Paper 2 Debrief
Hi all!
How did your second paper go today?
We did the Immigrant Experience OCR in my school, and it seems that lots of my students were quite happy with the extract!
And how many more exams do you all have (in general)?
hi miss! i also did the immigrant experience and it was def better than p1 (not sure if better enough to make up for it tho). at first i thought the extract was too complicated but it got better in the end, although i felt like each para was ab characterisation of the indian girls...
i also recognised the author so i made a link to their other novel which i was happy with!
most people did the journeys question like me, but i lowkey think i mightve written too mucb for it and it mightve muddled my argument! i wrote like 1k more words for it than my unseen (but i wrote a lotttt in total, def too much) 😭
i talked about initial settings of grandeur highlighting the honeymoon phase (ignoring their faults as a result, nevern street and the gothic buildings of princeton), romantic relationships as a symbol of their journey (erica+changez bad, but michael+queenie strangely good), and then geographical movements as symbolic of the metaphorical recalbiration of the relationship immigrations have w their host country (changez abandons completely by moving to pakistan, but hortense+gilbert are afro-saxon so they stay in britain)
do u think the grade boundaries will go up by a lot? im quite worried about how easy a lot of ppl found it
Shani C. ahh ok tysm!! i was scared bc my teacher said they should roughly be the same amount, and im scared that my examiners gonna be pissed and mark me lower cus im taking away their precious time 😭 i told myself i was gonna write less too, but the comparative was so broad i felt like i couldve just chosen anything and linked it enough so i didnt take long really
yes my teacher usually says that the IE extracts dont typically have a lot on languages, imagery and motif but there was a lot this time! there was sooooo much going on in that extract, and a lot of cultural symbols to analyse. it had a decent amount of tropes i think too, but i feel like all i could do in that extract was analyse how privileged the girls were
thank god also for the info note at the top about biju being poor which led for some useful juxtapositions (esp when the girl told him to buy a glove thing)
YB Z. One of my work friends is an examiner – she's like a manager of the examiners? – for OCR and she's one of the sweetest person! The thing she always tells me is that the reason the OCR grade boundaries are so high is because they train all their examiners to purposefully look for things they can reward you marks on! So it's not that the standard is unachievable; it's more that they're so nice that they've got to keep the grade boundaries high!
Yes! There were loads this time! I wish teachers would focus more on things like narrative structure, though! Like Text World Theory (a glossary post I'm currently working on) instead of trying to make students analyse prose like they would a poem! Not your fault though and you were fine for this one!
Shani C. ahhh that makes sense! hopefully theyll abstract away my waffle then LOL
i did focus on narrative + structure def! my teacher usually recommends we do a whole para on it. but i found less things to talk about than usual i think - i mentioned the third person omniscient narrator creating irony, and the long complex asyndetic lists (does that count? hope so). and the dialogue how it treats biju like hes not even there
we're taught to do 3 paras on 3/4 of the literary matters: narrative voice and structure, characterisation, setting, lang motif and imagery. altho this time for me a lot of this just blended into one at times
i did gothic and the comparative was good, i answered the question on Angela Carters ‘The Bloody Chamber’ about subverting victorian values, linked Dracula as an Outsider to The Tigers Bride, linked Lucy’s punishment for her desire to Erl King, and linked degeneration in both dracula and the marquis in The Bloody Chamber. The Unseen was a bit more difficult, I felt as it wasn’t very obviously gothic. Other then that i’m happy with how both papers have been
I think it was pretty good, i'm AQA Spec B and our extract was from "1948." Apparently it's a famous book but i've never heard of it...
I did the Q on Handmaids Tale on "women hurt and damage other women rather than support each other." To agree I used Aunt Lydia's cruelty and the behaviour that Offred shows to Janine. To disagree I discussed Moria and Offreds friendship, how Moria gives her moral support. As well as Ofglen and Offred.
For my two hander, I do Blake and Crace, and i picked the significance of victims Q.
I think it was pretty good overall! Hopefully Paper 2 and my coursework will redeem my grade from Paper 1
not too bad! i thought for ocr gothic they were going to do 20th century, didnt necessariliy expect so early (1907), was hoping for just after WW1/WW2 because I larn abut that stuff in history lol. But ok. THe traditional values question was fine, basically wrote about gender and colonialsm and some ideas by Srinivasan the modern phisopher. Feeling pretty good overall!
hi miss! sorry to bother you again but i wanted to ask if you remember if the q about the journeys specficied immigrant characters? bcause for my para on romantic relationships i mentioned michael+queenie for small island, and i just realised he wouldnt count! im semi lucky in that the focus was half split on the relationship, and the consequence of the relationship (baby michael in helping hortense deconstruct the colonial mindset)