HSC Students Are Using TikTok To Hilariously Vent About A Cursed English Exam
"Uncle Steve loves the thunderstorms"
A whole bunch of high school students in Australia are doing the HSC at the moment, the most needlessly stressful and upsetting exam that you’ll probably ever take.
Honestly, doing a quick survey of the Junkee office finds that a large portion of the adults who work here STILL have nightmares about this hell test.
So, it’s with great sympathy and empathy that I announce that Year 12 students, fresh from a particularly nasty English exam, are taking to TikTok to vent about the test, their absolute hatred of NESA (The New South Wales Educational Standards Authority), and a particularly confusing poem that they’re referring to as ‘Uncle Steve’.
Journalist Casey Briggs noticed the TikTok trend, putting up a selection of them on Twitter (which is only populated by old people and journalists), clarifying that he has “no idea what any of these mean”. They are definitely meant to be consumed by current students, but frankly, once you get the gist — exams are hard, topics are obscure, and high school English is always pretty stupid — they’re very funny videos.
Year 12 English students are venting about their exam on tiktok pic.twitter.com/S3txZaWpxp
— casey briggs (@CaseyBriggs) October 17, 2019
The SMH reported that the first HSC English exam was “incredibly stressful”, and the Head of the English Teachers Association of NSW, Eva Gold, praised the test saying “One of the problems that English teachers had expressed about the HSC exam was [that] students perceived it was too predictable.”
So — basically, HSC students seem to be very justified in letting off some steam. And unlike with the infamous, and racist Mango poem incident from a few years ago, nobody has taken the ribbing into harassment, racism and intimidation, so well done youth of today!
The english paper in a nutshell. rip my ATAR I guess :/#HSC2019 pic.twitter.com/4shauvkLsG
— DTom (@DTom24) October 17, 2019
It seems that in this poem, someone goes and throws a boomerang in a storm, and all these poor students are meant to write about what that means. That sucks — poems famously mean everything and nothing. They’re just evocative. They’re nonsense.
Anyway! Good luck, teens, hope you all do very well in the cursed exam.