SIDE

By: Young Person

School of Isolated and Distance Education

Year 12 wasn't the easiest year for me. The pressure was getting to me and having one teacher who I didn't seem to get along with didn't make life any easier. It wasn't that she disliked me, or I disliked her, but for some reason we just didn't click. Things had been building up between us for a while and one day she made a comment about an essay I wrote that I took quite personally. What she said really upset me.

At the time I was seeing our school psychologist, so I decided to go and see him about it. Unfortunately that day was his day off, so I ended up going to see my year co-ordinator who then made me talk to the principal because my year co-ordinator taught in the same subject as the teacher and didn't want to get involved. The principal spoke to me and the teacher involved and then when my psychologist was back at school, we decided that the best option for me was to leave that class. As the subject was one that I need to graduate I had to convince the school administration and the teacher to let me do the subject through the School of Isolated and Distance Education.

I think at the time I thought that everything would be better once I left the class at school, but I was to soon find out that doing a subject by correspondence was harder than I thought and I now have a lot of empathy for those people who do their whole course through SIDE.

Doing a subject through SIDE was definitely an experience. At the beginning of the semester I was given a copy of all of the notes and assignments for the whole semester. I was supposed to complete the set work and then submit an assignment every two weeks. It took me a while to get motivated to do the work on my own because I had always been used to having a teacher there to help me out and having other students around me to motivate me to study, but I soon learnt to work through the notes on my own and ring the teacher from SIDE who was in charge of my subject.

Finding a friend or our school psychologist to talk to when it got tough helped a lot as we were able to talk about ways that I could tackle the work and manage my time so that it all got done. The experience of studying a subject by correspondence has taught me that there are a lot of different ways to teach and to learn, it's just a matter of finding one that suits you.