Cope

If any of you poor souls out there are as unfortunate as me, and have to do Cope (Certificate of Personal Effectiveness), you'll understand that it is one of the most pointless things you will ever be called upon to do. However, I have now finished it all, at long last. It's rather pathetic, to be honest. Whoever decided it should be worth seventy UCAS points did not have their brain screwed on the right way up. Or even around at all. There's no way I have learnt more in Cope than I did in AS English Language, for which I will receive sixty UCAS points. In fact, I'm tempted to say that it's worse than Sociology, worse even than General Studies. Take, for example, the most recent module we completed. We had to make a brochure on an aspect of healthy living. Fine, you say. But we had to do it in a group of at least three, take minutes of 'meetings' where we discussed task allocation, and so on. I don't believe I have ever done something more pathetic. I could have done the leaflet in about fifteen minutes. In fact, I believe I did. But no, it had to be dragged out over two lessons so that we could have two separate meetings. Then we had to fill in a load of pointless sheets, including health and safety considerations. Health and safety considerations involved in making a leaflet?! How ridiculous is that?

There was, I will admit, one module which may have been vaguely worth doing. It involved learning a new skill and then doing a presentation on it. However, we weren't warned about it before the summer holiday as we should have been, and so I ended up doing my family history. Most people did learning to drive. Again, there was a large quantity of rather pointless sheets to fill in to go along with that. And the 'skill' I picked did not really fit with the sheets either. If I'd known, I might have done something interesting over the summer holiday, like building a model from scratch. Although to be fair, I could actually have done model-making as my 'new skill', as I did a model with rigging for the first time during the summer holidays. Boy was it fiddly--I was basically poking little bits of string into place and hoping they stuck in the right manner. And I even went and did a bit of research so I could check exactly how the strings were supposed to go. I've only done one model complete with string...

While I'm on the subject of pointless things, English Lit was rather infuriating today. In the exam, we have to write about William Blake's poetry, without the poetry in front of us, and we have to do an unseen poem as well. As in, a poem that we have never seen before, not as in an invisible one, and write about it as a partner text to the Songs of Innocence and Experience. Fine. So in English Lit, we're doing two matching Blake poems (allegedly they all pair up nicely, but what my English Lit teacher does not seem to have noticed--or nobody has--is that there are not equal numbers of poems in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experiencing), and then doing a random other too. Fine I guess, but there's no way we'll be getting one of the random others we've happened to study in the exam. So why did we spend far more time looking at a Thomas Hardy poem today than looking at The Echoing Green (Song of Innocence). We scarcely talked at all about the Blake one, but skipped pretty much right over it to the Questioning Nature one. Humph. I have to say though, William Blake is an absolutely fantastic poet. I'm really going to have to get hold of an illustrated edition of his poems.