English Coursework

Surely there must be a law against English Coursework, especially against having to do hours of hard slog when you really should be outside, inside, having fun because you're on holiday.
But no, someone somewhere has missed the point of the word 'HOLIDAY'.
That someone is an English teacher and department, that somewhere is my school.

At first, I thought that I was going to get away with not having to do any coursework at home in my free time, as my first piece of coursework just 7 weeks into Year 10 was done at school, during lessons on the computers. It was a piece of travel writing, so it wasn't that bad, and I wrote about my trip to Ypres, Belgium with my grandparents back in 2006. We went to the trenches, museums, and memorials there of the First World War. That particular piece was not too bad, as I just wrote it as it was, without having to make stuff up about a story in order to get any decent marks.

Then along came Spring Term Half-term HOLIDAY. The teacher set us an essay for coursework on a Sherlock Holmes story: 'The Speckled Band'. She gave us some sheet telling us what needed to be in the essay, with references from the story. Typically, the references were given column numbers, and were from a different publication of the story from the one I was using, so that was no help at all. To tell the truth, the sheet did help me a bit, but it also meant that my essay was an awful lot longer than it would have been without the sheet, and so it took more time and wasted more of my precious holiday. In the end, I wrote a load of stuff to analyse the story that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle probably never meant to happen. He wrote the story for people to enjoy, not to pull it apart!

And now I'm re-doing a piece of coursework that I don't even need! It is meant to be an alternative for my travel-writing piece, but I got a good mark for that and I was happy with it. We were told to write a 'Locked Room Mystery', so I did. I wrote a really short one, about 400 words and I did write a mystery; I left it unsolved! :D Then my teacher said it wasn't long enough, so now I have to do it again, over the Spring Holiday, and I've written nearly 3000 words now. It's a sheer waste of everything! [:(

P.S. No, it's not good exam practice; no-one can write 3000 words in an hour by hand.