can't quite remember anymore, and a big, decorated 7. You would be certain you want the 7. You wouldn't be able to identify why. It could have been a 6, or an 8, or a dollar sign, but somebody once decided it should be 7 and, as you know, nothing is ever allowed to change. 

You could unceremoniously tap the button at your waist-height and the wheel could grind to a stop, the exoskeleton of the slot machine bouncing and gyrating in an unconscious joy, so grateful someone is back to play with it. The wheel landed on some kind of abstract animal face, which it is your task now to find two more of. Your eyes are droopy and your mouth has fallen open but you don’t know that; you are fully engrossed with the machine's game, its sideways carousels that shakily promise fortune. You could push the STOP button a second time, and a third. But oh – your third symbol is that of a bug, cor a spindly plant of some kind, inconsistent with the two before it. The machine erupts into laughter, ravenously guffawing up and down, oily tears streaming down its face and pooling where your hand is resting. Its screens all flash red. It's You blew it! You clown! You'll never win its treasure if you perform like that. But – you could try it again. You could put in another coin and have another ride on the ferris wheel. In fact, you could keep trying until your fingers bleed, until the muscles atrophy, until gravity takes the sagging skin off your face, until you turn into dust completely and the hungry slot machine is finally satisfied.  

Or you could turn around and leave. The door is open. There is nobody forcing you to use this machine besides the machine itself. But when you look down at your hands, and see the skin, muscle and vein all already missing, you fear you have no choice.