A long short story called "Receiving my Major Work after the Internal Submission"

Receiving my Major Work after the Internal Submission

I first started my Major Work before year 12 even began. Way before. I wrote the first page of it way back in April 2013, when I only sensed that that very document might eventually turn into my Extension Two English Major Work. At that time, I didn’t even know if they’d let me into the course for sure, having still been far away from the application process and under the impression that it would be really hard to get in.

I remember being pretty proud of the first page. It was written in a really unusual way, for me, and it had lots of short paragraphs and dashes and adjectives. It looked pretty sophisticated. I had showed it to my friend Harry, and he had said it was good, if a little clunky because of the excessive adjectives. That criticism I had basically rejected at the time, but I realised he was right much later.  

I knew from the start that the story was to focus on one average workday in the life of a middle-aged man, named John (a name which was meant to be imaginative in its extreme unimaginativeness.) He was to be somewhat recently divorced to a wife whom I later named Margaret, to have two kids, to be miserable, lonely, and to live a mundane, repetitive life mostly consumed by a desperately boring job as some kind of lawyer in a non-descript office in a generic Sydney skyscraper. My biggest influences when I began writing were the canonical authors whose books I’d been reading at the time, all of them interested in the psychological: James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Virginia Woolf. Fascinated by writing about thought at the time, I imagined the story being written in a new, wonderful stream-of-consciousness style of my own making, a hybrid of the styles of those three authors. As all enthusiastic, arrogant young authors probably do, I imagined the story would eventually be on a par with the work of those others – except, frankly, better than Woolf and her idiotic writing style. In brief, euphoric fantasies, I imagined that I would publish the story by itself or as part of a novel that I was going to get around to writing straight after school, and I imagined the multitudinous accolades that would be heaped upon me: I imagined the story being called a ‘spectacular first work which truly conjures the profound out of the mundane’, a ‘blistering short story which captures the essence of the solipsism and routines of modern existence with its shocking nihilistic message’, I imagined being called ‘a precocious writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything’[1], I imagined being called the greatest writer of the 21^st Century, I imagined winning a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize, I imagined having a legacy greater than Shakespeare and of being eventually dubbed the greatest writer and genius to have ever graced the Earth with his presence and of being venerated by thousands of people around the world and ... On a more earthly level, I imagined, vividly and with a fairly strong sense of conviction, that my story would get full marks from the teaches at my school. I saw myself becoming a very minor celebrity at the school, talked about in hushed whispers by mostly kids in years below, who would say things like, “Did you hear about the Year 12 boy who wrote that amazingly sophisticated and intellectual story with all these words I don’t understand? He’s probably a certified genius or something.” I imagined not necessarily being in Showcase because I thought I was better than that, and possibly not even getting full marks in the external BOS mark because they wouldn’t understand my true brilliance, but I certainly imagined doing very well in Extension Two English.

Little did I know that I was seriously fucking deluded.

The whole class was sitting around the big old wooden table. Nobody was talking and everyone looking worried. Tom’s stomach was tied in knots. He was drumming his fingers on the table, his nails clacking loudly. He looked down at the area of the table his fingers were interacting with: carved into the dark wood was a crude, cartoonish penis, a swastika and FUCK, in caps. Ms Leicester was beginning to toss Major Works to their respective owners now. After two had been dispensed, one slid towards Tom. He dragged it in front of him and looked at the title: A Day. Yes, his masterstroke title – this was his.

Knowing that it would be better to end the suspense as quickly as possible, he flipped straight to the back of the Major Work proper, in front of the Reflection Statement.

By the time I had “got in” to Extension Two English with a super clever letter of application which addressed the relevant teacher in the second-person (ie like that book by Italo Calvino that I hadn’t read at the time and still haven’t read and don’t particularly want to read but whose plot outline I already know), and after year 11 had ended and the holidays had happened and I began to confront the reality that soon all life as I knew it would be over and other angsty teenage things, year 12 began. And I seem to recall the start of year 12 wasn’t so bad, particularly because of the subject of Extension Two English. I remember walking into class for the first lesson of that subject and thinking ‘This is my time to shine’ (or something to that effect). I had a very good feeling about the subject, mainly because my amazing story about the middle-aged man named John was now over 11,000 words, and I hence had basically 12 months to excise the worst 3000 words from it. This, in my mind, would eventually render it perhaps the best story ever written.

I remember my teacher for the subject, Ms Leicester, was giving us these speeches at the time about how, you know, a year sounds like a long time but it goes by very quickly and that you can’t be complacent, you’ve got to start work now. While she spoke in these moments, I would just be sitting there, utterly calm, thinking, ‘I am going to top this subject’. Those were good lessons – although perhaps a little too relaxed and easy for me. Anyway, at some point our first assessment appeared: a five minute ‘Viva Voce’ between us and two teachers, one of whom was to be your class teacher, in which we were meant to explain the basic facts of our Major Work in its present form and the process of development that had led to that stage, and then answer some questions asked by the teachers. In the few lessons leading up to it, Ms Leicester had emphasised that it was not particularly important and had generally presented it as a rather easy and straightforward task. Partly as a result of this (the other part being of course my outstanding arrogance and complacence), I was so unconcerned about it that I didn’t even bother to find out what percentage of my overall assessment mark it counted for. A fatal mistake, in hindsight.

As I’d been really busy that week, I did even less preparation than I’d planned to do, merely scribbling down a few fractured dot points on a scrap of paper in the lunchtime on the day of the assessment, which was to occur at 3pm. But I hadn’t been worried about that lack of preparation. After all, I was so much more eloquent than basically everyone else in my year, and I had written the most of my Major Work out of anyone else in my year, and, except for a few exceptionally industrious, nerdy students, most of the Extension Two cohort had barely done any work either. That said, I was very nervous as I walked up the stairs towards the room in which the Viva Voce was to take place, accompanied by the two teachers who were to examine me. I remember at the time wondering why I was so nervous; now I can only assume that my unconscious body knew what was going on better than the thinking bit did. The reality is that I was so unprepared that I didn’t even know that I was meant to speak for five minutes in a row – I had assumed that I would be given regular questions, not just at the end. When I sat down and the two teachers asked me if I was ready and then said ‘Start’, I quickly realised that I wasn’t going to be interrupted as I spoke. This shock made me yet more nervous, and although I thought I was babbling pretty fluently and coherently and intellectual-soundingly, I was very uncomfortable and I felt my face flush, which made me more nervous and self-conscious, and at one point I remember I lost track of my sentence, which was a minor thing but terrifying at the time. And then, after only four minutes had elapsed, there was nothing left to say at the front of my mind, so I said, ‘Can I stop?’ They said ‘Sure’, both of them assuming expressions that suggested they were trying to conciliate and reassure me, but also seemed to hint that they were maybe a little disappointed. I dismissed the latter inkling at the time, but now I see it was founded.

In the Q and A session which followed I’d thought they’d be nice to me, especially given what Ms Leicester had been saying in her speeches in class, but they weren’t. One question I felt was particularly surprising and a little nasty came from Ms Leicester herself. This is roughly what she said: ‘I have been through a divorce, you know. And it’s a very difficult process when you have to deal with a lot of stuff. And you’re a teenager. [She laughs]. So, frankly, I think the thing both of us are wondering about is what on earth you know about being middle-aged and going through a divorce. [She laughs again]. So, I guess what I’m saying is what motivated you to write about this character?’ I’m not exactly sure how I answered that question at the time, though I’m sure it was a bad answer. That same question about my motivation for writing about a middle-aged person kept cropping up throughout the year, and I never gave Ms Leicester a truly honest response. For ages, I kept feeling that it was unfair that I should be interrogated about my motivations – after all, is it not the duty of the author to try and escape his or her consciousness and to try to imagine what it is to live another’s life, even if that is drastically different from their own? Worse though, I was also embarrassed about the truth. The truth was that the character wasn’t so far away from me. It was basically just me, combined with little bits of my irascible, more mentally rigid dad, transplanted into the body of a middle-aged man whose life had essentially ended up a train wreck. I very recently came to realise that the main motivation was me imagining the worst possible scenario of my life at around age fifty: divorced, miserable, unfulfilled, and terrifyingly alone and introverted. In any case, what I did know at that time was that such an unhappy, hopeless character was the perfect vehicle for an exploration of the keen interest I held at that time in nihilism. The story was meant to be a powerfully bleak look at someone looking back at a life in which they had achieved nothing they’d set out to achieve, and looking ahead at the slow decline towards lonely death.  

Unfortunately, middle-aged teachers don’t want to hear that their age marks the beginning of the end. They don’t want to know that all that’s left for them is a gradually steepening descent to the grave!  

When I walked out of the Viva Voce, I felt very disappointed with myself. This was compounded when I talked to Matthew Thompson straight afterwards and thereby discovered that the Viva Voce did count for a fair chunk of the overall assessment mark, and hence that in a space of about ten minutes I’d ruined my chances of topping the subject. Nevertheless, I did retain hope that I would get around half way through the year. I reasoned that other people would go terribly, particularly people like Alex Mojad. And in any case, I didn’t do that badly myself – I did speak pretty eloquently.

So it came as a bit of a shock when I got 12 out of 20, and bottomed the cohort. It seems silly now but I was absolutely devastated by that result at the time. I guess it was mainly because it not only dashed my hopes of topping the subject but dashed my hopes of coming even top three or four. If you look at my Extension Two English journal, you can see a long, rambling, despairing elegy written just after I received that mark, which finished with me declaring, with stirring determination, that I would not falter again and that my internal mark would be 92/100.

If only that were true…

Tom looked at the page: written in lead, right in the centre, was the number 25.

25? It couldn’t be 25. But it was unmistakable: it said 25. Tom thought it was out of 40. How could he get 25? His stomach tangled itself even more tightly than before.

 “It’s out of 40 right, m’am?”

As soon as he asked the question, Ms Leicester’s expression immediately became deeply solicitous and almost guilty. “Yes.”

Tom could feel his face melting. It was too much. No. It was just too much. Why did these things keep happening to him? No. How? And it was so good, too. Harry read through all the drafts. He’d said they were good. Yes, there had been lots of problems with it, but he’d spent so long correcting them. He’d been writing it for so long. So much longer than anyone else in the room. No. Why did he never succeed? Look at Martin over there, his story wasn’t even that good, but he got, yes, 40. And this was the third time it had happened. Why did it keep happening? First the Viva Voce, then the Reflection Statement, now this. Why? He’d have to tell Harry. He’d be so shocked.  

Ms Leicester started to speak to him: “Mr Simons had very strong feelings about your Major Work. He’s worked at the Board of Studies Marking Centre more recently than any of us, just two years ago, so I respect his judgement a lot. I think it’d be good for you to have a chat to him today.”

“Ok.”

“I’ll remind him that you need to talk to him and that he should be available. [She laughs]. Also you know Dr Haig well, don’t you?

“Yep.”

“Well, let’s go talk to him after class.”

Tom was very slightly mollified. “Ok” he said. He paused. Then, with a quavering voice, he said, “I kinda feel like there’s no point me submitting it externally.”

“Let’s have a talk about this with Dr Haig,” Ms Leicester said, her expression still solicitous and concerned.

“Ok.”

He’d have to get over it. He’d just have to. He took a deep breath. Well, but that was it, Extension Two English was well and truly fucked for him now.

Ben, sitting next to him, spoke: “What did you get?”

“A pretty bad mark. You beat me,” Tom said quietly.

“Oh. Sorry.”

Ben immediately started talking to Edward, who was sitting on the other side of Tom.

“What did you get?” he asked.

“Oh, 35,” Edward replied.

“I got 34. I’m pretty annoyed because, like, I know if I just made a few changes I could have done heaps better. They’ve made a comment about me not exploring the characters enough. I just could have changed that and then my mark would have been way higher.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, he was hearing from Martin and James’ conversation that James had got 38/40 on his incredibly pretentious but also unoriginal and unintellectual and unsophisticated ‘postmodern’ series of vignettes mocking the way we consume art.

Tom had never hated every other living person on earth as much as he did in that moment. But he also just felt so weak all of a sudden. His face was twitching and wobbling as he tried to keep it in place. He was trying so hard not to cry. He wondered if he should run to the bathroom and just let his face melt and then bawl like teenage girls do in movies, but he decided against it. He just sat there, silently.

There’s not really much to say about my Reflection Statement except that I had thought it was really good and really well-written and had expected to get full marks – or at least very close to it – and when I didn’t, and instead came fourth bottom of the cohort, I was seriously fucking pissed off and frustrated and sad. At that point, it felt like the teachers must have something against me, especially when I noticed that one of them had circled the words “Posit” and “Opine” as if they were a mistake. I asked Ms Leicester why, and she said Mr Simons had said they were “pretentious” and although they hadn’t initially drawn her attention, she had agreed. She then said that it looked as if I was trying to distinguish myself from the rest of the cohort by using those words and, finally, that they made me sound “like an old professor”. That made me furious. I used those words for the sole reason that they were the most apt for their respective contexts. I didn’t even countenance the possibility that in a formal task using formal but unobscure English words would be regarded as pretentious. How absurd! Not that I expressed any sentiment of that kind to Ms Leicester, but I did defend my use of them with a fair amount of vigour. I couldn’t help feeling a bit like the teachers were Pol Pot and I was a dissenting intellectual at that point. In hindsight, this may have been a bit melodramatic.  

Anyway, after a few days I decided that there was no way on earth that I was going to let myself fail again: I was going to get a good mark on the bit that counted, the Major Work, and there was no doubt about it. This was the part of the assessment that would finally test my mettle – that would separate the preternaturally gifted geniuses (me) from the hopeless incompetents (everyone else). Or so I thought.  

Accompanied by Ms Leicester, Tom walked swiftly through the library the short distance to Dr Haig’s office. As soon as they entered, a conversation began.

Ms Leicester looked at Dr Haig, who was looking a bit confused: “I thought it’d be a good idea for you two to have a chat about the Major Work, considering you know each other well.”

“Oh ok,” said Dr Haig.

Dr Haig walked right up to Tom’s face, like he always did when he talked to people. He began to speak:

“I know your mark. I was very shocked when I found out because, although I haven’t read your whole Major Work, I know you, and I’ve been reading your writing for two years and I wouldn’t have expected that.”

The proximity of Dr Haig’s bespectacled face to his own made Tom go a bit red. He was still working to stop his face melting, and he was self-conscious about how visible that was.   

Ms Leicester spoke: “You have always been one of the best contributors in class, and you’re very good at analysing texts and all that stuff.”

“Mm,” Dr Haig said.

Ms Leceister spoke again, looking at Tom: “Your initial reaction was ‘What’s the point of continuing?’” wasn’t it?”

“Yep,” Tom replied.

“Well I certainly think that you should continue.”

“Yes I agree,” Dr Haig said. “There’s nothing to lose.”

Tom decided to speak: “Well, there’s no point not continuing, but it would be a wasted unit I think.”

“Mm,” said Dr Haig. “You’re doing alright in 2 Unit and 3 Unit, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Well you know it may not be a wasted unit because of the nature of moderation.”

“Mm,” Tom replied. Tom suspected Dr Haig didn’t know just how badly he had done in his previous two assessments. If you’re coming around third bottom of the cohort, you’re probably not going to do very well, no matter how the scaling works.

“Also, I’d like to read it myself. Do you have a copy that you can spare?”

“Ah, well, I can print another one out today because the document’s on my computer.”

“Ok. Thanks.”

Tom felt a little better now. At least Dr Haig was going to read it. He sort of hoped that Dr Haig would read it and think it’s brilliant and be so appalled at the injustice of his very low mark that he would demand it to be marked again.

“You should chat to Ms Simons as soon as you can,” Ms Leicester said. “I think it’ll be useful for him to explain why he gave you that mark, to give you some feedback and advice on how you might improve it. I’ll remind him that you’re looking for him.”

“Ok. Sure.” He didn’t think he was going to see Mr Simons today. He didn’t feel like it. Anyway, now both Dr Haig and Ms Leicester looked like they had nothing to say. “Thanks for this,” Tom said.

Both of them smiled. Tom walked out of the office and back through all the noise of the main area of the library, weaving through the tables full of chatting students. English was first period so he’d be staying up here. He’d need to find Harry so they could rehearse the speech. They wouldn’t have much time. He looked right, through the glass windows. On the other side of the playground, the big clock read 8:17. They would only have 20 minutes, if that. He still felt sick to the stomach, but his face was no longer melting. How much of what just happened would he tell Harry? They didn’t have time to waste so Tom couldn’t give him a long, cathartic confessional speech. He’d just have to steel his nerve, tell him what mark he’d got and what had just happened as calmly as he could, wait for Harry’s incredulous and sympathetic response, and then start rehearsing with him. He spotted Harry sitting on a table alone. He walked towards him.

I described earlier how my original influences in the project were Joyce, Dostoevsky and Woolf. Well, I actually stopped reading these authors either before year 12 began or just after it, and begun to read other authors whose books were much less focused around the psychological. This naturally affected how I wanted to write. Undoubtedly the most influential writer for me became David Foster Wallace. As much as I tried not to be, I became a real ‘fan’ of his in a way I had never been for an author before. After reading Oblivion, I began to learn all about him, and watch all of the radio and television interviews featuring him that existed on Youtube. After that, I set about reading every non-fiction piece he’d written that I could find on the internet. I’ve now done that. Just after Christmas, I embarked upon his famous epic, Infinite Jest. I am still reading this now, almost 8 months later, having constantly been delayed by the business of the HSC, but am almost finished. The consequence of this obsession was that I began to try and imitate his writing in my Major Work. I attempted to write in perfectly metric, elegant sentences, integrating slang and highly technical lexicon, basically only ever using commas and full-stops, and diminishing considerably my use of stream-of-consciousness, which had predominated in my Major Work originally. The closer I got to the point when I would submit my Major Work, the better I thought it became because of this influence. Then, while I was initially uncertain about what I should cut, I thought the process of getting it down to the word limit made it even better, as it forced me to excise the inferior or superfluous parts of the story that up till then I’d been ignoring. The closer I got to the point of submission, I felt I was getting wiser as a writer, too. Some extracts from Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon that I read, which were all writing advice and whose message amounted to, ‘Don’t write like an egotist, big, fancy words aren’t impressive’ made me see with even greater clarity that some parts of my Major Work were unnecessary. On top of this, I had a meeting with Ms Leicester a couple of weeks before submission, and though she was by no means unwaveringly laudatory about my Major Work, she seemed to be suggesting it was pretty good. And once I implemented a bit of her advice, I felt like my Major Work was, well, very good. My friend Harry had confirmed this, too. When the moment arrived, I submitted it with confidence.

Thus, it came as quite a shock when, bleary-eyed on a Thursday morning, I found out that my Major Work was not just somewhat flawed but massively so.

 It was period 3 and Tom and Harry had a free together. They were standing next to a basketball hoop, neither of them talking.

Tom decided to speak: “I have to do something or else I’ll get really stressed. Something physical.”

“Ok.”

Tom started pacing around, looking for a ball. Under some chairs just off the basketball court, he found one. He began to bounce it, moving towards the hoop. When he was just outside the circle, he shot. He missed. Harry picked up the ball and shot; he got it in. Tom ran up to retrieve the ball before Harry could and shot again. Again he missed. It seemed all too fitting that he’d be having a bad day in basketball too. Not that he was particularly good anyway.

“God hates me” he droned, intending for the comment to be construed as only semi-sincere.

“I think you’re being dramatic” Harry replied, as he shot and missed the hoop and the ball began to bounce away from them.

Tom was enraged by that remark. He began to chase after the ball, partly to stop himself from erupting.

Dramatic? Wouldn’t it be justified to be dramatic in this situation? What’s wrong with being dramatic anyway? Can’t a man be dramatic? And Harry doesn’t even know the least of what’s going on in my life. He’s not trying to empathise with me. He just thinks I’m being a whinger. Fuck him. Seriously, fuck him. Should I tell him this? I don’t know. Would it be good to? I don’t know.

Tom picked up the ball now and began to sprint with it back. When he returned, he and Harry kept shooting hoops. For minutes, they didn’t talk. They just watched as the other person mechanically shot, squinting bitterly in the sunshine.  

Just before lunchtime on the day I received my Major Work back, I received a notice that Dr Haig wanted to see me. When I went up to his office for the second time that day, I was informed that he’d managed to arrange Mr Rodgers to remark it that night. It was all very underhand – so much so that Dr Haig told me himself that I ought to keep it “discreet”. I felt very happy about this, and though I made a conscious effort not to get my hopes up too high, I expected that Mr Rodgers would increase my mark, if only by a few integers.

However, the next day, when I encountered Dr Haig in the morning, he informed me that Mr Rodgers had not increased the mark and may have even given me a lower mark than I received had he been one of the teachers originally responsible. I was shocked again. Again I wondered what on earth was so goddamn awful about my Major Work. But I had to get over it. And I did. I’m pleased to say that I did. Nevertheless, I didn’t fulfil Ms Leicester’s request by avoiding talking to Mr Simons until after the term had ended, whereupon I wrote the following email:

To: obs@tyhgram.nsw.edu.au
CC: sfl@tyhgram.nsw.edu.au; llh@tyhgram.nsw.edu.au

Dear sir, 

On Thursday morning, in SFL's Extension 2 class, I, Tom Aitken, received my Major Work back. Just before the moment of truth, SFL had told everyone in the class that the mark would be at the back of our Major Works. I was nervous but in an excited way (rather than fearful). Yes, I had not expected getting 12/20 in the Viva Voce, and yes, I had definitely not expected 21/30 for my Report considering I had put a lot of effort into it and thought it was good, but I wasn't thinking about that trend of abysmal marks as I quickly flicked through A Day to the last page. I was thinking mainly of glory. 

Then I saw the mark. In lead pencil, near some lead pencil comments that I wasn't interested in reading, was the number 25. My initial thoughts were 'What? Didn't Ms Leicester say it was out of 40?' That was how incredulous I was. I then said to her, "The Major Work's out of 40 isn't it?". With a solicitous, almost guilty expression, she replied "Yes". I felt like the wind had been sucked out of me – I was distraught. I think despite my best efforts to hide that devastation, she saw it and started saying reassuring things about my Major Work and how it was marked. She mentioned how Dr Haig hadn't read it and how you were the one who pushed for the lower mark and she explained how she had deferred to your judgement (those weren't her exact words but that was the subtext I got) as you were the most recent one of the markers to have worked in the BOS marking centre. She then suggested I talk to you today, saying that she would remind you to be available. Finally, she said that I should talk to Dr Haig about my mark as I knew him and he might have something to say to me. I replied to this with "Ok". I felt my face melting; I had to exert a lot of effort to keep it in place. Despite this, I managed to get these words out: "I kinda feel like there's no point me submitting it externally". She rejected that immediately and started talking to the class more generally about how it was always hard giving harsh marks because they knew we all poured our blood, sweat and tears into them. I felt like leaving to go into the library bathroom and, like, let my face melt, but I decided not to. I just sat there, as Ben van Persie lamely attempted sympathy and then started talking to Edward Lee about his mark. 

After the (very short) class had finished, I walked over to Dr Haig's office with Ms Leicester. He talked to me with his face really close to my face in the way he always does. He said very nice things. He said that he was very shocked by my mark, because though he hadn't read all of my Major Work, he had been reading my writing for the past two years and so this was very unexpected. As he talked, though, I felt stressed. I felt my face go a little bit red and the muscles on my face twitch and wobble as I tried to stop it from melting. After Ms Leicester interjected by saying to Dr Haig that my initial reaction had been, 'What's the point of continuing?' he said that I should definitely continue. I replied with, ‘There’s no point not submitting it, but it would be a wasted unit I think’. Haig or Leicester then said, 'You're doing alright in 2 Unit and 3 Unit aren't you?' I said yes, even though I am doing pretty averagely in 3U because I got 14 for my creative in the Half Yearly Exams and am doing less well than I should in 2U. He then said that it may not be a wasted unit anyway because of the nature of the moderation. I knew about this already and I think Dr Haig didn't realise that my internal mark is 66%. Even if the external mark is the one that really matters, a 66% internal mark means I can't do really well. I mean, that's obvious. He then said he would like to read it and asked that I get him a copy. That made me feel a little better. Finally, he suggested, like Ms Leicester had, that I should talk to Mr Simons. I said I would but I knew I wouldn't, at least that day. I felt too fragile to meet someone I'd never met who didn't like my Major Work. It was far too scary. 

What made all this doubly awful was that I had to perform the English 2 Unit speech only 20 minutes after I left Haig's office, with Harry Radcliffe, whom I know you know. Just before we started rehearsing, I told him about my mark as undramatically as possible and he was more incredulous than me. He had read every single bit of my Major Work I'd ever written as we constantly send each other writing. We talked a bit about it and he offered me his sympathies and, despite me being distressed, we then began our practice. Eventually, I resolved to try my best to not think about my result and it kind of worked. I decided that, you know, who cares what they think. I did care but that's the only way you can cope with that sort of thing.

At lunch, I then found out that Dr Haig had decided to get Mr Rodgers to mark it, the official reason being the discrepancy between Ms Simmons and you. This pleased me and I was again a little bit excited -- though I made a point of not getting my hopes up too much and knew my mark wouldn't suddenly be boosted to the high 30s out of 40. But, to be honest, I did expect it to increase. So it made it all the more shocking that the next day when Dr Haig pulled me into his office and informed me that Mr Rodgers was if anything even a little harsher than you, and had the same sort of criticisms. I wasn't devastated by this but I was certainly surprised. I kept thinking 'What on earth is wrong with my Major Work?' When I told Harry, he was shocked as well. He keeps telling me it's really good. I mean, I basically believe him. It is something that I've been essentially refining for a year. And, to be frank, I can't help but thinking of all the people in the 4U cohort whom I'm better at writing than, whom I've been writing far longer than, who beat me.

I realise everything I just said is ostensibly irrelevant to you and as a short narrative of my life is probably an unusual thing to send to a teacher – particularly one I haven't met before – but I felt I had to say it to both humanise me and to give background for what I'm about to say. What I'm about to say is a series of questions that I'd like answers to (though of course you have the right to just ignore me).
Did you think my story was well-written?
Did you like my story?
If my story was so incompatible with the rubric why didn't Ms Leicester tell me that I needed to make drastic changes? (I had a whole year to make changes, she'd only have to tell me and I would have done it. I could have even submitted something completely different. I had so many other things – essays, other short stories, poems. But no one told me my Major Work was going to get an awful mark. How was I meant to know? I had the same problem with the Viva Voce and the report: no one told me anything specific about them before I did them and if they did, there's no way I would have got as low a mark as I did. I thought my report was very good, but little did I know that lots of specific information was vital (and little did I know that the words 'posit' and 'opine’ were just far enough on the pretension spectrum to be crossed out. And, in any case, I thought we were meant to write formally!))
You wrote on the back of my piece "Ageing is an insufficient complication to drive a short story" – does that mean you personally need big 'complications' in stories or BOS requires them?
You also wrote on the back of my piece "You need to flesh out his character arc with backstory and development" – why is that so imperative? Did you think my character was unreal or incredible?
What is a character arc anyway?
(In reference to one of Ms Leicester’s comments) isn't my concept really obvious? It's just meant to be, like, bleak. It's about a dude with an awful life. What is it with a concept? My concept has never been accepted and I'm not sure why. How do concepts work? I'd rather talk about the themes of my Major Work than a concept but I always have to talk about a concept.
Does the rubric for the Major Work have anything about ability to write? To be frank, how is it that I can be beaten in the only HSC subject purely about writing skill by people who frequently commit malapropisms and solecisms? By people who can barely write coherently?

More than anything, I'd really like a considered answer to these questions because at the moment I can't help thinking that this whole thing is horrifically unfair. I'm not hugely concerned about my ATAR and I can probably afford to have a bad unit like this and still get a very 'respectable' mark, but what I'm hoping is that these questions are answerable and answerable in a way that will dispel my feeling of utter indignation.

I don't know when you'll actually receive this though. I'm hoping you have access to your school email during the holidays.

Sincerely,

Tom Aitken, author of the critically savaged A Day. 

  

In case you were worrying, no, I didn’t end up sending the email as written above. Luckily, I made a decision to send it to Harry before I sent it to Mr Simons and by calling it strange and advising me to change it, Harry steered me away from the jagged rocks that could have been the personal details I included, the arrogance of a lot of what I said and the generally inappropriate tone of this email. In the end, basically the only part of the email above I included was the questions, and even then I omitted the last one. While I was a bit affronted and indignant when Harry suggested I should change the email, as I was still very angry about my mark and how I’d been treated and felt that any alteration would amount to a dilution and hence betrayal of my true feelings, I was eventually able to see the light.

The funny thing was that none of the teachers saw the email for the whole holiday, and when it had finished, I had almost completely gotten over the disappointment. “Time like an ever-rolling stream, /Bears all it sons away; /They fly forgotten, as a dream/Dies at the opening day.”[2]

Now I’ve only got this Major Work to desolate and infuriate me. That is, unless you give me a good mark for this. I reckon this is likely. You should be very impressed by it, particularly considering I’ve spent an aggregate of about five hours on it and I’ve already written 7,318 words.

But back to what I was saying. When the teachers finally saw the edited email and I returned to school for the next term, the two responsible for giving me the mark had a long chat with me about why they gave me the mark, and it wasn’t about my talent so much, more just that the character was unlikeable and my concept was weak according to the criteria and I wasn’t concerned enough with how everything might all work together to reflect the concept and all that sort of stuff. This was good to hear because it dispelled my paranoia that my Major Work was not even slightly well-written. And now, well, I’m fine. I’m mentally stable. My face has long since stopped melting.

Anyway, I guess you may be wondering why marks have had such a profound impact on me. They shouldn’t after all. They’re just numbers. They’re not a reflection of my character or my worth as a human being; they’re not even a reflection of my industry or intelligence. They mean very little that is real and important and worth caring about. But it’s hard to keep that in mind when that’s all people talk about in year 12. And while getting a super high ATAR is not at all vital for the course I want to do at university and Extension Two English will almost certainly be a dead unit for me now, the feeling of loss of pride and hurt resulting from something into which you invested so much time and energy and emotion being dismissed as bad is pretty powerful.

And you know, when I think about it, the marks themselves probably had a profound impact on me more as a catharsis facilitator than a desolator. What I mean by that is that getting bad marks in a subject I’d really wanted and expected to do well in served as a synecdoche for all the other troubling stuff going on in my life at the time. The assessment marks had such a profound impact on me because they somehow symbolised at once: the pervasive stress resulting from the year 12 workload and the endless pressure of exams; my grandpa recently having a stroke and how I felt when I visited him and saw him incontinent and incoherent and watched my dad and the family try and cope with that; my insecurities and angsts about my social life; my insecurities and angsts about leaving the comforting repetition and conformity of school forever; my insecurities and angsts about the fact that I will inevitably start to move away emotionally from my parents; and my insecurities and angsts about becoming an adult in general and all that entails – having to fill in that tax form that I haven’t filled in, having to get a job, having to shop for myself, having to arrange things for myself etc.

It’s for this reason that I think that lead-pencil 25 will forever be seared onto my retina.

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[1] Which was a quote from a critic I’d read on the back of David Foster Wallace’s epic Infinite Jest. I’ll talk about Wallace later. He becomes important.

[2] Watts, I. O God, Our Help.